From the SMX West Conference in San Jose, California, March 21-23, 2017. SESSION: Creating a Customer-Driven Content Strategy. PRESENTATION: Creating a Customer-Driven Content Strategy - Given by Casie Gillette, @casieg - Ko Marketing, Director of Online Marketing. #SMX #32C1
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Creating a Customer-Driven Content Strategy By Casie Gillette
1. #SMX #32C1 @casieg
…give your customers the answer they need.
Creating a
Customer-Driven
Content Strategy
2. #SMX #32C1 @casieg
• What I Do: Director of Online Marketing at
KoMarketing, a B2B Digital Marketing firm in
Boston, MA.
• I’m Old: In the online marketing industry for over
12 years, working on both the agency side and in-
house.
• Things I Like: SEO, Dogs, Pizza, Netflix &
Smiling…it’s my favorite.
• Find Me: Connect with me on Twitter @casieg.
About Casie (Sounds Like K-C)
Excited for the customer track. We have 25 minutes and in that time I want to talk about the customer. and more importantly
I want to talk about their journey…Because think about it - we go on journeys every day - we make decisions every day - And yes, sometimes they are bad decision….
but typically to get to those decisions, we research, we look at data, and we choose what we think is the best option.
Let’s talk about how you got here. and not existentially…how you actually got here.
You’re a marketer. You thought, i’d like to go to a conference and learn about marketing.
But which conference should I go to?
So you searched marketing conferences
Asked your friends on social
Did some research
Got retargeted to…a LOT
Read the agenda, looked up the speakers, read their content.
And when you finally decided SMX West sounded awesome and you bought a ticket…you had to figure out hotels, flights, car rentals, where to eat, how to not be hungover from from the Google Dance…There were a lot of decisions to be made just for this trip.
And throughout all of it, there was CONTENT. And that’s why we are here! As marketers, and specifically for us search marketers, we need to be thinking about our customers and how they are making decisions:
what are they doing to get to that decision? - where are they going to find the information leading to their decisions? - what type of content are they using to help them make a decision? And when we start to figure that out - then we have to create content marketing programs that actually address their wants and needs. So let’s talk about content and more importantly WHY you are creating content.
First off - NO MORE CREATING CONTENT FOR THE SAKE OF CREATING CONTENT.
it must have a goal.
And those goals must address your customer needs and fit into the buyer journey.
Let’s go back to our conference example - when you were looking for which conference to go to, you may have searched things like “best search marketing conferences” or “marketing conference san jose” or maybe you asked “what’s the best marketing conference?”
To find what our customers are looking for at the beginning of their journey, we can guess, or we can turn to keyword research - but I want to talk about KW research not in the traditional sense.
Using your core keywords, we want to understand what QUESTIONS people are asking -
And here’s why this is important.
Additionally, getstat survey – discuss recent FQ analysis – Intent is more important than ever and having the content addressing questions and intent – also important. So how do we find these questions?
Answer the public.
Answer the public.
Answer the public.
Faq fox – webpage fx
We want to take all that and we want to funnel it together. Creating a map of relevant questions.
By understand what people are asking, we can identify if 1 - we have the answer and 2 - if we are presenting it correctly.
Which takes me to the next point - We also have to think about WHERE they are asking these questions. Because guess what, we can no longer just optimize for search engines. We have to consider search, social, video, chat, etc. And we can go back to our tools we used earlier --
Faq fox – webpage fx
Answer the public.
BuzzSumo can show us where people are talking about specific topics.
But we can also take a look at our data.
Where are referrals coming from? (GA)
Which networks are driving shares? (GA)
Where are competitors talking and being mentioned?
Where are your competitors being linked from? Where are they advertising?
BuzzSumo– mentions / shares / backlinks
Social mentions
And let’s be real, if we want to think about just search engines - we still need to think beyond just the search engine. Because being in the result might not be an option - being in a result within the result might be though.
So I’m getting kind of meta —
What’s out there. What we have. And what we need.
We also need to go back to our funnel - looking at our data - questions, channels, where does our existing content fit in and where are our needs?
And in reality, at this point, we should have a solid understanding of what our audience wants and if we have it.
I actually did this for a client recently - I broke down top questions and phrases by channel, where they fell in the funnel, where their content was performing well, and where they had gaps.
One of the biggest successes that came out of that was for actually for organic search. In looking through the data, search was their one of their biggest drivers of traffic - but there were a few opportunities that really stood out - answer boxes. And while they had content that was aligned, it didn’t necessarily address the question being asked. So we built out a blog post, structured for the answer box and guess what?
Within a couple weeks, the post was not only ranking, but was appearing in the answer box. For the record, I have rolled this strategy out to a number of my clients and it is working.
My colleague also wrote a post around this a few months back if you are interested. I’ll make sure it’s tweeted out after.
For another client, we found a page we created for organic search was actually very in line with what competitors were promoting in paid ads. So we changed up some of our remarketing content, driving people to the page and saw a huge increase in downloads. We didn’t have to create entirely new assets, we just had to make some new ad copy.
Going back to my analysis, I really was able to see where our content strategy needed to head and what we needed to reach out customers. I am running out of time here but I want to make sure we go back a bit here.
Decisions - we make them every day…so do your customers.
Question - we ask them. an increasing amount. and search results reflect it. we didn’t even talk about voice search.
Content - we need it. we rely on it. as marketers - it’s up to you to give it to us.