A presentation by David Somerville, head of social media at Fresh Egg, given at the 2013 Brighton Digital Marketing Festival.
The presentation covers the five different stages of the content cycle, with the aim of helping you plan, implement, measure and improve upon the success of your content marketing strategy. These five stages are:
- Discovery – an investigation stage to guide your content strategy and campaigns
- Planning and setup – a stage that ensures your content is well thought-out and designed to meet specific objectives
- Execution – creating your content and promoting it
- Reporting, analysis and insight – measuring what has happened as a result of your content campaigns
- Refinement – learning from your reporting and feeding back into planning and setup to help guide future campaigns
2. • David Somerville
(@southcoastdavid)
• Head of social media at Fresh Egg
• Work with clients such as
Confused.com, Maplin, Vodafone
Australia, Adecco
• Previously spent over 4 years as
online content manager for Friday
Media Group
About me
7. Low-quality websites were hit, especially ‘content farms’
Then this happened...
Source: saffronweb.com
8. And then this happened…
Source: blog.bringshare.com
Low-quality article marketing and blog spam hit
9. • Everyone went content crazy (especially SEOs!)
• ‘Content marketing’ became the new buzzphrase
• Content moved more away from automation and only written text
• There was an underlying shift in reason WHY content was written
…and the content landscape changed dramatically
13. • A process of helping to plan and implement your content strategy
• Makes you focus on objectives and audiences
• Allows you to report fully on your content production and help
justify ROI
• Five different related stages…
What is the Content Cycle?
15. An ‘investigation’ stage to ensure you have your content
fundamentals in place – guides your content strategy and campaigns
Discovery
16. Audit your current content (and website) and build a SWOT.
• Technical limitations – crawlable, multi-device accessible
• Content structure – layout for UX, editorial standards, internal
linking
• User metrics and conversions – what does the site traffic tell you?
• Resources – who is doing it and who could do it?
• Competitors – what are they doing well and not so well?
Content audit
17. Producing content for the right audience is crucial, so make sure you
know exactly who they are by:
• Using any demographic data you have access to
(Hitwise, Mosaic, CRM data, email lists, social media network
insights, etc.)
• Building personas for different audience groups
• Including their motivations for wanting to view your content
Audience personas
18. Social Crawlytics scans your website (or your competitor’s) to show
the level of social shares it receives
Use this to see the most popular pages and produce more of this
content
Socially popular content – Social Crawlytics
19. An often overlooked and underused resource…
TIP: this does need to be configured first in Google Analytics
Google Analytics Site Search
20. Find experts and influencers from within your company (or industry)
– use them for ideas and their authority…
Experts and Authorship
21. Find any offline content and repurpose it digitally
Repurposing content
Source: displaydevelopments.co.uk
22. Planning & Setup
Use this stage to ensure that your content campaigns are well
thought-out and have purpose
23. It is important to consider what role the content you are writing plays
in each stage of the customer journey…
This backs up your ‘audience’ work in the discovery stage
Content and the customer journey
24. What content channel fits which stage?
Content and the customer journey
Search, social
networks, blogs
, PR
Your
website, blog,
interactive
tools
Ecommerce
process on
site, email
25. Why are you producing this content?
Setting clearly defined OBJECTIVES is vital to the planning and success
of a campaign
How are you going to measure the success of this content?
Each content campaign needs to have measureable KPIs to help with
reporting – these will help show if you have achieved your
OBJECTIVES
Objectives and KPIs
29. The tighter, better and more detailed your brief, the better content
you will produce (or have produced for you)
Briefs
30. Use ‘fag packet
wireframes’ to help guide
designers and content
producers about what
you want to see
These can also guide the
content writer to see how
they content will appear
in the context of the page
Wireframes
31. For each campaign, ensure that everyone knows their responsibilities
Responsibilities
Source: fitfanempire.com
32. The rise of multiple devices means that CONTEXT is key
Different environments
Source: www.mashable.com
40. Influencers vs. brand advocates
Measure Influencer Brand advocates
Consumer trust 18% of people trust
influencers
92% of people trust brand
advocates
Typical profile Blogger, journalist,
pundit/celebrity
Highly satisfied customer
Defined by Size of audience How likely they are to
recommend brand
Motivation Grow their audience Help their friends
Advocacy and loyalty Short term Long lasting
Genuine passion Maybe Yes
Incentives needed Typically yes (money, free
products, etc.)
Typically no
41. Make it easy for people to share and it will spread further
Make it shareable
42. Reporting, Analysis & Insight
This stage is for reporting on what has happened as a result of your
content campaigns
43. A few examples of metrics:
• Links (who is linking to your content)
• Reach (eyeballs)
• Social reach
• Brand mentions and sentiment
• Google Analytics metrics (traffic, time on site, etc.)
• Conversions and assisted conversions
What metrics can you report on?
45. Link metrics – Open Site Explorer, Majestic SEO
Visibility – Searchmetrics, Google Webmaster Tools
Impressions – Google Webmaster tools, tracking pixels
Social reach – Social Crawlytics, Shared Count
Brand or sentiment measurement – Social Mention, Brandwatch
Tools to help measure
46. Use the Google UTM tag and add this to all links you’re using to
promote your content.
• Specify the SOURCE (the place) and the MEDIUM (the method)
• Make sure you keep the CAMPAIGN NAME consistent
• Check the results of the campaign in Google Analytics
Tag your content
47. Refinement
The final stage – feeding back into Planning & Setup or Execution to
help guide future campaigns
48. • What worked? What didn’t?
• Ask users for feedback on content – what do your social media and
onsite comments tell you?
• Did it meet your objectives?
• Combine your metrics with testing and feedback this learning into
the planning and setup stage
Refinement
50. • Content comes in many forms – think beyond just text
(and beyond desktop)
• Focus on your objectives and your audience – why are
you producing the content and for who?
• Discover > Plan > Execute > Report > Refine
• RINSE AND REPEAT!
Key takeaways
Also founder of Brighton Social Media – monthly meet-ups for all digital marketing people
And a way of producing better content in a smarter way is to adopt the Content Cycle as an approach
Some examples of different content types or formats
Authorship is really important and you need to be implementing it on your content:Improves CTRShows authority and expertisePrevents plagiarismFuture-proof against Author Rank
Company brochures, magazines, archived materials, photos, videos
Event – as discussed previously with ‘Trigger Events’, something causes the person to require that content informationAwareness – making a user aware of a product, service etcConsideration – providing further information to help them make a more informed choiceConversion – a direct style of content to make the user do something (buy, sign-up, review etc)Also consider ‘Post-conversion’ in terms of content (i.e follow up email to customers, user guides etc)
Different content may fit different stages – you may not be working on all of this stages at once
Topsy – search for conversationsTweetdeck – create columns for searches and lists of usersTrendsmap – monitor local trends and conversations
Even a basic wireframe will help a designer or content producer see more clearly exactly how you want the content to look
Hannibal – planning and strategy Murdoch – ideas generation (crazy stuff!)BA – producing the goodsFace – content marketing and outreach
You need to consider the context of where the user will be viewing the content and on what device.Content can be produced for a range of different devices and ‘thing’ – mobile, tablet, electronic signage, Google glass, watches
Consider…HOW will users view your contentWHY are they viewing itON WHAT devices will they be using
These will help get your content found better by search and perform better for the user and required actions
Just some ways in which content can be promoted once live. Content promotion will depend on the content, audience and objectives
Who are they? What is the difference?This is also the most liked image on Instagram!
The table shows the differences between an influencer and a brand advocate as identified from research by Zuberance.comBrand advocates also are a great source of UGC!
This is a simple, but fundamental element that often gets neglected.Examples:Buzzfeed.com – prominent sharing near title, plus on each image/sectionConfused.com Royal baby Name Generator (widget)Consider incentivising people to share your content too – add an embedded tweet and run a ‘Tweet to win competition’.
Define these at your planning stageMay differ depending on content type, campaign etcThese metrics should be combineMeasurement may be best to be done over time
What metrics to consider at the different stages of the customer journey?
Make reporting even easier by tagging your content
Example of NVC refinement of Track Talk articles – Interviews with F1 commentators. Feedback from users led us to tweak the interview questions and get more success on them