The content marketing show is the latest free to attend conference from Kelvin Newman the known mastermind behind Brighton SEO – another free conference for our industry. After raiding the free coffee and pick ‘n’ mix (kindly supplied by Calberi) here are what I deem the best takeaways from the day, enjoy!
1. Influence Flows – Philip Sheldrake
- You don’t need to be a person of influence to be influential – People influence everyone around them day in day out whether it is your friends, co-workers or even family. People you interact with regularly will trust your judgement.
2. Agile Content Strategy – Lauren Pope
- Analyse metrics such as time on site, bounce rate and social metrics to judge the quality of your content.
- Remember time on site can show users that are crawling your site looking for that content still as well as people reading your quality content. Use your analytics keywords to see if your content matches the queries.
- Think about your target audience’s persona before creating content
3. Digital Storytelling: The Power Of Content Marketing – Ian Humphreys
- Be careful to avoid trolling – Waitrose learnt from this when they tried to get #ishopatwaitrosebecause trending as tweeters responded in not the manner they was looking for.
- Instead of pitching to pay for content placement use your assets to incentivize the source to gain better results.
4. How To Win At Pooh Sticks – Tom Ewing
- Pinterest – Top pinned topic is “love”, most repinned topic is “recipe” and “chicken”
- When targeting social networks keep culture in mind. Especially when dealing with smaller and more niche communities.
- Networks are known for creating content, replicating it and then mutating it to make their own. (memes on reddit/tumblr and parody videos on youtube)
- Measure Response – emotion of test subject > scale of repsonse (1-10) > Why they felt that way? Insert/link to slide
- Tom found in his research that suprise> emotional intensity > with an end message of happiness works best. Insert diagram that represents this.
5. Stories, Number & Conversations – Antony Mayfield
6. Tales From A Content Marketing Rookie – Mila Mclean Homburg
- Learn from your mistakes – Mila was very open with the conference admitting her first mistake in her new content marketing job was to know your audience prior to pitching/developing your ideas. Pay attention to key factors such as age group, gender & terminology your audience use.
- Use your team – Get everyone familiar with that client from each team involved and brainstorm ideas to move the account forward.
- Try something new – Don’t be afraid to try something new, if it fails you will learn from the experience.
- Think big – Don’t limit your brainstormin
- Have standards – Remember you are representing both your client’s and your companies brand.
7. Things You Always Wanted To Know About Journalists But Were Afraid To Ask – Desire Athow
- Online journalists are paid on page views
- The social network journalists use to communicate with their industry is twitter
- Very responsive on grammar. One spelling mistake in an email could leave them focused on something other than your message.
- Out of Phone/email/social they prefer to be contacted via email. This is more flexible for outside of 9-5 work and doesn’t stop them halfway through their work. They can also flag your email to deal with later rather than being lost within the stream. Having a written copy of the conversation means they can revisit the email and make notes for writing your content.
8. Using Content To Get Press Coverage – Stephen Pavlovich
- 4 ingredients for successful PR –
- Topical (hitting trends as soon as possible)
- Sexual
- Controversial
- Celebrity (this could be content targeted towards getting a response from the celebrity).
- Valentines PR on the cheap – Romantic break for 3 was covered in the metro and BBC5 live.
- Target influencers with copy tailored to gaining a mention from them.E.g. email stephen fry > get mentioned > profit
- Reddit TIL/AMA – If a 3rd party posts your content on reddit reply as your brand to represent good customer service and reputation.
- Simple/short/straight to the point titles describing your product gain a better response from the press as they can fit this into their story titles. e.g. zombie shopping mall, hotel room for 3.ievements
- Use existing PR achievements as leverage for expanding your reach further to bigger press.
9. Evergreen Content: The Art Of Recycling Resources – Chelsea Blacker
- Audit old content –Use analytics to judge the performance of your previous content and revamp where necessary
- Use Employees – With google authorship being very prominant in search engines use your employee’s to post blog posts as themselves. Include more than just management with your employees appearing as professionals online this will also build your brands authority in your industry.
- History – Your employees will also have experience and history prior to your employment. Utilise this information.
10. How To Sell Cups Of Coffee Online – Stephen Leighton
- Integrate youtube into your blog strategy to review your products. Answer questions like where it came from? How it was produced? What does it taste like?
- Send your product to influential people in the industry and ask them to review it. Stephen sent their coffee to barristers for them to try.
- Sell additional services and products that compliment your product. In Has Bean’s case additional coffee equipment.
- Most importantly Stephen says you must be driven. You must be passionate about your product to motivate you.
11. Successful Briefs: The Key To Getting Good Content – Jochen Mebus
- The most effective briefs that work with text broker answer the following questions –
- What is your posts aim? – To inform, to entertain, to optimise
- Preferred style of writing? – Personal, neutral, funny, in character
- What is the preferred structure of the post? – What headings, author paragraph, images
- Any SEO Requirements? – What keywords, phrases
- Supply the author with direct contact details and speak to them in a friendly/personal manner so they are more likely to contact you if they have any questions
- Concise briefing supplies enough information to get the content you desire without going too overboard and cutting into your paid work time.
12. SMM Not S&M: Taking The Pain Out Of Social Media Marketing – Andy Keetch
- Break down your audience’s conversation by day and post content relevant to the day of the week. E.g. everyone hates Mondays, Tuesday is the day most people call in sick and Friday people want to go out.
- And then again by hour to see what time of the day people are active.
- Use tag clouds to find out what topics people are talking about and then categorise them on top of your daily graphs to outline content targets for your social strategy.
13. The Great Content Robbery – Simon Penson
- Taking what we can learn from broadsheets and magazines and applying it to online.
- Theme the year – There are always annual events, seasons happening. Make sure you have content targeting as many of these as possible.
- Align content to the audience – Think of persona’s when creating xcontent and make sure you are targeting the right ones.
- Define who we are – When brainstorming put mind set into being the consumer and what are your habits, hobbies and what would you want from the product.
- Define typography / hotposts – Research and take advantage of the most looked at places of your website and place USP’s and CTA’s in these locations.
- Use celebrities – Use celebrities in your niche to flag run your campaigns
- Reverse engineer your competitors plan looking at framework and what is in each section
14. Writing Content That Resonates With Influencers – Matt Roberts
Matt recommends the following books:
