Last week we had the opportunity to speak to the members of the Frederick County Chamber of Commerce about getting the most out of your content. There’s a ton of great stuff in here. The video is below and all relevant links have been added to the video transcription below.
Enjoy!
Video Transcript: Edited for Readability
I am Jon-Mikel Bailey. I’m with Wellspring Digital. We are a full-service marketing agency. I’ll talk about that a little bit more in a second. Today’s topic is going to be talking about your content and whether or not you’re getting the most out of it. We’re gonna identify some likely terrifying instances where you’re actually wasting content opportunities.
We’re going to teach you how to recognize content opportunities, and we’re going to teach you how to then take that content and grow your reach.
Also, a note that this entire webinar features drawings from my lovely daughter, Lennah Mae Bailey, who is 12 and she is not getting paid for this. I support her in other ways. So this isn’t any kind of child labor issue. 😉 In fact, she was quite happy to do it. So I just want to address those concerns right out of the gate. All right.
Wellspring Digital Introduction
So, what is Wellspring Digital? I started working as the chief development marketing officer or the CMO for a company called Wellspring Digital. There are many reasons for that move, but I think the thing that sums it up best is this little picture of the robot with the heart.
And I think it’s all about digital marketing with a heart. That’s what drew me to Wellspring and that’s what gets me excited about doing my job every day.
So what is Wellspring? Wellspring? digital is a full-service digital marketing company with a heart! We do search engine optimization: local, regional, national, international, multilingual.
We do marketing automation, platform-agnostic, this could be HubSpot, Marketo, SharpSpring, Pardot, you name it. Microsoft dynamics.
We do pay per click marketing. This is Google AdWords or social media advertising, retargeting, that sort of thing.
We do content and social media marketing, which I’m going to talk about today.
We do web and graphic design and website support and maintenance. We offer a world-class business hosting platform on sailfish. It’s cloud hosting. It’s super fast. Made for WordPress websites.
We also offer reputation management and sentiment analysis. Basically what that means is, we can see what your reputation is out there on the interwebs, what people are saying about you, and we can also see what they feel about certain topics so that you can plan accordingly for future marketing efforts.
So again, we are a full-service digital marketing firm aligned with your core values!
What Is Content Marketing
So let’s talk about content marketing. For those of you who don’t know or you’ve been under a rock, whatever. You’re busy running your business and you don’t have time to learn all this marketing junk. Let’s go through some basics first…
Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content.
And this is to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience with the objective of driving profitable customer action.
The three words valuable, relevant and consistent content are the things I really want to focus on today. That’s where I think a lot of companies missed the mark with their content efforts. So we’re going to really dive deep into that.
So Robert Rose, author of Killing Marketing and also with Content Marketing Institute. Yes, there is an institute of content marketing. It’s a great resource if you need information on content marketing. I put his quote up, which I loved. He said, “traditional marketing is telling the world you’re a rock star. Content Marketing is showing the world you’re one.”
And it’s really the difference between advertising and inbound marketing or content marketing today.
Ann Handley is hands down one of my favorite people in marketing and just in general, she’s a wonderful human being.
A few years back, I was doing a seminar on digital marketing. She wrote a book called Content Rules, which is one of my absolute favorite books, and it still holds up today. It’s probably like, I don’t know, 6, 7, 8 years old and still holds true today.
I asked her on Facebook of all places if she could sum up her book, in one sentence, what would that sentence be? And this was the sentence she gave me and I think it’s brilliant.
“Be relentlessly customer-focused and not corporate-focused. Ask yourself as a business owner and as a marketer, what marketing will my customer thank me for?”
Think about that for a second. You’re talking about marketing and you want them to thank you for it. That is marketing today. That is digital marketing today. They want value. They want to see that you care about them, you understand them, and that you will connect with them on a deeper level than just taking their money.
Content Marketing Stats
So some stats on content marketing that I think are important, just to kind of drive the point home that content marketing is very important still to this day.
Companies that publish 16 plus blog posts per month got almost three and a half times more traffic than ones that publish zero to four monthly. (Source: HubSpot) So that’s great traffic, wonderful.
But what’s more important, is that if you look at number three, conversion rates are nearly six times higher for content marketing adopters than non-adopters. (Source: Aberdeen)
So you’re getting more of the traffic that you see there in number one, and you’re converting them, meaning you are converting them from a casual visitor to your website to an actual client or customer or they are doing some action that you want them to do.
Number two content mark, I know I’m skipping around but it’s, it’s my show. Content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing and generates about three times as many leads. (Source: DemandMetric) That’s a little misleading. It costs less in terms of paying for advertising costs, but it costs more in terms of time, your time, and anytime that you pay for a marketing agency to generate and promote content for you.
I want to focus on this for a second because while that seems like a big investment, the return on that investment in the long term is exponential. So the time and energy that you put into creating valuable effective content marketing will continue to pay off in terms of the SEO value of your site, and the general overall value of your site to your clients and future clients.
It is now taking more time to create blogs with the average writing time in 2019, hitting three hours and 57 minutes a 65% increase from 2014 24 minutes. (Source: SmartInsights) Why did I put this stat up? Because I think it’s important to note that the days of churning out the 300-word meaningless blog post is over, they do nothing.
They don’t help with your SEO, they don’t convince your clients that you’re a good company to work with. They do nothing. So spend some time on your content.
So, the number of b2c companies using content, it’s quite high. So if you’re in the b2c world, I hear from people all the time on B2C, it’s not really something that we can get, you know, super into writing but now that’s not true.
And the content usage is if you look at that, that pie that graph on the second slot on the second graphic, that’s huge. You’re increasing website traffic, social media sharing, time spent on website sales, these are all things that you want improvements on, so don’t skimp. And don’t think just because you’re b2c, that content marketing doesn’t apply to you because it very much does. (Source: MarketingProfs)
Topics Covered in this Webinar
So this is what we’re going to talk about today. There’s another one of her drawings. We are going to talk about content marketing, work smarter, not harder. I want to make sure that
- you’re finding great content
- you’re writing great content
- and you’re getting the most value out of that content that you possibly can
So we’ll go through each of these for you now…
Content Opportunities
So let’s talk about content opportunities. I see content everywhere, it’s everywhere, and it doesn’t even know its content. That’s from the kid from that movie, you know, anyway, so content is hiding in plain sight.
It’s passing you by all the time and you’re not even noticing it is passing you by: an email and conversations, in sales and contract content. You’re sending out presentations like this one. The world around you and more, we’re going to take a closer look at each one of these.
Content Ideas in Email and Conversations
So, email and conversations. I want everyone that is paying attention to this webinar right now to understand the importance of shifting your focus. You need to shift your focus as a business owner, as a marketer, even as a salesperson to “how can I help my customers, my clients, my fans, and the community in general?”
And the way you do that is by being hyper-vigilant and doing some active listening in terms of what content do they want? How do you know what content they want? They’re telling you this every single day.
You’re getting questions, you’re answering your emails, the answers you give, that’s the start of a post, take that answer that you’ve typed up in that email back to them, and start writing it as a blog post for a larger audience.
You’re having back and forth with staff, you’re having staff meetings, you’re having creative discussions with different people on your staff, you’re trying to do some problem-solving. Use this as a basis for not only point-counterpoint, if you’re having disagreements, and there’s a valid argument maybe you take that public with a post.
You have a back and forth to the staff or outline the back and forth in the problem solving that you’re doing to find the solution to the problem.
Customer Service Emails and Conversations
You’re also getting customer service calls and emails. So your customer service department, if you have one or if it’s just you, is really the front line. People used to think that it was their sales department, the sales departments, the front line, and they understand what the clients need. And to a certain extent, that’s true.
But the people who are really understanding what the clients need, are the people on the front line and that’s your customer service people. And that’s you if you’re a one to two-person shop, that’s fielding those calls, make notes of those calls and email and go back to those notes later and say, “what can we generate from a content perspective that would be helpful to a larger audience than just that person?
They Ask, You Answer
There’s a great book They Ask, You Answer by Marcus Sheridan. And in that book, he talks about how every question he got asked, when he was running his small pool company, he took that question no matter how difficult.
You know, “why should I buy your pool over somebody else?” “Why are you more expensive than somebody else?” “Do I need this pool?” He would answer those in a post that would be completely, “No, I am not the right company for you if this is your situation.”
In doing that he killed it with growth on his website and his sales went through the roof.
So I can’t overestimate enough the importance of the customer service calls and emails and the questions that they’re asking you and the problems they’re presenting to you and why you need to be mindful of those and make posts out of those.
And of course, the conversations and in the office. These just might be water cooler talk or general conversations in your staff meetings or whatever. There might be things that you’re talking about on a regular basis that you’re not sharing with your audience and they can totally benefit from it. So I think it’s important that you pay attention to those.
Presentations as a Source of Content
So you want to fine-tune your content radar, so you’re not wasting good content, presentations.
So this PowerPoint, I could make probably 20 posts out of this PowerPoint alone. These PowerPoints are so valuable. Each slide has the potential to be expanded into a post. And by the way, my daughter, I think, is coming up with a cure for COVID-19. So everybody can rest easy now, she’s on it.
You can develop a series so the slides could be a blog post series, or you could go to the next level and produce an ebook that people can download on your website and even you can use that ebook to build your email newsletter list.
You can embed the presentation into a blog post, and then write a post underneath it as a summary, and people can click through the slides. Google loves it. So why not?
Here’s where SlideShare is owned by LinkedIn. You can upload your slides here. And this is where you can actually copy the iframe source code that you can plunk right down in your say, a WordPress blog post, or something else. Or your website manager can do this for you. And then the slideshow will actually show right in that blog post itself.
Content Ideas from the World around You
And, of course, the world around you. There are ideas everywhere. A while ago, a guy named David Meerman Scott (look for our upcoming interview with DMS) came up with the idea of newsjacking. And really it’s a fancy word for basically just creating topical posts.
We are seeing a ton of it right now, with this pandemic that we’re in, we’re seeing posts by just random people at home, that are posting to Facebook or posting a video about their stress or whatever.
This is not really anything new people have been doing this newsjacking for quite a while. It’s a way to create a topical post for your website or your blog that can be relevant and actually gain additional attention because it’s what people are talking about and interested in at the time.
I get into social media discussions, quite a bit about marketing, and I will borrow a snippet from that or take a screenshot or something and I will run with it and do a post about it because I am friends with lots of marketing people and so we talk about marketing.
If you’re friends with people in your industry, and you’re talking about a common problem or something like that, screenshot it, ask them if it’s okay, if you can post that. And then write a post about it. It’s great. It’s real. It’s what people are talking about. It’s what they need to know.
There’s stuff at home, stuff your kids do, stuff your pets do, anything, just try to have that, that filter in your listening, where you can hear things through that filter and think, how does this relate? Or can this relate to what I do professionally, what I’m trying to do from a marketing perspective for my clients, everyday life, there’s inspiration anywhere and everywhere.
It could be on TV shows, it could be while you’re out, walking, it could be while you’re sitting in your dining room by yourself, losing your mind because you’ve been stuck in your house for a month. You know, whatever. It’s out there.
Content Squeeze
Now you have all these ideas, you’ve been listening to all of this content. Great. You’re jotting them down. You’re, you’re creating these posts. You want to make sure that you’re getting every possible ounce of goodness out of your content. If you’re not doing this, you’re wasting content and you’re wasting time. You’re wasting your valuable time.
Not getting every ounce of goodness out of your content? We’ll talk about this in a second. I have a serious seltzer addiction. Don’t judge me.
So just a little clarification, that drawing is supposed to be the monkey on the rock holding Simba from Lion King. So there is a content circle of life. Nothing is one and done in Content Marketing…
- a post can be can become a series
- a series can then become a presentation
- that presentation can then be recycled back into an E-book
- the Ebook becomes a video
- this SlideShare right now will become a video, this presentation
- the video can become a podcast and it can then become a blog post
So it is a content marketing circle of life. Let’s talk a little bit more about all this.
Interviews for Content Marketing
So I’ve been doing these interviews with some of my favorite marketers out there. And just a quick note. That guy right there to your left. That is Mathew Sweezey. He is one of the smartest, friendliest, nicest, awesome, most awesomest guys in marketing that I know today.
He works at Salesforce. He wrote a book called The Context Marketing Revolution. That’s c o n t e x t. It is a phenomenal book.
I got an advance copy that I printed and I highlighted just about every page. I cannot recommend his book enough. Okay. advertisement for Mathew Sweezey over now.
We do these interviews on a regular basis. So we’re doing these Zoom interviews. I’m pretty sure that there are some people on this webinar right now who have, I don’t know, maybe done about 150 Zoom meetings in the past like month.
If you think that those Zoom meetings are producing valuable content, that people can use, that they can relate to, that helps them (your clients), then record it.
Then take that recording and post it on YouTube. Take that YouTube embed, put it in a blog post like you see here to the left. You can add a description just above the YouTube video. And then you can get a video transcription done (like what you are reading here).
We use otter.ai for transcription. There’s also a service called Rev.com. Otter.ai is a membership plan. Rev.com haS a pay as you go, you pay by the minute.
Either way, super cheap, and it’s a machine, it’s AI so it’s churning out these transcriptions for you just as it hears it from the computer. The downside is it will get some words and things wrong. Now I know marketing friends of mine who will take that transcription and then just post it as is and say it’s machine transcribed.
I don’t like that. Because I have problems. I prefer to edit it so it’s readable. And I also put links in the text. This is SEO gold. This is search engine optimization gold. It is a video with text. It’s what Google’s been saying they love, not only is it great, multi-platform content, it’s also conversational content.
This is content that is spoken. So this is appealing to the Alexa’s or when you’re talking to your phone, this is actually allowing you to put actual conversational content on your website.
Then you can post this video to Facebook, you can reuse that audio as a podcast and put it on all the podcast platforms. You can use this content as an inspiration to come up with additional posts. And you can use this content to create an E-book.
So the opportunities are endless.
Don’t Waste Good Content
Repurpose all of your content, don’t be wasteful.
You may have old blog posts, you can go back and give them a new life. You can make them relevant again. They may be
kinda old, they may be kind of tired. They may be out of date, maybe you need to update stats, go back and re-edit those and repost them.
If you’ve done ebooks, and you’re still giving them out, take a look at them and everyone once while and make sure that they’re, they’re up to date, and that they can create good, timely information.
So you may want to repurpose those or update those or just scrap them and start a new one.
You down with OPP? You can use other people’s posts. You can include their link in your post. And then you can add your insight and say so and so in this post says blah, blah, blah. And here’s what I think. It’s inspiration.
Printed pieces and printed materials that you’ve given out and handed out that you can actually take and digitize and put on your website. That’s good content that gets you traffic.
Presentations like this one, you may have presentations that you did a while back that you haven’t gone back to since you did the presentation that you might want to take a look at and go, “you know what, there’s more here that I can use.”
And video, just like we talked about, get the text, get the sound, and the video, all those things working for you on multiple platforms.
Content Boost
Now we’re getting into the boost part (check out the Content Code by Mark Schaefer for more on this).
So those are eyeballs, by the way, in case you can’t tell. We need to get your content in front of those eyeballs.
This is a part where I think a lot of people get frustrated. And I’m going to get on my soapbox here for a second. A lot of people get frustrated and they think, “well, I’ve created all this content and nobody’s commenting on it and nobody’s sharing it.”
“And I’m really frustrated and nobody loves me. And I’m going to go eat worms.”
Don’t go eat worms because they’re nasty. Just understand that people are attacked on a daily basis, by information from all sides. You need to do everything you can to make sure that you’re getting your content in front of them.
Don’t be discouraged if everything is an instant hit. That’s not the point. The point is that you’re building up value on your website, you’re building up your story, you’re building up the tips and the information that your customers and future customers are craving.
So take the time to make sure that it’s getting out there and you’ll start to see that build. It’s almost impossible to get something to go viral. Don’t shoot for viral, shoot for quality.
Sharing Content on Social Media Channels
Do you want to share it? Obviously. But there’s, there’s more than just sharing it on Facebook. And there’s more than just sharing it on Facebook or sharing it on Twitter once. You want to share it on these things on a regular basis.
So I have no idea what that thing is that the one dog is giving the other dog. I don’t know maybe a chew toy, I’m hoping it’s a chew toy and not something else anyway.
So there’s more than one way to boost to social media, you can share more than once the same content again and again, people look at me sideways when I say that sometimes, but it’s crucial.
They’re not always going to see it when you share it that one time so space it out. Schedule it and make sure that it’s getting in front of them on a regular basis because they may not even see it scroll right past it.
But if they see it more than once they might go “you know what I’m gonna click this time.” So share it on multiple platforms where your clients are and share it more than once.
Content Syndication
Syndication. I’m going to talk a little bit about that in a second. Email is important as well, your email newsletter and other ways to do that. And then from the email, you graduate up into marketing automation. And I’m going to talk a little bit about that here in a second.
So manual syndication is another way that you can do get your content out there. So you can do this through LinkedIn articles. Medium.
You can do this through Reddit.
You can even take your posts and do it through Facebook. There’s a few more. But you always want to make sure that when you’re posting these articles – these are your blog posts that you’re copying and pasting in these other formats – just make sure that you’re putting a link back to the original and that you have permission to repost it.
You want to get in front of a whole new set of eyeballs. That’s the way to do it. If they’re not coming to your blog. Take your blog to them. And manual syndication is the way to do that.
Email Marketing
Email Marketing. So one of my favorite newsletters is from MarketingProfs, who was run by none other than Ann Handley. You may know her from earlier slides in this presentation.
In these emails, you can see that they have a view and browser option in case they can’t see it in their email client.
It has the brand you want to include your brand. Give your newsletter a title. And I would say even give it a tagline, you can see here “your source for what matters in marketing from the team at MarketingProfs.” So even if their logo doesn’t load, they still get the MarketingProfs in there and they’re still telling you what this newsletter is.
You want to link back to posts. A lot of people make this mistake. They will put the actual post in the email and not link back to their website. Big mistake.
Put the post on your website and link to it from the email. You want to drive traffic to your website because that’s where you’re going to get the conversion.
Use icons and images for clarity if the text isn’t enough. Make the action obvious make it clear where the click where the links are and what it’s taking you to.
You need to earn your way into the email inbox and you do this with quality emails and by delivering quality content. Don’t Cousin Eddie this moment and just show up. That’s bad.
Content Blast!
You want to blast it out there. This list is always going to change. And this is one of my all-time favorite drawings from Lennah. I think it’s amazing.
This list is always going to change. So don’t ever stop looking.
Slide Sharing Platforms
Slideshare and AuthorSTREAM are both really important. Slideshare is owned by LinkedIn. AuthorSTREAM, I don’t know who owns that.
These are both places where you can take slides from presentations like the one you’re seeing right now and you can share these
on those platforms, and these platforms are searchable by Google and other search engines, and they will get listed.
And those slides, then have a link back to the post, where you’ve embedded the slide, see what I’m saying. So you get that circular kind of link juice flowing, and you’re building traffic to your website.
You’re building visibility of your slides. You’re building yourself as someone that that is an authority on a topic. And you’re killing it with keywords.
Video Marketing
YouTube and Vimeo. Both are great video platforms. YouTube is owned by Google. It is the number two search engine in the world.
So put your videos there, make them public, make them shareable, make them embeddable is my opinion.
Vimeo is just a fancier version of YouTube, it’s just another way to share videos. You can control a bit of the user experience there more than you can with YouTube, you can lock down certain elements.
So if it’s a video that you really want to control, how it plays, what it looks like, and all that, Vimeo might be something that you might want to look into and get a license for.
Bookmarking Websites
There are tons of bookmarking sites out there, like ScoopIt! and Mix and others. Pinterest is actually a phenomenal tool, even for B2B for getting your content out to a broader audience.
So this is another one where people look at me like I’m insane. Pinterest is mainly known as the site where women will go and they’ll pin pictures of their wedding dress or some you know color palette for a renovation project or something like that. That is BS. That is not the end all be all of what that platform is.
Basically, it’s like an image search on Google times 1000. It’s a fantastic way to get your posts and your videos with those images shared out and indexed by Google on a regular basis. So please, please, please set up a Pinterest account.
Be mindful of the images that you’re creating, on your blog posts, use things like infographics, charts, video, things like that, on your post. Use those things and then pin them to your Pinterest. Word.
Google will come in and see the Pinterest board when people do image searches. And then that Pinterest board that you have that shows that infographic, for example, links back to that blog post.
Public Relations
Public relations is another way to get yourself out there. This is generally a pay to play sort of thing, but it is something that, especially in Frederick, you have resources.
If you’re a Frederick business or Frederick County business, both the city and the county have a PR service that they can use. So if you can get them a press release, they can get it out on basically on the wire, so to speak.
So these are great ways to get yourself out there on publications and in articles that you normally wouldn’t be seen on. This as a way to build your reach and build your credibility.
One word of caution though, if you’re going to create press releases, make sure that it’s newsworthy. I’m pretty sure Jen from the Chamber can get you all some articles on what actually is and what isn’t newsworthy.
Make sure it’s newsworthy, and I’m not going to go too much into that, I think. I think Jen can cover that. But uh, but that’s it. That’s a great way to get, get your business out there to get your content out there and to get links back to your website
Social Media Marketing and Influencer Marketing
Social media, we talked about it, I can’t stress it enough. Don’t just post it one and done. Post it, share it.
Here’s a little tidbit for you. If you’re doing interviews, or if you’ve had, if you’re using some of those ideas where I talked about – use a conversation that you had with somebody on a social media posts that you’ve screenshotted and made a post out of – when you
post that on social media, tag that person.
If you’re writing a post that has something to do with some public entity, tag that entity! If this is something that you think would be relevant for certain people, and it’s not going to annoy them, tag them.
People love them some of them and when they are tagged, when they are made a part of your share and your post, they will feel a sense of ownership with that and they will want to share it out even more on all their channels.
It’s called Influencer Marketing and it’s a whole nother webinar I can do but it’s super, super effective. And it’s really easy to do. Just make sure that you include people in your content efforts and make sure that you’re using them to get that extra boost for your content.
Content Syndication
Syndication we talked about. This our blog is syndicated to a blog called business2community. There are tons of syndication opportunities for you, it’s just a matter of going out and, and finding them.
So find the industry blogs that really are the ones that you go to all the time and reach out to them and say, “Hey, do you guys do syndication?” Or do a search on their site and see if they do syndication on their site or look at the posts on their site and see if those posts have a link back to an original post. If they do, then they’re doing syndication.
All you need to get them is just an RSS feed. So you just all you have to get them is just a link to your RSS feed and your web designer, web developer can get that for you.
You can share it with the webmaster or Content Manager at that publication and they will set it up, and it’ll automatically pull your content and it’s a great way to build, build your reach
Email Marketing
Email and email marketing, don’t sleep on email. Remember, don’t waste that opportunity to get in their inbox. Don’t be a cousin Eddie. Don’t show up unannounced with, you know, well we won’t go into cousin Eddie.
Make sure that you’re making the most of that email relationship that you have with a client. Make sure that your email marketing has value. Your email newsletters are easy to use. They’re easy to use on mobile devices, on desktop devices, on tablet devices, you name it.
The better that email newsletter is in terms of ease of use, and quality of content, the more interaction you’re going to get with it.
Marketing Automation
And marketing automation. So, marketing automation is a way to sort of put the robots to work. It’s a way to take your content, take your offers, take your social media posts, and automate them in such a way that, as a potential client, or even a client is interacting with you, you’re using those posts and those content pieces, and email newsletters and email touches, to hit them at certain points, as they’re sort of moving along a funnel to get to a point of conversion – where they’re actually moving from being a potential customer to a customer.
So, marketing automation is something that I think just about every company is going to be doing in the next three to five years.
More and more companies are using it. If you want to know more about marketing automation, you can certainly check out our blog posts on marketing automation.
There’s tons of information on marketing automation there. It’s a great way to stay in front of potential clients and to really put your content out there and get it to work for you.
HARO and PR
One other thing I wanted to mention that I’ve forgotten on the public relations bullet there is, you also might want to check out HARO. It is H A R O, it stands for help a reporter out.
I think it’s a twice-daily email newsletter that you get. It’s a little tedious. You can assign it to an assistant or something. But basically what it is, is these reporters sending out requests for interviews or subject matter experts.
So it’s basically a one to one match where you’re getting linked in with reporters who need you, they need your expertise. You have to kind of scan through the entire email. But if you can get a hit, and you can get your company name, and your expertise and a link back to your site on a nationally recognized news organization or blog or magazine site, that’s huge.
There’s always going to be new and better places to post content, keep looking, stay active, read marketing, blogs, which I’ll get to in a second. Always be looking for new ways to get your content out there.
Content Marketing, Work Smarter, Not Harder
So that’s content marketing, working smarter, not harder.
Remember, great content is all around you, begging to be shared. You want to see the amazing content right in front of you. You want to utilize it and squeeze every last drop out of that content that you can and then blast that content out there!
Content marketing is only as hard as you make it. It can be fun, it can be effective. And it can really, really help grow your business.
So I want to thank everybody for showing up. I know these are tough times. I hope that this little webinar we’ve done here has
inspired you to take advantage of some of this quiet time stuck in your home to really rethink what you’re doing with your content and make the most use of it.
So some suggested resources for you. Obviously, our blog, there’s tons of great stuff there.
- Content Rules!, the book, highly recommend it.
- The Content Code by Mark Schaefer is a great book.
- Go to the Content Marketing Institute. Tons of articles on content marketing.
- And Everybody Writes is also another Ann Handley book that will help you get over your fear of writing
and help you through all the ins and outs of writing.
That’s how to contact me. Sarah, do we have any questions?
Questions
If you have questions, you should be able to put them in the chat.
All right, Whitney Hahn, “if you were to suggest an X minutes everyday approach, what might that be?”
You know, I hate that. I, I think you do what needs to be done and you do what you feel okay with. I think instead of forcing yourself to write so many minutes a day or create content so many minutes a day, I’d rather see you force yourself to really think long and hard about what kind of content your audience wants to see.
And put however much time and energy into that content that you think is, you know, worthwhile. So, great question Whitney. I hate that concept. I don’t think anything can be regimented to that level, especially when you’re talking about trying to drum up inspiration and trying to create content that is going to be hugely, hugely, you know, valued.
Ah, and then Whitney said a friend recently shared, “contribute before you consume.” I love that. There’s a couple of rules that 80/20 and a 70/30.
And yes, sorry, Hood College this will be reposted on our blog for viewing, probably sometime next week. And Jen can send everyone a link to that.
But yeah, 80/20 or 70/30 whatever, where it’s 80% someone else’s content 20% your own. One of the ways that you build up a reputation as a valid resource and trusted expert is, is you share out information from other people, it can’t always be all about you.
You have to really make sure that you’re kind of gregarious, and you’re sort of selfless in your giving of useful information that you’re giving out to your audience. It’s definitely an important ratio to keep in mind.
So as you’re sharing on social media, remember, share other people’s content as long as it is a value. Don’t make it all about yourself.
Any other questions? Okay, here’s Kim Dow, “do you have any suggestions for software that helps you share content across multiple platforms rather than manually doing it? I know some use Hootsuite Manager. Just curious if you had a preference.”
I personally use Buffer. Sarah uses our marketing automation tool called SharpSpring. There are tons of different tools out there.
You can do it through HubSpot. You can do through Hootsuite, and as I said Buffer. Then, you know, all the different marketing automation platforms will allow you to schedule it.
Manually doing every single post is really a waste of time and it’s not an effective use of your social media marketing efforts. You want to schedule them out. If you’re not scheduling your posts, Buffer and Hootsuite are both cheap. Get on there.
I really love Buffer. It’s super simple. Some people really prefer Hootsuite. And then if you have a marketing automation platform, use it, use it, use it, use it. It has a scheduling feature in there. I guarantee it. Make sure you use it.
Well, thanks, everybody. I really appreciate you spending your time with me today. I hope you learned something.
Please, if you disagree with anything I’ve said, call me out on social media and we’ll have a little chat about it and maybe that’ll turn into a blog post.
Please visit Wellspring Digital. The blog there is great. We have guest posts. We have posts from our experts. Good stuff there.
And please, by all means, read these books that I’ve recommended. They’re all great resources.
So that was it. And stay safe, stay healthy. Wear your masks, wash your hands, and all that good stuff. We’re gonna all get through this together. And we’ll all be better for it on the other side, especially if you take some time and really up your content game. You’ll see the benefit when everything starts to pick back up.
And then we can all go out and do a little dance. So thank you, everyone. And that is it.
