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Monday’s Marketing Minute: Elon’s Twitter Takeover Back On, Twitter Re-Embracing Devs, What Makes B2B Content Memorable

Happy Monday, y’all! I hope everyone has a wonderful and productive week! Here’s some business and marketing stories that I’ve had my eye on over the last week:

 

So it seems the on-again, off-again bid by Elon to buy Twitter is back on. Multiple sources are saying that the Twitter board is reconsidering Elon’s latest offer to buy the company. I would caution that just because it’s being reported that Twitter is close to a deal with Elon, that doesn’t mean they are. Control of Twitter is a BIG BIG deal, as its become such a massive platform to create and shape public opinion. The company and its shareholders want to continue to control that.  So does Elon.  We will see how it plays out.

 

Years ago, in a time where Twitter let 3rd party developers access its API and build tools on top of it, one such tool called Monitter existed.  At the time, Monitter was one of the most useful social media tools out there. It gave you the ability to search Twitter VIA TARGETED LOCATION. You could see, in real-time what people were saying on Twitter, at a particular location.  It had amazing potential, say you were a restaurant that offered delivery, you could search Twitter for people tweeting ‘I am hungry’ within the last hour, in your neighborhood.  Or if there was a breaking news event at a particular location, you could search for tweets from people at that location, reporting live as the event was unfolding.  It was amazing.  But like many promising apps, Twitter cut off access to its API, and they went away.

Well now they may be coming back.  It seems Twitter is reaching back out to the same developers it once turned its back on.  This may end up being a case of too little too late, but hopefully Twitter will embrace developers building on the platform’s functionality as it once did.  If so, Twitter’s users will be the real winners, and Twitter can always just acquire any successful apps that emerge.

 

New research from Demand Gen gives insights into the types of content that B2B buyers prefer. Specifically, B2B buyers gravitate to content that relies on research and data in presentation. Research and data lends to credibility for the buyer. When it comes to shareability, buyers said that being able to quickly distill key insights derived from the data made the reader more likely to share the content. This is why it’s a good idea to summarize lengthy content with ‘Key Takeaways’ at the start of the post. Readers will often use these insights when sharing your content.

 

So that’s it for this week’s Monday’s Marketing Minute! At some point I want to do a deeper dive into Elon’s flirtations with buying Twitter, and what it really is all about. I might do that later this week, or I may wait until we see if his bid to buy the company actually works or not. I haven’t decided yet. Either way, I appreciate you taking the time to read, and I hope you have a wonderful and prosperous week ahead!

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New Research Reveals How Content Creation is Changing For Bloggers

My pal Andy Crestodina conducts blogging research annually to give us insights into what’s working for bloggers when it comes to content creation. He just published the results of this year’s survey, and I wanted to do a deeper dive into some of his findings.

Successful bloggers spend 4-6 hours on each post

According to Andy’s research, the average blog posts takes 4 hours to write in 2021. This makes sense as more bloggers are moving toward creating long-form content, and we will see that reflected in the survey results.
Additionally, bloggers were asked if they felt their posts were delivering ‘strong results’. Bloggers who spent 6 hours or more on a post reported the highest levels of ‘strong results’ by far. So if you want to write successful blog posts, be prepared to invest at least 4 hours per post. If not more.

The average blog post in 2021 is 1,416 words

And according to Andy’s blogging research, that number has grown every year. I was just discussing this very topic with a colleague. A big reason why longer-form content is more appealing is because it’s harder to write long-form content unless you are an expert on that topic. Longer posts and articles are a key indicator of expertise.
Andy also broke down the length of blog posts, and asked bloggers to rank if their blog posts were giving ‘strong results‘. For instance, for bloggers who wrote posts that were less than 500 words, 16% of them said their blog was delivering ‘strong results’. For bloggers who wrote 500-1000 words per post, that percentage increased to 17%, and for bloggers who wrote 1000-1500 words a post, those bloggers felt their posts delivered ‘strong results’.
Here’s where it gets interesting; For bloggers that wrote 1500-2000 words per post, the percentage who felt their posts delivered ‘strong results’ shot up to 30%. Bloggers who wrote 3000+ words per post felt their blog delivered ‘strong results’ 36% of the time.
Longer content gets better results.

Blogging frequency is down slightly

Not surprisingly, bloggers who are writing longer posts, aren’t blogging quite as often. The average blogger tends to write 1-2 new posts a week. That’s pretty much in line with what I try to shoot for.
Think about the type of content you will be creating. If you are publishing more thought leadership pieces, then you want to go longer, and that means fewer posts. If you are publishing more news or industry-roundup posts, those can typically be shorter, and take less time.
In general, I think you should commit to at least 1 new blog post a week. In a perfect world, I think 2 a week, perhaps Tuesday and Thursday, would work best. But every situation is different. What’s most essential is that you pick a schedule, and stick to it. Consistency is the name of the game, and how you build an audience over time.
Remember, blogging is a marathon, not a sprint.
blogging research

How are bloggers promoting their content?

So I wanted to close with the survey results on content promotion. What’s interesting to me is that social media was listed as the most popular promotion channel, used by 90% of respondents.
But only 20% of respondents said social media was an effective promotional channel, in fact it was the least successful. Isn’t that interesting? Social media is by far the most popular promotional channel and also the least effective.
Why is this? I think a great part of the reason why bloggers aren’t seeing good results from social media is that most bloggers simply tweet or share a link to their new blog post, with zero explanation or context explaining why the post is worth our time. I am the worst about doing this, I need to get better about adding context to ALL links I share, my own, and the links of other creators.
So check out Andy’s blogging research, there’s a ton more of useful information.

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How I Increased My Website Traffic By 52% In One Year

Last year was a rough one for me, just as I’m sure it was for many of you.

Faced with less work, and more time on my hands than usual, I decided to reinvest my time in growing my website traffic. My guess was that most people would be spending more time at home, for work and casual, and that would mean more time spent reading blogs.

So starting on August 31st, 2020, I decided to get serious about growing my blog’s traffic. Here’s what I did.

I Needed More Content

From January-August of last year, I wrote and published a grand total of 17 new posts. That’s roughly 2 posts a month. It’s almost impossible to sustain, much less grow your blog traffic if you only post once every 2 weeks.

So the first step I took to increase my website traffic was to create more content. Originally, my goal was to create 6 new posts a week here. That proved unattainable within the first month or so.

I decided to scale back and settle for at least 2 new posts a week here. I’ve been able to stick to that schedule more often than not. Moving forward, I want to get back to doing Monday’s Marketing Minute every Monday, and then publish new posts every Tuesday-Thursday. This will give me 4 new posts a week, and I think that will be enough new content to continue to grow the traffic here.

In August of 2020, I published one new post.  Last month, I published nine new posts. That alone shows you how much my content creation increased in just one year’s time. This made a huge impact on increasing my website traffic, but it wasn’t the only factor.

I Needed to Improve My Existing Content

In addition to creating more new content, I also focused on optimizing and improving my existing content. This was the second step I took to increase my traffic.

I am a huge believer in going back and optimizing your older content. My pal Andy Crestodina also believes strongly in revisiting and improving older content. You can learn a ton about this process from reading his blog.

What I did was go back and target posts I had written on the core topics I want to be known for. I then looked to optimize these posts.

I focused first on SEO.  I used the Yoast SEO plugin to make sure I had the proper keywords targeted and that the post was optimized for the selected phrase.

I then edited the post to make sure it had relevant, and recent information. If there were any new research studies or news stories I could add to the post, I did so. I also made sure images and visual content was correct and on point for the topic.

Finally, I linked to any new content I had created on the same topic, that might be beneficial.

I started this process in April. On average, posts that I optimized saw a 20% lift in search traffic within the first 2 weeks of being optimized. Not bad.

Here’s the results: I increased my website traffic by 52% in one year:

website traffic

That’s from Google Analytics, my August 2020 traffic vs August 2021 traffic. An increase of 52.46% in website traffic.

On August 31st of last year I committed to growing my blog’s traffic here. I talked yesterday about how you had to build a platform before you can sell a product. That was a big part of my reasoning for wanting to blog more here, I needed to build and grow my platform if I wanted to sell more products and services.

Thankfully, the results of the hard work are starting to show. There’s one thing I wanted to point out: For the first 4-6 months of this push to increase traffic here, I saw marginal improvement at best. And that was frustrating, because for the first 6 weeks or so, I was publishing up to 6 new posts a week.

But for the last 4-6 months, I’ve seen accelerated growth. As late as February or March of this year, 75 visitors in a day was considered average. I hit that many visitors today by 10 am. The point is, when it comes to increasing traffic, growth is rarely linear. I saw a 52% increase in traffic after one year of this strategy. Yet, if I stick to this same strategy for another year, I could easily see another 100% or 200% increase in traffic for next year.

Let’s see if I can do it. Thanks for reading and I look forward to giving you a lot more valuable content to read over the next year.

 

PS: Want me to design a strategy for your blog that will help you achieve an increase in traffic? Fill out the form below and let’s set up a call to discuss your needs.

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The One Thing I Hate About Content Creation

Content CreationThe one thing I hate about content creation is writing about the same topic over and over again.

I hate doing this. When I do, it always feels like I am being lazy or repeating myself. I mean, I covered this same topic back in 2011, why revisit it?

As it turns out, there’s actually several good reasons to create content around the same topic, more than once. So if you are like me, and it gives you the willies to create content about the same topic over and over again, strap in and let’s talk about why this is actually a good idea.

Why you should be creating content about the same topics over and over again

1 – Your audience changes. I’ve been blogging since 2005, across three different sites. The audience I wrote for at each site was vastly different. I’ve now been blogging here for over 12 years.  The people I am writing for today are vastly different than the readers I wrote for back in 2009. It makes complete sense to cover the same topics repeatedly because there are constantly new eyeballs on your content.

2 – Your expertise changes. I look back at a lot of the content I created back in 2005-2007 and realize now that I had no earthly idea what I was talking about. I certainly thought I did, but over the years I got to work with many companies and clients and put what was theory, into practice. My skills improved and grew, and as such the point of view I had for the work changed as well. I could go from presenting other people’s case studies to illustrate a point, to referencing the work I had personally done with clients. My knowledge and understanding of the topics greatly improved, and as a result it makes sense to revisit those topics to add what I have learned.

3 – You have better examples. Tying in with the previous point, as your expertise grows, your ability to illustrate concepts and ideas does as well. You become aware of better examples either through your own growing experience, or simply by being exposed to new case studies.

For instance, when I first started blogging, I often wrote about the value of using influencers on-site to drive interest in a conference or event. After a few years of experience working with companies such as Adobe as an influencer to promote their events, I could then point readers toward the results from that work. This resulted in my being able to create better content, and back up the concepts with real-world results.

4 – It helps your SEO. Yes, writing for search engines still matters. Depending on your blog, anywhere from 30-80% of your traffic comes from search engines. Those are numbers that are simply too big to ignore. By consistently creating content around certain topics, you are telling those search engines what the focus of your blog is. That makes it more likely that the content you create for those topics will place higher in search results, leading to more traffic from search engines.

The plugin I use for my blog to help me rank higher in search results is Yoast SEO. I cannot recommend it enough.

5 – It helps readers understand what the focus of your content is. It’s important to write for search engines, but it’s even more important to write for your readers. Consistently writing about the same topics helps readers understand where your focus is. Once they know what topics you write about, they can help tell their friends and colleagues about you as well.

So it’s vital to think about, from a strategic standpoint, the key topics you want to focus on. This will be the 3-5 topics that you want to be known for. I call these Topic Buckets. I pick 3-5 Topic Buckets that will be the main focus of the content I create here. This helps me focus my content. Additionally, this makes it easier for others to understand what the main topics are that I cover here.

 

There’s five reasons why it pays to focus your content creation efforts on the same topics, over and over again. Pick 3-5 Topic Buckets, then consistently create content that fits into one of those Topic Buckets. This will not only help drive more search traffic to your blog, but it will drive more direct and referral traffic as your readers better understand the focus of your writing.

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5 Common Mistakes Businesses Make on Instagram (And How to Fix Them!)

In the early days of social media (2006-2010), most businesses created content for three channels; Their blog, Facebook and Twitter.

All that changed in 2010 with the introduction of an app called Instagram. What made Instagram stand out from the social media crowd was its focus on visual content. Today, Instagram boasts over a billion users, and it has revolutionized social media, forcing all competing platforms and apps to adopt more visual content options in order to compete.

Yet as businesses are rushing to use Instagram, they are still making many mistakes.

5 Common Mistakes Businesses Make on Instagram (And How to Fix Them!)

 

1 – You business uses Instagram the same way it uses every other social media channel. Instagram is about visual content. The focus of your content should be images and videos, obviously. You can’t just post the same image that you did on Facebook and Twitter and expect the same results.

More than anything, Instagram is a wonderful platform for visual storytelling. If you are reading this post and want to know how to get better at using visual content, I would suggest reading The Power of Visual Storytelling, by my friends Ekaterina Walter and Jessica Gioglio.

Want to see an amazing example of using Instagram for visual storytelling? Check out what Whole Foods did to its Instagram feed.

2 – Your business focuses too much on itself, and not enough on your customers. Keep in mind that social media is best used as a way to build awareness. Who do you want to build awareness with? Your customers! So why not have your customers create your content for you?

For instance, the Alabama Mountain Lakes Tourist Association has partnered with ambassadors throughout North Alabama to photograph the sights of the area. This partnership gives AMLTA access to much more content, and the photographers have a vested interest in promoting that content to their friends and followers. (Disclaimer: I advised AMLTA on their ambassador program as it was being created and launched)

By focusing on your customers, either in creating content about them, or letting them create the content directly, you are giving other customers a reason to engage with your content.

Instagram AMLTA

3 – Your business isn’t using Instagram Stories. If no one sees your content, then they can’t engage with your content. One problem that businesses face when they first join Instagram is building a following. Building a following in necessary to get more visibility and engagement. But there’s another way you can improve both: By using Instagram Stories.

 

Look at the top of that picture.  The bubbles for Amber, NickMercs, Donna and Stephanie are Instagram Stories. The big benefit to using Instagram Stories is that the Stories are moved to the top of the IG feed of your followers. That means better exposure and visibility. If you are simply posting to Instagram, then your updates are going to the regular feeds of your followers. With Instagram Stories, your content stands out and is more likely to be seen.

4 – Your photos are poor quality. Instagram is a visual medium. Your content is competing against businesses that are investing in creating top-notch visual content, both photos and videos. If you want your images to stand out, they must be top quality. If you don’t have a photographer on staff, or access to high quality images, you should make an effort to acquire them.

instagram

5 – Your posting is erratic. Success in building awareness and engagement with social media content is rooted in consistency. You need to create a schedule for when you post content on Instagram, and stick to it! Keeping a consistent schedule ‘trains’ your followers to know when your new content will be posted, so they know when to look for it.

 

So there’s 5 common mistakes that businesses make on Instagram, and how to fix them. If you want to learn more about using Instagram for your business, check out all the posts I’ve written on how businesses are using Instagram.

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10 Simple Ways to Boost Engagement on Your Business Blog (For Free!)

business blog engagementBlogging, especially for a business, can often feel like a very lonely endeavor.

Ten years ago, blogs were where conversations happened on social media. I could write this same post in 2010, and it would likely have 30 comments in a week. This one will be lucky to have a tenth of that in a week.

It’s just the nature of the beast. Blogging has changed, how people engage has changed. Those of us that blog for our business, need to adapt to meet those changes.

 

What does ‘engagement’ mean for a business blog?

There’s a big misconception about what engagement is in terms of business blogging. Many people view engagement for a blog, personal or business, as simply being about comments. Nothing could be further from the truth for a business blog.

For a business blog, engagement is defined as any action that a reader takes that creates value for your business. This could be leaving a comment, but it could also be sharing your post with a colleague or signing up for your newsletter.

So don’t limit your view of engagement on a business blog as simply being about getting more comments. In fact, before we talk about boosting engagement on your business blog, let’s list some of the types of engagement that we want to boost:

  • Comments
  • Shares of your post or article with colleagues
  • Signing up for a company newsletter
  • Leaving your business blog to visit the company website or a product specific area of the company website
  • Emailing or calling your company to ask a product-specific question
  • Downloading a white paper

Now we have an entire list of ways that visitors can engage with the content on our business blog. We can now structure our content to encourage one or more of these types of engagement.

10 Simple Ways to Boost Engagement on Your Business Blog (For Free!)

1 – Simplify your content. Content that’s easier to grasp and understand, is more likely to engage your audience and hold their attention.

The easiest way to do this is to is to focus on topics that are written at a more 101-level than advanced. That’s because its easier for people to form and share an opinion about 101-level content than it is say 401-level content.

Case in point, which question do you think would receive more comments?

  1. What’s your favorite movie night snack; burgers or pizza?
  2. Who was the better military strategist; Alexander The Great or General Robert E Lee?

Obviously, more people would feel confident engaging with content around the first question, than the second. Ultimately, you want your audience to feel comfortable engaging with your content. So creating content that’s easier to digest and understand, will lead to higher engagement rates.

2 – Focus on improving the readability of your content. Content that’s easier to read is easier to understand. Simply organizing your content so it is clear and easy to read will enhance understanding, and that improves engagement.

This is where I want to share one of my content creation secret weapons with you. It’s the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress. Yoast SEO has a Readability checklist it creates for each post you create. That checklist gives you a list of items you need to do in order to make the post easier to read. It’s been a huge help to me and if you compare this post to ones I wrote even a year ago, you can see a stark difference in organization and readability.

3 – Make it clear how you want readers to engage with your content. Do you want more comments? Then ask for them. Do you want more newsletter signups? Then include a signup form in or around your content (There’s one at the end of this post). Do you want them to download your white paper? Then include a link where they can.

Think about how you want readers to engage with your content, then craft your Calls to Action so that you encourage those forms of engagement.

4 -Reply to comments. This one is so simple it hurts. If someone leaves a comment on your blog, answer them! It’s incredibly hard to get anyone to leave a first comment. If they do, and you respond and engage them, that increases the chance that they will comment again.

5 – End your post with these three words; “What do you think?” That encourages the reader to engage you in the comments. You can make it even easier by asking them to leave a comment OR email you any thoughts they have.

6 – Write about your audience, not your company. Remember that your business blog is a great tool for building brand awareness. Awareness is at the top of the sales funnel. To get customers into your sales funnel via content, you want to create content that focuses almost completely on the customer.

Write about what your customer goes through every day. Talk about the problems and issues they face in their lives, without talking about how your company solves those issues. At least not yet. You want to focus completely on the customer in order to get their attention and engage them. Then, once they are on your business blog and engaging with you, then you can create content that helps the customer understand how your company can solve the problems they are facing every day.

7 – Use social sharing buttons on every post. Not every reader wants to comment, but many will want to share your article with friends and colleagues. Giving them social sharing options is an easy way to encourage more visitors to your site. When deciding which buttons to add, always remember to add a button to share via email. Old school still works!

8 – Add Related Content to the end of every post. This is an easy way to help the reader find more content you have written on the same topic. It works perfectly, because if they read the entire article, it signals interest, then you include Related posts at the end for them to read next. I use the Jetpack plugin(Affiliate link) to add three Related posts at the end of each post.

9 – Write good headlines. Your post headline should be engaging, interesting and even a bit provocative all at the same time. But above all, your headline should make a specific promise to the reader, and that promise should compel them to read your post.

Too many bloggers use the post headline to simply summarize the topic of the post. Understand how your content will be spread: It will show up in search results, it will be shared on social media feeds. In most cases, your headline is all a person will read before deciding if they want to click your post and read it.

Spoiler alert: Boring headlines don’t get clicks. I’m using the Headline Optimizer Test from Thrive Themes to create the headline for this post. I entered multiple variations of the headline, the Headline Optimizer serves the headlines randomly, and the one with the best engagement ‘wins’ and is chosen as the headline for this post. So as I’m writing this post now, the most engaging headline hasn’t been chosen yet! You can get the Headline Optimizer Test for your blog as part of the Thrive Themes Suite(Affiliate link), which I also use on this blog.

10 – Publish new posts when your audience will read them. Think about who you are writing for, and when they will be reading blogs. For instance, if your business is a B2B, you likely want to reach customers who are at work, so publish new posts during the workday. Publish new posts when you think your audience might be free to read them, such as in the morning before lunch, or in the afternoon before they leave for the day.

 

So there’s 10 easy (and free!) ways to start getting more engagement on your business blog as early as today! Want more advice on how to grow your business blog? Check out all the posts under the Business Blogging category.

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How Do You Create a Content Strategy For a B2C Company?

I am an introvert, and introverts tend to want order and structure in their lives. So it shouldn’t surprise you that I love helping companies develop content strategies.

A strategy is simply a plan of action for achieving a desired outcome. Strategies are important, because they help you focus your time and attention. In business, time is money. So the more time spent on executing your strategy, the more productive and profitable your business will be.

What is a content strategy?

Let’s back up and make sure everyone understands what we mean by strategy, because it can get confusing. As I said earlier, a strategy is simply a plan of action for achieving a desired outcome.

What’s the strategy for a football team? The desired outcome is to win the game. So the strategy would be to create a plan that would allow the team to win the game. Makes sense, right?

So the head coach, would work with his offensive, defensive and special teams coordinators to come up with a strategy for winning the game. This would be similar to how a CEO might work with his CMO, CIO, CTO and CFO to create a business strategy. There will be a strategy for the offense, another for the defense, and one for the special teams. But these three strategies will all support the larger strategy for the team; Winning the football game. Each different area of the team will play its part in supporting that larger strategy and achieving the desired outcome of winning the game.

A content strategy is a plan that uses the creation, development and management of content as a tactic to support your larger business goals. Notice I used the word ‘tactic’ to describe content. Many people get confused about the terms strategy and tactics. Tactics are what you use to execute a strategy.

Going back to the football example above, our strategy is to win the game. Running the ball could be a tactic we use to execute that strategy. We could also have a running strategy. Maybe our strategy is to run between the tackles to avoid the speed rush of the ends on defense. Likewise, content can be a tactic we use to execute a larger business strategy, but we can still have a content strategy that guides how we use that tactic.

Why have a content strategy?

Confession time, I stole a lot of Andy Crestodina’s ideas for structuring and writing this blog post from this article of his. I used his ideas while writing this post, and it greatly helped me clarify my thinking and bring order to the chaos of creating this post.

Why did it make writing this post easier? Because Andy’s advice helped me better organize the writing of the post. It made the process more efficient because it helped me focus on the desired outcome from the post.

This is why strategies are so important, they focus your actions on the desired outcome. When you have a strategy in place guiding your efforts, you accomplish more, in less time.

By creating a content strategy, you focus your content efforts only on the areas that are relevant to your desired outcomes. Think of all the places where you could create content. Your blog, Instagram, Twitter, Tik Tok, Facebook, Clubhouse. So many other options, it can be incredibly overwhelming!

A content strategy helps you narrow your content creation focus to only the tools and channels necessary to achieve your business’ desired outcomes. This saves your business time, money, and it saves your content team an awful lot of stress!

How do you create a B2C content strategy?

The first consideration when creating a content strategy for your B2C company is figuring out your desired outcomes. There are two considerations you want to address with your content strategy:

1 – Who are you trying to reach with your content?

2 – What action do you want them to take?

 

Before we dig into answering those two questions, let’s back up for a minute and talk about content, especially digital content. Digital content has strengths and weaknesses when it comes to helping a business reach its goals.

In general, digital content can do a wonderful job of helping your company build awareness. On the other hand, digital content doesn’t perform as well at closing sales.

Considering both of these factors, you want to focus on creating a content strategy for your B2C company that enters potential customers into the top of your sales funnel, and pushes them to the middle. Let’s think about this in terms of the Buyer’s Journey:

Content Strategy

As mentioned earlier, digital content does a great job of building awareness. So your content strategy should focus on building awareness and making your target audience slightly aware of who your company is, and how your products and services can fit into their lives. If your B2C sells relatively inexpensive items, then once your content has moved a customer to the slightly aware stage, they can usually complete the purchase on their own. If your products are relatively inexpensive, that leads to little or no time spend on the research stage (Interested) and the customer can typically go close the sale themselves.

For more expensive items, let’s say a new car, your customer will want to do further research before completing the sale, in most cases. So for more expensive products, a good content strategy could target customers who are Unaware, move them to Slightly Aware, then when they become Interested, they could move to your website or interact directly with your company to get more detailed information on the products you sell.

Either way, a successful content strategy for most B2C companies focuses on building awareness with new customers, and helping them understand how the products and services your company sells can fit into their daily lives.

How is a B2C content strategy different?

Since most B2C content strategies focus on building awareness, that means creating content that focuses on the customer. In fact, when you are creating content to gain the awareness of customers, that content should focus almost entirely on the customer. Content that focuses on the customer is interesting and more relatable to the customer. This helps gain the customer’s attention, and that encourages them to learn more about your company.

It’s important to note that when you are creating content to build awareness, do NOT sell to the customer. Selling to a customer who is unaware of what your company sells, is a complete disconnect for the customer. So the content strategy is to gain the awareness of the customer, help them understand how your products fit into their lives, then once they are interested, you can create content that sells. Most companies want to create content that sells to the customer as soon as they enter the sales funnel, instead of selling to them at the bottom of the funnel, when the customer is interested in buying.

Another element of your content strategy that’s particularly important for a B2C company is to focus on storytelling. You want to create content that paints a story for the customer, where the customer can either see themselves as the main character, or they can see themselves playing a key role in the story’s development.

A classic example of creating compelling storytelling with content came from B2C brand Whole Foods in 2018. Whole Foods deleted all its Instagram posts, unfollowed everyone it was following, then posted a blank image. This immediately led to speculation over what had happened to Whole Foods’ Instagram feed. People believed that Whole Foods’ IG account had been hacked. Then, slowly, the brand began to follow a few celebrities who in some way had an attachment to the letter ‘B’ or the word Bee.

Finally, Whole Foods posted this update on Instagram:

The brand was using storytelling in its content to raise awareness of what would happen if there were no more honey bees. Whole Foods showed us some of the delicious foods we all love, that would no longer be available without pollination from honey bees. It was compelling storytelling that raised awareness of an issue that was relevant to the Whole Foods brand. In the process, it helped people understand how all parts of nature are related, and to also appreciate the quality of the foods that Whole Foods sells.

What if my content strategy isn’t working?

There will come a time in the life of every content strategy when you ask ‘What’s going on here?” For whatever reason, you aren’t seeing the results you want or need from your content strategy.

At this point, you need to back up and reassess. There’s some basic questions you should ask:

  • Have we set realistic goals for our content strategy? For instance, expecting a 50% increase in sales attributable to your content strategy after 3 months may not be realistic.
  • Have we adequately defined who our target audience is? Saying you are targeting adults age 18-55 is probably too broad. Creating a buyer persona for your content can help focus your efforts. More on this in a minute.
  • Have we set the proper KPIs for our content strategy? There’s an old business saying ‘What gets measured, gets managed”. You want to measure metrics associated with the desired outcomes for your content. For instance, if you are using content to drive awareness, then measure metrics that would signal an increase in awareness. Such as traffic to your content channels, engagement with your content, and an increase in UGC.

It’s a good idea to audit your content strategy at least once every 12 months. Review the previous year’s content performance, and see how well you met your content goals. If necessary, you can adjust your strategy and implement new goals and desired outcomes. You should always think of your content strategy as something that’s malleable, there’s nothing wrong with changing or adapting your content strategy. This is to be expected, as your customers and how they interact and consume content changes.

The value of a buyer persona

One of the most overlooked areas of content creation are buyer personas. A buyer persona is an abstract representation of your ideal customer. Why is a buyer persona so important? Think of buyer personas as a snapshot of the daily life of your ideal customer. Buyer personas help your content teams get a better sense of the person they are creating content for.

Here’s a sample buyer persona I created for a customer called ‘Sarah’:

Buyer Persona
If you need more help, I’ve written a detailed article on how to create buyer personas for your content strategy.

 

So there’s your framework for creating, developing and managing a content strategy for your B2C company. If you have more questions about creating a content strategy, please fill out the form below!

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Introducing The Edge: SME Accelerator Program For Your Company

The Edge - SME Accelerator Program
One of the biggest challenges mid to large-size companies face is engaging and activating its Subject Matter Experts or SMEs. SMEs are typically not content creators, so the process of sharing their knowledge with the world can sometimes be difficult. Both for the SME, and the company. Companies that cannot engage its SMEs in the content creation process are missing a huge opportunity to help not only its employees internally, but to better communicate your company’s core mission and product benefits to customers externally.

This is why I have created The Edge. The Edge is a SME Accelerator Program, designed to engage your SMEs in the content creation process, and to help them build their own visibility and personal brand. Additionally, The Edge works with employees to help cultivate future SMEs, and to increase the content creation, engagement and visibility of all your employees who are active on social media.

 

Here are the key features and benefits of The Edge:

Features:

  • Optimization of employee social media accounts to increase engagement and visibility. This will also ensure that social content created by your employees is consistent in brand voice and tone.
  • Social media training and mentorship for your SMEs. In addition to working with your SMEs to improve their content creation efforts, my team will also work with your SMEs to increase their engagement and visibility online. Additionally, we will work with your SMEs to help secure media appearances and speaking appearances, such as guesting on podcasts and speaking at industry conferences and events. I will also work with your SMEs to coach them on how to improve both their interviewing and speaking skills. I will also work with your SMEs on the content and structure of their presentations, ensuring their speaking is a success for themselves, and as a representative of your company.
  • Digital and content training for all your employees. This will greatly increase your employees’ ability to generate content that drives engagement for your company. In this process, I will also identify SMEs that are good candidates for additional training and mentoring.

 

Benefits:

  • The Edge helps you retain current employees longer, and it makes it easier to hire new ones. Let’s be honest, SMEs are always in high demand. The Edge gives you all the tools to ensure that your SMEs are successful in their professional careers, which increases their loyalty to your company. The loss of SMEs creates a huge loss of skills for your employees. The Edge gives you a way to not only retain your current SMEs longer, but it can also be used to hire additional SMEs. When jobseekers discover that your have a program like The Edge, which is dedicated to their professional growth, it becomes a massive competitive advantage for your company. It communicates to SMEs that your company values their skills and knowledge, and wants to help them reach their full potential.
  • Training your employees on how to properly use social media and create content, ensures that your employees engage customers with a consistent brand voice. This has a very positive impact on your company’s reputation, and increases engagement and visibility for your company, and all your digitally-active employees.
  • Additional content from your SMEs and employees greatly improves the effectiveness of your company’s entire content strategy.

 

The Edge not only accelerates the progress and growth of your SMEs, but it helps establish them as thought leaders in their space. Why is this important? Not only is your company facing stiff competition for the best SMEs from other companies in your industry, but now it’s facing competition from social media platforms as well. All major social media platforms either have or are about to roll out monetization options for its content creators. The Edge gives your company a way to proactively help your SMEs develop and monetize their personal brands.

In the last 15 years, I’ve seen many smart employees and companies of all shapes and sizes become though leaders and build strong personal brands for themselves. I’ve become friends with many of those thought leaders, and they often tell me that would have loved to stay with their company, but they felt that they could better grow on their own. Typically, they didn’t feel like their employee gave them the support they needed to keep growing.

The Edge gives your employees and SMEs the support they need to keep growing their personal and professional brands, and to keep growing your company’s brand as well.

The Edge requires a minimum 6-month commitment. Only a limited number of clients for The Edge SME Accelerator Program will be accepted in 2021.  If you want to discuss availability and to see if The Edge is a good fit for your company, please use the contact form below, and myself or a member of my team will be in touch with you ASAP.

Give your company The Edge against the competition and unleash the power of your SMEs today!

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#ContentCircus 2-2-21 Recap: How to Create Buyer Personas For Your Content Marketing Strategy

Last night, we had another great conversation at #ContentCircus on Twitter, this time discussing How to Create Buyer Personas For Your Content Strategy. Let’s jump into some of the key takeaways:

When you start creating buyer personas, you want to define who the persona is. For that, you need customer data. If you work for a business, your sales, marketing and customer service teams should be able to help you define your ideal customer. If you have a retail business, you and your employees that are in regular contact with your customers can give this information. If you are still uncertain who your ideal customer is, you can create a persona for who you would want this customer to be.

 

After collecting demographic data about your persona (age, gender, occupation, income, education), you want to move on to addressing the personas pain points. What are the issues and problems they face every day, that you can address via the content you create? Giving customers the solutions to their problems is a wonderful way to create content that drives sales, and loyalty.

 

When creating content for your personas, you want to be aware of where the persona is currently getting information, and which sources it trusts. You also want to know what type of content they prefer. Do they want to read long blog posts on their desktop, or do they want to see short videos on their smartphone? By understanding what type of content they want and from what sources, it helps you tailor content to meet the expectations of your customers.

 

Finally, when you are creating your personas, you want to define where the persona is in the Buyer’s Journey. We discussed creating content for each stage of the Buyer’s Journey back in December at #ContentCircus, here’s the recap post for our conversation. Additionally, you want to define the persona’s role in making purchasing decisions within their organization or household. Can they authorize purchases independently, or will they need approval from their boss or spouse?

 

So that was our discussion last night at #ContentCircus of How to Create Buyer Personas For Your Content Strategy. If you want to join the next #ContentCircus, it happens every Tuesday night at 7pm Central. Just follow the #ContentCircus hashtag. Next week’s topic will be Winning Strategies For Content Creation on Twitter! See you then!

 

Bonus: I wrote about How to Create Buyer Personas For Your Content Marketing Strategy here yesterday. In that post I also added the persona for Sarah, to give you an idea of what a persona looks like so you can better understand how it can help your content creation efforts.  Here it is again:

 

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How to Create a Buyer Persona For Your Content Marketing Strategy

If you want to take your content strategy to the next level, one of the smartest moves you can make is to create a buyer persona(s) for the content you create.

 

What is a buyer persona?

A buyer persona is an abstract representation of your ideal customer/client/donor/partner. Ideally, your sales and marketing department will already have existing buyer personas that you can work off of. If not, you’ll need to coordinate with these departments to create new personas.

What the big deal about a buyer persona? Think of personas as a ‘day in the life’ snapshot of your ideal customer. Personas help the content creator quickly and easily understand the person it is creating the content for, as well as the type of content that can best meet the needs of that person. Personas help give your content creators structure and direction on the type of content they should be creating. In fact, if your personas are developed correctly, you even set your content calendar with your personas instead of topics. For instance, on Monday you write a post for Sarah, on Wednesday you write one for Isaac, and Friday is for Jennifer.

 

Where do you get the information to create your buyer persona?

In other words, how do you determine who your ‘ideal’ customer is? A good starting point is to talk to your sales team. This group typically has the most hands-on experience working with and connecting directly with your customers. Also check with your marketing team, and see if they have done any customer surveys. Your ecommerce team can also help with information about who your customers are. Finally, talk to your customer service team, they can give you a different set of customer insights, which we will talk about in a minute.

These are all in-house sources of information. You can also look at market research, especially research done about customers in your industry and vertical. Also, study your competitors and try to get a sense for who they are targeting with their sales and marketing efforts, this will give you a sense of who their ideal customer is.

 

What does a buyer persona include?

There’s multiple areas of information that you want to focus on to help define each buyer persona that you create. For each of these areas, you want to be as specific as possible, while still being accurate. For instance, you don’t want to say your ideal customer is a male aged 18-34, because that’s a pretty big age range. You want to shorten that age range as a much as possible, while still being as accurate as possible.

Demographics

This is the first area of information you want to focus on. You want to include basic information such as gender, age, martial status, income level and educational history. If your company is a B2C, then you want to also make sure that your buyer persona clearly defines that person’s role within the family. You want to know how your persona relates to the other members of the family, and whether or not this person has direct control over purchases or not.

For a B2B, you want to clearly define the person’s role within their company. You want to clearly define their responsibilities within their company, as well as where their position fits within the company hierarchy. As with a B2C persona, you want to clearly define if this persona has direct control over purchases, or if they must work with someone else within the company to secure that purchases are made. In both scenarios, you basically want to know who has the ability to authorize a purchase; is it the persona, or someone else.

The persona’s pain points and worries

Here, you identify and detail what ‘keeps them up at night’. You detail what problems the persona faces in their home and/or business life. This is done to help the content creator understand the problems that your products and services help solve. You can also detail what worries them, and also what excites them about being in their position, whether it be in a personal or professional setting. For instance, if your persona works for Company ABC, detail what they like about their job, and dislike. Talk about the issues the persona faces on a daily basis that the persona feels is holding them back. These are problems that the persona faces, but they also can give you a sense of what type of content you should be creating to address those problems, or at least communicate how your products or services can address those problems.

What type of content does the persona prefer, and from what sources?

Here, you want to gain insights into the type of content your persona is looking for, and why. Do they want video content that can demonstrate how your products and services work? Do they prefer posts or articles that can explain how they work? Also, where do they get their content from? Do they consult blogs, or do they prefer to more ‘mainstream’ sites? You basically want to know what sources does the persona trust for information, and in what form does that information exist?

Where is the persona on the buyer’s journey?

At this point, let’s quickly review the buyer’s journey:

Buyer's Journey, Creating Better Content

You want to establish where your persona is on the above buyer’s journey. This will give you insights not only into the type of content the persona needs based on their location on the buyer’s journey, but it will also show you how to craft the content in order to move the buyer to the next stage. This is also a good place to review if the persona has direct control over purchasing decisions, or if they must convince some other person or party to approve purchases.

 

Meet Sarah, your new persona! 

This is a very basic persona I created in roughly a half hour using the format outlined in this post. You can go far more in depth than this, I’ve worked with clients that had about four times as much information in their personas. I just wanted to give you an idea of what this would look like.

Note that just from this simple persona, you can get a much better idea of who your ideal customer Sarah is, and how to create content that’s useful to her. You can see she needs content that helps her with her time management issues. So any products or services you sell that can help her save time as either a business owner OR a mom, will resonate with Sarah. You can also see where she is on the Buyer’s Journey, plus you get a sense of her income. Smaller purchases that can benefit her in either role as a mom or business owner, Sarah can likely make by herself. A major purchase would likely require she and her spouse to consult first. Additionally, her age tells you that she is likely more comfortable with emerging digital technologies and how she prefers to consume and interact with content.

 

So that shows you how personas can truly take the effectiveness of your content strategy to the next level. What I love about personas is they help bring clarity to your content creation efforts. Anything that helps clarify who you are creating content for, and what type of content you should be creating for them, helps you create better content, in less time. I’m all about doing more in less time, and personas can definitely boost your productivity when it comes to creating content.

Need help creating buyer personas for your content strategy? Use the form below and my team and I will be happy to assist you!

 

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