From B2B to B2C, everyone is getting in on the action.
In fact, according to the Content Marketing Institute, 89% of B2B marketers are either already using content marketing or plan to do so in 2017.
The thing is, most of them have very little idea what they’re doing. And, because of this, they’re outsourcing a large portion of their content marketing efforts.
So what does that mean for you?
Well, it means there’s a whole lot of opportunity to grab a piece of the pie if you’re willing to get in the trenches and learn about the content marketing industry.
And we’re going to help you do just that.
Let’s get started.
What Can Content Marketing Help You Accomplish?
The beauty of content marketing lies in the fact that it can help marketers and organizations accomplish multiple business goals at once.
As Content Marketing Institute contributor Andrea Fryrear puts it,
“Content marketing is kind of like a Swiss Army knife; it can do almost anything if you set it up the right way.”
Some of the main goals that it can help accomplish include:
In order to accomplish these goals, however, you’ll need to develop a deeper understanding of the components that make up the content marketing industry.
How to Learn About the Content Marketing Industry
Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk currently heads three different companies in three completely different industries (SpaceX, Tesla, and SolarCity).
But what in the world can Musk teach us about content marketing?
It starts with his views on learning.
In an AMA that Musk took part in on Reddit, he was asked a question about how he’s able to learn so much so fast.
His response?
The part we want to hone in on is his advice that, when attempting to learn something, you need to understand the fundamentals first before moving onto the leaves and details.
There are so many different aspects of content marketing.
If you try to learn the ins and outs of the industry without first understanding the fundamentals, you’ll get lost quickly.
Fundamentals first. Details second.
[clickToTweet tweet=”Check out the beginner’s guide to #ContentMarketing via @ExpWriters! It shares the six fundamentals you need to know!” quote=”Check out the beginner’s guide to #ContentMarketing via @ExpWriters! It shares the six fundamentals you need to know!”]
The Fundamentals of Content Marketing
Let’s take a look at the six main fundamentals of content marketing. They include:
Creating an Audience Persona
Understanding SEO & Identifying High-Value Keywords
Determining Content Types
Creating an Editorial Calendar
Understanding Content Publishing & Promotion
Content Maintenance & Tracking Results
1. What You Need to Know About Creating an Audience Persona
The first rule of content marketing is simple; create audience-centric content.
“When creating content with the ultimate goal of marketing a good or service, you have to know who your audience is. Understanding and targeting your audience is crucial to a successful content marketing campaign.”
Instead of being audience-centric, where they identify their audience and produce content that’s useful and relevant to them, these marketers instead create content and then try to find an audience for it.
This is a crushing mistake that will almost always lead to a failed content marketing strategy.
For this reason, creating an audience persona should be the first step when developing your content marketing strategy.
The personas you create serve as the catalyst for making sure that your content is relevant and useful to the audience you’re targeting.
And, in the end, content marketing success comes down to creating an audience persona where you’re able to identify your target audience, research them thoroughly, and figure out what THEY want you to talk about.
Where to Learn About Creating an Audience Persona
While there are quite a few resources to help guide you on how to create an audience persona, the two that I’ve found to offer the most actionable information on the topic include:
“…a misguided impulse to put various tactics into separate boxes instead of seeing each as an aspect of one overarching strategic process.”
Instead of thinking of SEO and content marketing as two totally different tactics, Clark advises that,
“The smart way to practice effective online marketing is to treat social media and search engine results as aspects of a holistic strategy that centers around compelling content.”
While there was certainly a time when marketers could generate positive organic search results by focusing solely on technical SEO – and not on creating great content – that time has long since passed.
Today, SEO and content need to work together, along with social media, to form an online marketing combination capable of winning over customers that will stick around for the long term.
What You Need to Know About Identifying High-Value Keywords
The main thing you need to know about high-value keywords is that they have the power to transform your website, and business, when identified and used properly.
Interestingly enough, identifying high-value keywords, and building great content around those keywords, has been the main strategy that has helped turn Express Writers into a multi-million dollar agency.
In fact, using this strategy, we’ve gone from ranking for about 3,000 keywords back in November 2015 to ranking for over 11,000 as recently as June of 2017.
At the time, we were ecstatic about these results. After all, we were generating monthly organic traffic worth $6.8k per month.
A year later, by September 2016, we were outranking competitors while quadrupling our monthly traffic and generating organic traffic worth $13.2k per month.
But it didn’t stop there. As of June 2017, we were ranking for over 11,000 keywords, our monthly organic traffic had risen to over 32,000 visitors, and our monthly traffic was worth $57.4k per month.
And while I’m certainly proud of these results, I’m not showing you this to brag.
I’m showing you this so you can see what’s possible when you’re able to successfully identify high-value keywords and create amazing content around those keywords.
Where to Learn About SEO
I wrote a fairly comprehensive piece on how to write content for SEO that should get you on the right path towards successfully combining your SEO and content marketing tactics.
No matter what resources you use, however, it’s imperative that you understand the main message being presented by content marketing gurus like Neil Patel, Brian Clark, and Rand Fishkin.
That message is that you need to view SEO and content marketing like this:
And NOT like this:
Where to Learn About Identifying High-Value Keywords
You’d be hard pressed to find a better resource on identifying high-value keywords than Moz’s chapter on keyword research that lies within their beginner’s guide to SEO.
I’d also encourage you to check out our piece on why keyword research is vital, which also lays out some of the tools we use to identify the keywords that have led to our success in SERPs.
3. What You Need to Know About Determining Content Types
With all these options, what type of content should you create?
This is where things can get tricky. Since there are dozens, potentially even hundreds, of different types of content, determining which options are optimal for your business can be a major challenge.
Here’s a look at just a few of the content types that are available:
The simple way to answer this question, and determine what type of content we should create, is to go back to the rule we talked about when creating an audience persona.
That is, we always want to create audience-centric content.
If we maintain that focus, we can reframe the question from, “what type of content should I create?” to, “what type of content does my audience want?”
From there, we can make our decisions based off a combination of what our audience wants and what our goals are for the content we create.
If, for instance, our goal is to use our content to generate leads, then we’ll want to focus on a few of the many types of lead generating content that our audience wants.
On the other hand, if our goal is to build an audience that will become loyal, long-term customers, we can follow the lead of Recreational Equipment, Inc. (REI).
How REI Cornered the Outdoor Clothing Market By Determining the Right Content to Create
REI is an outdoor clothing company that has used comprehensive, audience-centric content to build themselves into an organization with annual revenue in the 8-figures.
For education purposes, their website features an Outdoor Expert Advice section that has hundreds of detailed guides on topics ranging from mountain climbing and road cycling to backpacking and snowboarding.
For inspiration purposes, their Facebook page features regular posts intended to uplift their fans.
They determined that education and inspiration were what their audience wanted. And, with that knowledge, they did everything in their power to make sure they created content based on those two principles.
This made it easy to determine their content types. On their website, they use long form guides. On their Facebook page, they create uplifting stories that are then featured on the REI blog.
Where to Learn About Determining Content Types
As we’ve mentioned, there are dozens of content types to choose from.
4. What You Need to Know About Creating an Editorial Calendar
The only thing that you really need to know about creating an editorial calendar, other than how to do it, is that it’s an essential piece of your content strategy.
When attempting to answer the question of whether or not you can benefit from it:
“Most of us know that the answer to that question is yes. We know that the number one way to get traffic to our blog is through the very habits that an editorial calendar will help us develop – organization.”
But it doesn’t just help with organization.
At this point, you’re probably aware that one of the main keys to a successful content marketing strategy is consistency.
When you commit to creating an editorial calendar, you’re putting a plan together that ensures this consistency.
Sure, you could go and put together your calendar and then never move forward with actually creating the content.
The likelihood of procrastinating on your content creation efforts, however, is significantly lower when you create an editorial calendar.
Where to Create A Dynamic Editorial Calendar
There are several different types of editorial calendars, although a large majority of them are fairly straight forward.
I love Airtable, for many reasons – mostly because it’s super simple, clean, and easy to use. They have preloaded templates you can start using right away. It’s a simple, more beautiful and dynamic version of Excel, but no harder than excel. And, you can share it with clients directly through email. (Check out Airtable’s blog calendar template here.)
I seriously haven’t found a better tool. Here’s the example calendar that I put together for my students:
Some marketers prefer to take the cost free route and create their editorial calendar (also referred to as a content calendar) through Google Sheets.
Others decide to use one of the many, multi-feature (and, expensive) content calendar tools available. Kapost and CoSchedule are two of the more popular options.
To learn more about putting together a successful editorial calendar, check out Buffer contributor Kevan Lee’s guide to choosing a content calendar.
5. What You Need to Know About Content Publishing
Marketers are constantly searching for answers to questions like:
Where should I publish my content?
Should I be on as many social media platforms as possible?
In the post, I really wanted to make the point that answering this question should always start with finding out where NOT to publish.
Why? Because it’s easy to get overwhelmed by all the options out there.
You may think that it’s a good idea to create your content, post it on your blog, and then follow that up by posting it on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Reddit, and every other platform under the sun.
The truth is, however, that it’s just not possible to be successful on every platform.
The reason for this goes back to the number one rule of content marketing: create audience-centric content.
Since different platforms have varying demographics, creating content designed for each audience would be exhausting.
In the end, your best bet is to focus on building an audience through your blog while honing in on two social media platforms that feature your target audience.
What You Need to Know About Content Promotion
You already know that creating great content is absolutely necessary if you want your content strategy to succeed.
Unfortunately, as Neil Patel points out, many content creators don’t realize that,
“Creating content is only part of content marketing. The other half is promoting it. Don’t forget the ‘marketing’ in content marketing.”
The main point to take away here is that creating great content isn’t enough. That’s an expectation, not a differentiation factor.
By combining great content with a strong promotional strategy, however, you can set yourself up for success.
While it’s impossible to tell exactly how long a piece of content will last, you can significantly increase its chances of a long term lifespan by focusing on these two controllable maintenance methods.
What You Need to Know About Tracking Results
If you want to make consistent improvements to your content marketing efforts, it’s imperative that you understand how to track your results.
As Content Marketing Institute contributor Mike Murray shows us, there are over 101 Key Performance Indicators that can help you measure the effectiveness of your strategy.
When you’re able to match the KPIs to the unique goals of your business, measuring content marketing success becomes a fairly easy task.
Did you know that Google actually updates 500 times per year? (Moz)
Last year, I wrote a bestseller on successful online writing, and I was also named a top content marketer for 2016.
My passion, as the creator of this agency, is truly in this very industry of content marketing. It’s been my full-time career for nearly seven years now. I personally help recruit every single person that makes up our team (I can’t tell you how much I love finding a “gem!”). I read the latest books by content marketers, test and try SEO and content theories for myself, and have established incredible rankings for our own content. My staff and I create exclusive, internal training resources to keep my writers growing, and their skills sharp. We have a 5-point editing process I’ve put together that ensures we edit for exceptional content. And, our writing levels are created to exceed our industry competition in getting our clients their best-fit copywriters.
Easily, I’ve increased my own content standards (and budget) for my brand content tenfold in the last few years, year-after-year.
I’ll never drop my standards.
My goal is that every client of ours can be sure of this foundation when they interact with and purchase services from Express Writers.
You’re working with a team that cares about:
Evolution and adapting to today’s standards, both in terms of reader expectation and ever-evolving search engine criteria.
Quality.
Personally head-hunting for the best of the best, in writers.
Molding our writing to current standards.
Constant innovation.
Matching the client’s need, not just their want – even if we tell them “no” because our content isn’t a fit for their business stage.
Creating content that is at the forefront of all the other results in Google.
Launching the best writing level in the industry with Authority Content, which I created as a service in 2016 to answer the “skyscraper content” need.
Developing new products, services, and even a course to match new industry standards.
Ensuring a higher standard of content that will elevate your brand online every time the web demands higher standards..
Dear client, I’m afraid you’re right on one thing you said.
It’s the elephant in the room.
Our content prices have increased, yes – in the last week, our general blog rates went from $35/500w to $45/500w. (Expert rates are $90/500-600w.)
But not to price gouge you.
Not by a long shot.
Think about this…it’s the truth:
If we were here to price gouge you (charge an inflated cost for services that aren’t worth it), in reality we’d charge the same fee, give you crap content that’s not worth a dime in real ROI with Google (not to mention lets down your reader, and fails to support your business by offering content not within industry standards).
Do you see the truth now?
Our fees come from an honest place that reflects how we truly care about the content we deliver for our clients and how our writing standards fit today’s demand.
In reality, our prices are actually more than fair.
Our rates are equal to – or even lower than – the market value charged by many of our competitors, whose rates have doubled (or in some cases, tripled) in the past two years.
But, cheap Textbroker rates just wouldn’t cover what our quality process is now – the process you need for content that matters.
It wouldn’t cover:
– Myself head-hunting for your best writer, and then testing and proving them before we bring them into the team. (See our Values.)
– Our Content Director personally assigning your content to a best-fit writer.
– Our content-marketing specialists and high-level editors reviewing every single one of your pages.
– Halting production of your content mid-stream if it doesn’t match quality standards, and taking the time to revise and re-edit.
‘Nuff said.
To end this letter on a very valid, marketer-mindset point:
What worked years ago in simple, average, link-bait content will not work today.
You won’t get a second glance from Google or a real, human reader for average content.
Our content, even at the “General” level, is created by writers hand-picked and mentored by yours truly in best writing practices, and we continually head hunt, refine, and re-initiate our guidelines to match the ever-evolving trends of content marketing.
And that makes the biggest difference.
Because we care.
Our goal is to serve our clients content at all levels in a way that works.
We don’t want to serve up crap content that will be a waste of your time and money.
I would encourage increasing your content marketing budget to allow for quality. If not, there are certainly competitors that offer cheaper content (a double-edged sword, though, it’s lesser in both quality and price).
If I asked for a show of hands to see who researches their keywords by highest search volume, I’d see a pretty unanimous answer.
If you’re a true nerd / geek / SEO’er, you might have even had dreams of climbing the search results to #1 by optimizing for those keywords.
(Kind of like a new pop artist who hopes to crack the Billboard Top 100 with their first single.)
When you pick a keyword, what do you go by?
Are you using the best metrics? Every business wants to show up at the top of the SERPs (search engine result pages).
But knowing how… that’s a skill that involves, at the core fundamental, knowing how to pick out a great keyword. And not everyone has that skill.
Keep reading for an in-depth guide on what matters most when you’re choosing best opportunity, high-ROI keywords. (The answer, surprisingly, is decidedly not keyword search volume.)
Keyword Search Volume: The Skinny
Everyone wants that coveted top organic #1, #2, or #3 hit in Google.
However, what you may not realize is top brands have already cornered those keywords. This includes multi-million-dollar corporations. These are brands you are not going to be able to compete with, especially if you’re a small business.
What do those top-ranking keywords look like?
Nine times out of 10, they’re broad keywords – short phrases that aren’t specific. For example: “cake,” “baking,” and “baking cakes.”
If you’re a small-town baker and you try to rank for these terms, you’ll be out of luck. Instead, you may find yourself competing with the likes of Cooking Light, Food Network, and Epicurious.
Let’s face it – you’re never going to win, here.
So, what can you do, instead? What’s the smarter strategy?
For good results for your particular business, you don’t need high traffic from high search volume keywords. Instead, you need the right traffic.
Forget Search Volume – Get the Right Traffic with High-Converting Keywords
Throw search volume out the window for now. Yes, it was once the be-all, end-all of keywords, but nothing in this world is static, right?
I’m not saying search volume is completely irrelevant. But, I am urging you to look at other avenues for driving people to your site.
Let’s start by defining what we mean when we talk about the “right” traffic.
You’ll have an easier time converting customers if they’re in an ideal state of the buying process. This is the “right” traffic – the people who are looking for you, but don’t yet realize you exist. If they knew you existed, they would be ready to jump on board and fish for their wallets.
Broad keywords do not drive this kind of traffic to your site.
What will?
Long tail keywords!
Long tail Keywords: Specificity and Relevancy for Search
Long tail keywords are just that: longer, more specific, and relevant to the customer’s needs.
For instance, a person who needs a specific type of cake will not search for “cake.” Instead, they might search for “wedding cake chocolate swirl Rhode Island.” Or, “birthday cake yellow with sprinkles.” A search string that is becoming even more common might look like this: “Where can I get a yellow birthday cake with chocolate frosting in Rhode Island?”
All of these have a few things in common, though they vary in subject matter. The people searching know what type of cake they want and where they want to get it. If you’re a baker and you optimize your site for long tail keywords like this, you’ll strike gold.
Why? Because long tail keywords have less competition than their broad counterparts. You have a far better chance of ranking for “wedding cake chocolate swirl Rhode Island” than “cake.”
Plus, customers use long tail keywords like this when they have a higher buying intent. They know what they’re looking for, what they need, or what they want. If you have it, there’s a very good chance you’ll close the deal.
Basically, these keywords fall right into your sweet spot for driving traffic.
Take a look at the brands who have successfully ranked for the above long tail keyword example. There’s only one multi-million-dollar corporation on this list (Ben & Jerry’s). The rest are small bakeries or boutique shops. That’s the power of the long tail keyword in action.
How Do You Choose the Right Long Tail Keywords?
According to Search Engine Journal (SEJ), one of the keys to driving conversions from search results is to engage people at the perfect time. It’s a two-way street. Their intent needs to match up with the keyword, and the keyword needs to be relative to their intent.
This is that sweet spot we mentioned earlier. Hit it, and you’ll see ROI.
Here are some other keys for choosing the best long tail keywords for you. They have to do with relevancy and uniqueness.
1. Relevancy, Relevancy, Relevancy
When a keyword is relevant to you, it ties back to your particular brand. This includes what you do, who you are, where you’re located, or what you sell.
The relevance of your keywords is the brunt of what makes long tail types work. If you’re not using relevant long tails, you won’t be taking advantage of their conversion power.
2. Use What Makes You Stand Out (Your Differentiation Factor)
A highly unique keyword could net you a buyer every time someone searches for it. Wow! That’s a BIG deal.
At the same time, that particular keyword could have next to no search volume because of its uniqueness.
Fact: this is common for keywords with good opportunities.
In other words, it’s not a problem because the conversion value is so high. The more unique your keyword, the more you’re targeting a specific buyer – the one looking to pull the trigger and make the purchase!
These types of keywords don’t work well for everyone – but they work great for you. The opportunity is personal, and that’s a big bonus.
Why Broad, Short Tail Keywords Are on the Way Out
Short tail keywords do have their uses. They haven’t gone the way of VCRs and rotary phones – they aren’t relics quite yet.
They’re good for optimizing basic pages on your site. Your “about us” page is a fine example. Over time, your long tail keyword content can help improve your rankings for those general terms. Your content will build authority, and that can give your general pages a boost.
Time, however, is the clincher here. For keywords with tough competition, it may take years for you to crack the top 100, let alone the top 50.
Ranking shouldn’t be your main concern, anyway.
Ranking for broad terms may drive traffic, but it won’t drive traffic that converts.
Instead, you’ll get a mix of people at all different stages of the buying cycle. Some, if not most, will not need what you’re offering. Neil Patel has an excellent chart that shows the difference:
As the chart shows, people who are looking to browse will use the broadest keywords of all: “Las Vegas,” “spyware,” and “television.”
Meanwhile, the people looking to buy tend to use the most specific terms possible: “Panasonic 43’ Plasma TV HVD3002 best price.” That’s one hefty long tail. You can tell this buyer is locked and loaded.
Draw the Locked and Loaded Buyer – Not the “Just Browsing” Variety
According to Forbes, a few years ago, most businesses online attempted to target small numbers of “sort-of” relevant keywords. These were traffic-drivers alone, and it worked well enough.
Now things have changed. There are millions more people online, and close to a billion websites. The competition to rank for broad keywords is more cut-throat than ever. In fact, it’s nearly impossible unless you’re a huge corporation or you pay.
You can rank well, and organically, for long tail keywords. These aren’t searched as often, but the people who do are far more likely to buy from you.
Who would you rather guide to your site – the casual browser, or that buyer who’s locked, loaded, and ready to whip out their credit card, because you’ve got what they need?
So, when it comes to keywords, redirect your focus.
Switch your tactics – shake things up.
The times, they are a-changin’, as Bob Dylan so eloquently put it. Pretty soon, short tail keywords may be thrown out with the bathwater. The long tail is the future of keywords.
Are you ready?
To start building your path towards more high rankings with long tail keyword-optimized content, Express Writers can help. Take a peek at our custom blog plans or content planning to see what we can do.
One of the best ways to figure out what your customers want is to ask them.
Don’t get me wrong – looking at numbers and statistics gleaned from various sources is helpful.
This includes comments on posts, Facebook likes, click-through rates, newsletter subscriptions, and more. But, you’ll never learn more than when you hear the truth straight from your audience.
This “ask the audience” technique isn’t difficult to carry out, either. It doesn’t require going “door-to-door,” so to speak. You don’t have to approach individuals directly through email or chat and query them.
Instead, get direct customer feedback the simple way – through surveys.
Why Are Surveys Valuable for Content Marketing?
Surveys give you the chance to collect data you may not be able to glean through any other method. Here are a few more reasons to invest time and resources into them (we’ll go into the “how” soon).
1. They Foster Conversation and Engagement
These days, more than ever, content marketing is about engagement and community building.
It’s about keeping up a dialogue with your audience. You do this in a few ways: You answer questions and offer information. You learn what their problems or pain points are, and then you see how you can solve them.
Marketing is a continual conversation with your customers. However, you don’t want it to be one-sided.
You can never assume how your audience will respond to your content, and you can’t assume what they want from you. You have to keep the dialogue open if you want to know. You have to ask!
Surveys are one of the best ways to ask, hands-down.
2. Surveys Offer Valuable Insights
Not only do surveys keep that all-important dialogue open — they give you an avenue for insights.
According to Content Marketing Institute, asking your audience provides priceless data. This is information your carefully collected statistics can’t tell you.
Yes, your stats give a picture of what your customers are doing. However, one factor it can’t address is why they’re doing what they’re doing.
For instance, perhaps your stats tell you certain posts are more popular than others. Lumped together, these blogs don’t have much in common. Their popularity is confusing rather than enlightening. No matter how you look at the numbers, they’ll never give up the secret behind why some of your posts land and others fail.
Surveys can. With this tool, you can acquire useful information such as:
Impressions your brand has made, along with expectations and perceptions
How your content may or may not affect a customer’s decision-making process
Demographic information about your audience that may/may not affect purchasing decisions
Real world example: when I personally asked my audience for feedback about Express Writers’ services, we learned:
Pain points our products/services didn’t solve (but could, with a few tweaks!)
Exactly how we could serve our customers better, straight from their mouths
Pain points our customers experienced with our competitors (giving us the ability to know exactly how we were winning – which allowed us to use those direct points in home/sales page copy)
We never would have garnered these vital bits of knowledge without utilizing a survey. It allowed us to change tactics, hone our strategy, and give our customers exactly what they want. How can you beat that?
Now that you understand how integral a tool surveys can be, here are some easy ways to implement them.
How to Create Effective Surveys
An effective survey will depend on a variety of factors. You have to set a goal, choose the right tool, and ask the right questions. You also need to ask your questions at the right time.
1. Set a Specific Goal
Ideally, your survey should set out to answer a broad question. This should have to do either with reach, reputation, or results. Who is your content attracting, and is it the audience you want? Is your content marketing representing your brand in the right way? Is your content influencing customer decision-making?
2. Choose a Tool
The tool you use to carry out your surveys should be a platform that’s easy and suitable for your needs.
Google Consumer Surveys or SurveyMonkey are good tools for in-depth questionnaires. They let you target an audience, ask away, and collect the results. Google’s tool is a bit more bare-bones. SurveyMonkey can be exhaustive if you’re willing to shell out the funds.
An example of question formatting from SurveyMonkey.
If you’re not quite ready to put together a formal survey, you’re not limited to traditional tools. You don’t have to carry out a survey in a standard way.
For instance, you can directly ask your readers a question on social media in a forum-like strategy that opens up the discussion. Here are some basic ideas:
Informally query your followers on Instagram
Pose a question to your Facebook followers
Throw out a question for a specific Facebook group, or create a Facebook poll
Quickly ask your audience one multiple-choice question using a feature on Twitter called “Twitter Poll”
Other options: You can go more informal and add a question to the end of a blog post, opening up the comments for discussion. While you’re at it, ask your email subscribers for their opinion on a matter, too.
Whatever your style, or information you’re looking to glean, you can gather it with the right tools.
3. Keep It Short and Sweet
When surveying your audience, you’re asking for their time as much as their input. Be respectful of that and keep your surveys short and sweet.
Make questions easy to answer, and don’t overwhelm your readership with too many surveys in a short timespan. You’ll end up turning them off altogether instead of gaining useful feedback.
4. Ask Closed Questions
To collect data you can quickly sort and measure, keep your questions closed versus open-ended. For example, instead of asking, “What do you think of our company?” – which could elicit any number of opinions – ask “Which answer is closest to your impression of our company?” and provide a limited number of selections to choose from.
Setting limits on possible answers will limit the amount of data you’ll have to sift through. This makes it easier to analyze.
Here are some examples of closed questions on a SurveyMonkey template:
5. Ask About Past Behaviors – They’re More Quantifiable
You can never predict what people will do – and, truly, neither can they. You can only assess your audience by what they have done in the past. The only measurable action is the one that’s completed.
Asking questions that probe past behaviors are also easier to answer. It’s far simpler to think about what you have done than to definitively say what you will do in an uncertain future situation.
6. Send Survey Invites at Opportune Times
One part of getting people to respond to your survey is timing. If you send invites at the wrong moment or to the wrong people, you’ll do nothing but turn them off.
For example, give your audience time to dig into your content before you throw a survey link at them. Include it at the bottom of a post, not the top. Similarly, don’t ask readers who haven’t engaged with your brand to fill out a survey. A pop-up right when they click onto your website isn’t tempting – it’s annoying and unwarranted. What do they know about you at that point? Nothing.
Instead, try hitting up your email subscribers, your blog readers, and your social media followers. Use common sense and go where your people are.
Then, once you have your survey locked in and ready to go, you can unleash it on the world. Or, if your goals are less dramatic, you can share it, send it, and promote it.
The stationery sellers at Paper Source invited customers to their survey with an email. They sweetened the deal and offered 10% off, too.
How to Seamlessly Incorporate Surveys into Your Content Marketing
You’ve learned about the tools you can use to quiz your customers. You understand that survey-taking doesn’t have to be formal. It doesn’t have to involve long pages with dozens of questions and answers.
Now that you know which tactic will work best for you, how do you implement it?
1. Use a CTA
If you have a longer survey you would like your audience to take, point them in that direction with a CTA.
Include a CTA at the end of a blog post, in a social media post, or at the end of one of your newsletter emails. Remember: If you don’t promote your survey and point a finger at it, shouting, “Hey! Look at this!” nobody will know it exists.
As you know, a survey without any responses is useless.
2. Send an Email
We’ve already covered this, but it’s a good avenue for responses. It’s worth a shot to send your survey in an email to your newsletter subscribers.
Why? These are people who have already invested in your company in a small way. They want to keep up with your news and goings-on. Sending them your survey is a logical step – not unwarranted, and most likely effective.
3. Offer Survey Incentives
There’s nothing like a good incentive to get people motivated. Offer up something in exchange for taking your survey. You may get more interest and responses as a result.
For instance, give survey-takers a coupon code at the end of the questionnaire. Or, automatically enter their name into a raffle or giveaway. This shows your customers that you value their time and appreciate their help.
4. Post the Results
Fortunately, surveys are bits of research you can share in your content marketing. Round up the results, analyze and quantify them, and write up a blog post or article about your findings. Create an infographic, a slide presentation, or an ebook.
Look at how Hubspot turned their survey about the state of content marketing into an eye-popping infographic:
These are great pieces of content because they’re original. They position you as an authority in your industry. Plus, you’ll help push industry knowledge to new heights by sharing your results with other thought leaders.
If your survey gets a generous response and you gain a host of valuable insights, it’s transparent and forthright to share, too. That doesn’t only build authority – that builds trust.
Bottom Line: Surveys for Content Marketing Are So Worth Your Time
Think about this scenario: You have all kinds of stats gathered from sources like website hits, ad clicks, Facebook likes, blog post comments, and email subscriptions.
You can see what your audience is doing – how they’re interacting with your brand and your content. You just don’t know why.
Why is that one post so popular? Why does one ad work while another fails? Why are you getting tons of conversions on one version of a landing page, but not another?
That’s exactly what surveys are for.
Surveys give you the why behind the numbers, figures, and stats. For instance, they tell you:
Why customers make purchasing decisions
Why customers like you
Why a particular ad, piece of content, or something similar works (or doesn’t work)
And, more importantly, surveys can tell you who these people are.
Surveys can become an integral piece of your marketing puzzle. The information they provide is priceless. You only need the right questions, the right tools, and the right strategy.
That’s one small step for your bottom line, and one giant leap for your brand. Need to know ALL the ins and outs of strategy? Build a content strategy from the ground up and learn how to create high ROI content in our new course.
I’m the CEO of a content creation agency that has completed over 17,000 projects in content services (blogs, web pages, content planning), since 2011.
In my line of work forging and leading content creation to power many content strategies, I’ve heard just about every complaint and frustration you could possibly hear from content strategists, marketers, and content practitioners:
“I’m not sure this content is worth it.”
“Where do you recommend I publish my content?”
“I’m not sure I can do more than one month of blogging. I’ll look at the budget and get back to you.”
“I can’t afford an industry specialist writer.”
This is a small percentage of the clients that come our way, but I’m stillready to pull my hair out, every time I hear these phrases.
Why?
Because I personally know the value that a great content marketing strategy, and consistent publishing, can bring.
But I also know what it takes to get there: the path isn’t easy. It requires investment, time, and most of all, commitment.
The skills involved in the workload of a content strategist aren’t easy to learn.
But here’s the cool news…
Content can truly bring you 100x what you put into it.
I’ll talk more about that in a moment, but first, here’s a look at what I’ve managed to achieve here at Express Writers solely through high quality, original content creation.
A Content Strategist Success Story: Express Writers, Fueled Completely By Organic Content
[bctt tweet=”Content can truly bring you 100x what you put into it. Read all about @JuliaEMcCoy’s venture into #contentstrategy ” username=”ExpWriters”]
Today, under my direction and content creation as a self-taught content strategist and CEO, my little self-funded content creation agency and staff of 40 at Express Writers has managed to outrank competitors that have $9+ million in outside funding, by an immense 3%+ higher visibility in Google.
We rank organically for over 11,000 key terms, with a presence worth $57,000+ monthly in organic search.
And we haven’t paid a penny in ads—across six years—to gain the majority of our leads and clientele. They’ve come straight from these rankings.
Question…
How well does this content convert?
Because you can’t just have high-ranking content, right? It has to return.
After optimizing my strategy and increasing my content investment this year, we hit the highest sales month we’ve ever had this January. Now, we’re on track to break our first seven figure year as an agency.
99% of our leads come through organic content marketing.
I’ve never invested a single dollar in PPC.
The secret is all in how you go about it (your strategy), and your commitment. It’s not an overnight game, and it’s a steady, slow, but sure process.
It can feel like hard, low-return work in the beginning, but in the long run, content is the best marketing you’ll have ever done.
Content Strategists & The Proven Worth of Content to Advertisers
Today, SEO has basically merged as a part of the wider picture that is content marketing.
When you do SEO, you’re optimizing your content for high rankings in the search results: in content marketing, you market your product or service through high-value, audience-targeted content campaigns.
Optimizing your content for search (SEO) is a crucial, integrated part of content marketing itself. It’s a big part of the skillset of a great content strategist.
If you have the right strategy, the right SEO and the right content consistency in place, take a look at these success statistics that can happen.
Per dollar spent, content marketing generates more than 3x the number of leads than paid search does. (Kapost/Eloqua)
Content marketing costs between 31 and 41% less than paid search, depending on the organization’s size. (Kapost/Eloqua)
Website conversion rate is nearly 6x higher for content marketing adopters than non-adopters (2.9% vs. 0.5%). (Aberdeen Group)
Content creation ranks as the single most effective SEO technique. (Marketing Sherpa)
61% of U.S. online consumers have made a purchase based on recommendations from a blog. (FactBrowser)
Small businesses that blog get 126% more lead growth than small businesses that do not blog. (ImpactBnd)
A Content Strategist Skillset Wheelhouse: 7 Keys to Success
Your content strategy is everything in achieving high-performing, high-ROI content.
Follow these critical steps, in order, for a baseline sense of how to navigate through and set up your strategy so that your content is knocked out of the park and you know you’re getting ROI when you publish content. (PSA: These steps take time. Don’t jump around or rush through them. PSA 2: This takes time. Don’t expect overnight success.)
1. Know your position of authority and differentiation in your field.
It all starts here. Know where your expertise lies, own it, and ten find your Content Differentiation Factor so you can officially stand out in your industry. To get to that, ask yourself, “what would make a customer choose me over my competitor?” Your answer is your CDF. Condense it to one or two key sentences to showcase on your home page (you may need a conversion copywriter to help you express this perfectly).
Brands that have a standout CDF in a variety of niches (scan their home pages—it should, quite literally, stand out there):
This is the first step of a true content strategy, and this step is a discovery that could take some time. But it’s absolutely worth it. Too many brands starting out don’t take the time to make sure they have a standout factor.
To set yourself up for content success, you have to have a reason for the reader (buyer, audience member, lead) to choose you and your content. Don’t skimp here. Having a CDF will 10x the results you’ll get when leads start finding your content.
2. Know your content goals.
What do you want to get out of content? Bucket in three key areas: 1. SEO rankings (you’ll define your terms later in the strategy), 2. Sales and connections, and 3. Brand awareness.
Direct your efforts in content based on where you’re at in your business. If you have leads and customers, you may be able to afford more time and creativity with brand awareness content. If you’re starting out, focus on finding your keywords and creating comprehensive, awesome SEO content—months down the road, when your leads start coming in, you’ll be glad you did.
Go by goals, and every content idea you have, you should be able to bucket that topic or idea into your goal areas. This heavily narrows down the chances of you creating undirected, low-ROI content.
3. Know your audience and who you’re talking to.
Get to know your audience, their language, the conferences they attend and the publications they read. Think of it like “friendly-stalking” the people you want to do business with and earn as customers.
A surefire way to find out persona data is to use surveys and get real-time feedback (use and pay for a Google Survey if you don’t have an audience yet). Ask them to fill out a demographic survey in exchange for a reward (gift card, a free service from you). If you have an existing customer list, pick a customer on that list and offer to have coffee with them, on you, in exchange for a few minutes of their time—or pick up the phone and ask to interview them.
Get comfortable with who your ideal customer is, their likes, dislikes, and you’ll be able to create content that is just for them.
4. Build a persona and a style guidelines document for your brand.
Once you have survey results in and have profiled your ideal client, build a persona. Don’t set it in stone—people change, and traits vary so much (we’re all so unique). So, don’t idealize just one person with a persona. Think of it like getting familiar with their likes and interests, so you can create better content that caters to them.
Then, invest time and resources into building a style guidelines for your brand. Keep it simple – include your audience persona, specify how to use (and not use) your company brand name and colors, the preferred style and tone of voice you want to maintain, linking and content rules. You’ll find this document invaluable when you start investing in content creators. Brand style guidelines can stop hired writers and creators from assuming different tones, in their tracks. And it’s crucial in winning leads and building a loyal audience that you adhere to and use your tone throughout every piece of content you publish. Brand familiarity is ROI.
Check out how Skype specifies their tone of voice in their brand book: “If your mum couldn’t understand what is being written, then it’s not the Skype voice. Humour is an important part of the Skype voice. We don’t tell one liners, but employ a gentle wit to engage our users.”
5. Know your keywords, content topics, & investments to make.
Keyword discovery should be a part of every brand’s content strategy. Go for long-tail keywords and use tools like KWFinder and SEMrush to find your best keywords according to how well they’re scored. Avoid high competition keywords on authoritative sites—they will be much harder to write content around and rank for, if you’re competing against someone who has already done an amazing job at writing content for it and Google is ranking that content #1. Look for relevant, low competition keywords.
Be thorough with your keyword discovery. It takes me about an hour to find eight amazing long-tail keywords that have a real chance of ranking, if I create comprehensive content around them. I look for a score of 40 and below in the SEO difficulty scores.
Don’t just rely on keyword tools for content topics: use tools like BuzzSumo and question/answer platforms like Quora to discover trending topics in your industry. Choose a few you can write on with authority, and add your own thoughts on the subject.
Your topics can and should branch outside of SEO terms. For example:
SEO-focused post: we found out that the keyword “hiring the best SEO content writers” was a long-tail keyword with slim competition, so we created a 1,500 word post titled “How to Hire Your Best SEO Content Writers: 4 Key Qualities to Look For.”
Brand awareness-focused post: Outside of keyword research, I found that a common question on Quora was “how do I create a content marketing plan?” So, one of my blogs was a 2,000 word piece on that topic. The keyword had high competition, but since I have established rankings and leads, I wrote on the topic to focus on high level industry education, which can bring my agency more brand awareness.
Your content investments should be based on your commitment. Remember: it takes 12-24 months of consistent content creation to see results.
Hubspot did a study showing how much the effort of blogging can return 12 months down the road:
And, they did a study on why more is always better:
If you can’t write a consistent stream of content yourself, invest in an industry copywriter. I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to find a writer that knows the industry they’re writing in—inside and out. Your reader is smart, savvy, and attracted to your brand/products because they’re in the same industry you’re in. Don’t leave the important process of writing the content your prospects actually read just up to any writer. Besides knowing the industry, your content writer should also know online optimization (keyword placement, format) and have engaging writing skills.
We’ve seen our clients 10x their rankings and results when they invested in an industry knowledgeable, authoritative copywriter!
6. Build your editorial calendar.
Keep this part simple so you focus on the other cores more (research, publishing, promoting). Guide your topics by the high-opportunity keywords you find and the brand awareness focused topics you discover from a web topic crawl (trending in Quora, BuzzSumo, etc.). Get creative and tie topics to seasons and dates (see next point). Use Google Sheets or Trello to store your editorial topics in one place, month after month.
7. Promote, maintain, and audit.
A content promotion strategy should be in your mind from the moment you create content.
For example: back in February this year I had the idea to write a list of women in marketing to follow, and tie it to International Women’s Day in March. I categorized that topic based on where I could best promote it, and ended up pitching it to Search Engine Journal, where it received the best reception in promotion and shares, out of all the publications I could have published it on.
Think of where you can place and promote your content, as you create it. Go outside the box and be creative and strategic. Tie topics to holidays, seasonal launches to guest publication feature dates, and more.
Content maintenance and auditing should be part of your strategy on a consistent basis.
Every month, I check my site positions in SEMrush, and ask three of my best agency copywriters to help me update the posts that start to rank. This has brought a serious return in the amount of lead inquiries we get.
The content I wrote back in 2013 that’s ranking #1 today isn’t nearly as good as the content I can write today, so it’s absolutely necessary for me to update content as it ranks. By improving the quality of that content, updating the meta description, etc., I can seriously improve the amount of visitors that turn into leads from finding these high-ranking posts on Google.
Content Strategist Skillsets: Success is In the Details
Remember: content marketing isn’t something that can be done once, or twice, or even for a few months. In a podcast I recently recorded with Joe Pulizzi, he recommended 12-24 months as the typical turnaround to expect with a content investment. So, as a content strategist, once you invest in a blog schedule, you need to keep at it at least a year to start seeing return.
I’ve talked to influencers and content strategists that have shared their personal success stories, and it’s always a story about long-term success that translates to long term ROI—combined with a serious investment in “10x style” content (content that is 10x better than anything already out there).
The success is in the commitment, and in the details of how willing you are to get good at your strategy and content itself.
Unbounce’ Content Director, Dan Levy: “Blogging was survival for Unbounce in the early days. It was the only way for us to raise awareness of our brand and the need for landing pages in general without spending a ton of money, which we didn’t have.” Unbounce blogged six months before their product launched. Today, they have over 9,800 paying customers—which they’ve acquired mostly through Oli Gardner’s amazing long-form content.
Sujan Patel: “Content takes time, and people just see success stories and don’t realize it’s not overnight. It’s taken two and a half years for me. After that length of creating content for my own site consistently, I’m at a point of earning speaking gigs without even seeking them out.”
Yet, it works. At a Content Marketing World conference, the former senior director for data, content and media at Kraft, Julie Fleischer, said that content marketing ROI was 4x greater than their most targeted advertising.
Get a Visualized, Step-for-Step, 6-Week Content Strategist Certification & Training
This 2017, one of my biggest goals was to turn what I know into teachable, easy-to-digest knowledge in a course format.
I’d taken a few courses, and the ones I experienced all lacked one thing—the practical how-to of “what do I do next in my content?”
Personally, I learned content creation ROI the hard way, through trial and error. And after training dozens of writers with content I wrote just for internal education at my agency, I’ve seen firsthand how this industry is lacking in a practical, hands-on, high-ROI education.
The hows, what’s, and when’s of content creation and strategy as it applies to content marketing–where do you go to learn them?
So, over the last three months, I put hundreds of hours (and all the knowledge from my last six years in the industry) into creating an ultimate Content Strategy Certification Course.
It went live last week. The points I laid out in the six keys above are what I teach, step-by-step, visualized in video lesson demos and taught in hands-on exercises throughout six workbooks that accompany my course modules. In the course, my students learn how to build a working brand strategy, complete with personas, keyword reports, editorial calendars, and more: and my team and I personally review and mentor their results before they progress to certification.
Here’s to changing the industry—one complete, high-ROI content strategy at a time!
