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Digital Marketing and PR

Suggested read on ecommerce:

https://jeffwalker.com/tag/product-launch-formula/

 

More useful you are to the members of the media, the more likely we can get into their brain.

 

Let’s think about what it’s like for them (empathize)

  • Time
  • Amount of incoming emails – stories
  • Lots of people in the team v’s very few
  • Freelance or full time part time employee? Mostly freelance.
  • Deadlines?
  • Serving the audience
  • Use the phone
  • ABC rated – journalist lists

 

Media thinks about Christmas now and finished it up in about Aug-Sep

Think in advance

 

Media website

Marketing / press pack

 

Avoid emails after Friday afternoon

 

What is the media and what are they looking for?

  • Purpose of the media
  • Job of a journalist / media outlet
  • Readership
  • Media outlet = bottom line, currency driven
  • Journalists = content / story driven
  • Editor – a bit of both

 

If PR projects provide value to journalists / editors, they welcome it because they don’t have the team, resources and they need quality content to publish.

 

How do you do PR on budget?

  • It’s all about blending
  • Clear strategy,creative approach
  • Creating and nurturing relationship
  • Measuring results
  • In short it’s all about story
  • Powerful storytelling will make you memorable relatable and visible
  • Build that relationship
  • Be relevant

 

Creating your story . including your backstory

  • Angles
  • Spin
  • What’s already news / whats out there .
  • How can we ride on its coat tails
  • Can we create a brand new story
  • And your backstory? It’s vital

 

Enrich your story

  • Do not necessarily focus on the product / process / manufacturing itself
  • Use backstory or focus on the effects, improvements in people’s lives with the product
  • Backstory selles your content

 

Idea: Start from a national story / issue (eg education / deprived of books)

https://www.ons.gov.uk/

 

Let’s think about

  • Organise your planned activities – creating a focussed calendar of planned activity
  • Be strategic – what is the purpose of your activity (what are your campaign objectives? )
  • What does success look like, be specific about campaign objectives

 

Task Months
Campaign objectives

1

2

3

Increase brand awareness (Increase branded google searches by 20%)

Increase returning customers from 6% to 8%

Increase returning visitors from 21% to 25%

Website updates / blog
Press packs 1-2 pages

Half of it is about business, reason for being

These are the 3 things we’d like to talk about

Company, individual, 3 things

A press kit, often referred to as a media kit in business environments, is a pre-packaged set of promotional materials that provide information about a person, company, organization or cause and which is distributed to members of the media for promotional use.

Press releases
Story angles
Forward features
Opinion pieces
Social media You can hunt journalists on social media and learn about what they are talking about. Twitter and Linkedin
Cost / time
Results

 

Do not send PDFs or hires photo directly. It should be easy to copy paste from the emali. They can ask for hires photo and you can use it to build the relationship. Consider most of the time they are checking on mobile.

 

Make it easy for them.

 

Do not send the story to everyone. Do not blanked email.  Target as much as possible to the editor / journalist level.

 

Twenty top tips for next year, etc

 

You can use google alerts to keep in track of published news.

 

How to

  • Develop a trustworthy and reliable relationship.
    • Treat them as your best clients who can refer best / most clients to you. How would you treat them?
  • Present information in a simple manner.
    • Put information right into the email / embed it. No PDF.
    • Always send an image. Not a stock image

 

Talking to the media

  • Formal v’s informal
  • The different types of interview
    • Face to face
    • Email webast video conference skype
    • On camera studio based remote feed
    • On the radio
    • Be mindful if you are going to be live
    • You can ask for questions to prepare. Not trying to look good, trying to look better.

 

Write a press release

  • Get it on paper … then shuffle it about
  • Just as at school… think beginning middle and end
  • If you need to write your headline first or last
  • Always write with your media’s audience firmly in mind
  • Make sure you include a “boilerplate” (editors notes) at the end which succinctly describes your company and clearly gives your contact details
  • Email it in a s part of the body of your email ie. not as an attachment that needs to be opened

 

Take the perfect press photo

  • Think about what story you’re trying to convey
  • Why would they use your photo
  • How is it different from the rest
  • Is it good enough quality wise to use
  • Tech specs
    • 300 dpi for a magazine
    • 150 dpi for newspapers
    • 72 dpi for online
  • What headline or byline would go with it?
    • Use filename as well

 

Branding and Amazon

In marketing, brand management is the analysis and planning on how a brand is perceived in the market. Developing a good relationship with the target market is essential for brand management. Tangible elements of brand management include the product itself; its look, price, and packaging, etc. The intangible elements are the experiences that the consumers share with the brand, and also the relationships they have with the brand. A brand manager would oversee all aspects of the consumer’s brand association as well as relationships with members of the supply chain.[

 

Book clubs

 

https://imaginationlibrary.com/uk/

 

What you stand for

What you stand against

What you do

Why you do it?

 

Brand Structure

Brand is why others want to be with you

 

What your brand stands for

 

Brand is creating your ideal personality

You can create a list, honest tolerance strength etc

Once you created the core personality – naked brand

Core values can not be contradicted

 

Brand identity is the wardrobe you dress your brand in.

 

Good brand – your strongest friend

Branding is quite personal

 

Simple, uncorporate

 

You build your brand through text and images on your website, business cards any medium it reflects on.

 

Brand management aims to create an emotional connection between products, companies and their customers and constituents. Brand managers & Marketing managers may try to control the brand image.

 

Specialize. You can choose who your potential clients / customers could be.

 

Amazon brand values https://www.amazon.jobs/en/principles

 

Leadership Principles

We use our Leadership Principles every day, whether we’re discussing ideas for new projects or deciding on the best approach to solving a problem. It is just one of the things that makes Amazon peculiar.

Customer Obsession

Leaders start with the customer and work backwards. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. Although leaders pay attention to competitors, they obsess over customers.

Ownership

Leaders are owners. They think long term and don’t sacrifice long-term value for short-term results. They act on behalf of the entire company, beyond just their own team. They never say “that’s not my job.”

Invent and Simplify

Leaders expect and require innovation and invention from their teams and always find ways to simplify. They are externally aware, look for new ideas from everywhere, and are not limited by “not invented here.” As we do new things, we accept that we may be misunderstood for long periods of time.

Are Right, A Lot

Leaders are right a lot. They have strong judgment and good instincts. They seek diverse perspectives and work to disconfirm their beliefs.

Learn and Be Curious

Leaders are never done learning and always seek to improve themselves. They are curious about new possibilities and act to explore them.

Hire and Develop the Best

Leaders raise the performance bar with every hire and promotion. They recognize exceptional talent, and willingly move them throughout the organization. Leaders develop leaders and take seriously their role in coaching others. We work on behalf of our people to invent mechanisms for development like Career Choice.

Insist on the Highest Standards

Leaders have relentlessly high standards — many people may think these standards are unreasonably high. Leaders are continually raising the bar and drive their teams to deliver high quality products, services, and processes. Leaders ensure that defects do not get sent down the line and that problems are fixed so they stay fixed.

Think Big

Thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Leaders create and communicate a bold direction that inspires results. They think differently and look around corners for ways to serve customers.

Bias for Action

Speed matters in business. Many decisions and actions are reversible and do not need extensive study. We value calculated risk taking.

Frugality

Accomplish more with less. Constraints breed resourcefulness, self-sufficiency, and invention. There are no extra points for growing headcount, budget size, or fixed expense.

Earn Trust

Leaders listen attentively, speak candidly, and treat others respectfully. They are vocally self-critical, even when doing so is awkward or embarrassing. Leaders do not believe their or their team’s body odor smells of perfume. They benchmark themselves and their teams against the best.

Dive Deep

Leaders operate at all levels, stay connected to the details, audit frequently, and are skeptical when metrics and anecdote differ. No task is beneath them.

Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit

Leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting. Leaders have conviction and are tenacious. They do not compromise for the sake of social cohesion. Once a decision is determined, they commit wholly.

Deliver Results

Leaders focus on the key inputs for their business and deliver them with the right quality and in a timely fashion. Despite setbacks, they rise to the occasion and never settle.

 

Storytelling

Ideas to next workshop –

School

Setting up an eCommerce Website

QUESTIONS TO START

 

  • Own site, marketplace or both
  • Own site – how? Shopify
  • Site assets you will need
  • Site organisation
  • Site search
  • Legalities
  • Payments
  • Site security
  • POS – point of sale

 

DOMAIN STRUCTURE

 

  • Shop.site.com
  • site.com/shop
  • Site.com – full ecommerce

 

PLATFORM CHOICE

 

  • Shopify is the best ecommerce platform .
    • As an ecommerce consultant I find it is easier to get shopify working
  • Wix very slow – slow is death in ecommerce
  • Square space – some of it good some of it very bad – not recommended
  • Easy as possible but should be able to sell your stuff
  • Security – do you want to trust 1-2 people for the security of your website or a world class
  • Shopify and amazon work well
  • Magento is very good but the problem is it is very technical and you need a developer. It is overkill. It was the best ecommerce platform 10 years ago
  • How much control do you have over what helps you to sell?
  • What is the ROI rather than the cost?
  • Are they a trusted supplier for the long term?

 

TOOLKIT WEBSITES

 

 

DESIGN AND LAYOUT

 

  • You should not mess around too much with the design and page layout in ecommerce
  • Page layout is fairly standard. Functionality is pretty standard as well.
  • You want to mess around with branding, colors, logo, feel of it. Look of it.
  • Especially on mobile, almost most websites look very similar. Except images / visuals

 

LOGO, BRANDING, BRAND GUIDELINES

 

  • Branding mostly about consistency, guidelines
  • Landscape logos better for layout . don’t push content too much down
  • What gets seen gets sold
  • Colors can be a problem for navigation (contrast)
  • Domain, short, difficult to get wrong, memorable
    • Co.uk if you are selling exclusively in the UK
    • Com if you want to look bigger

 

IMAGES FOR ECOMMERCE

 

  • Hero at top of page = landscape orientation
  • Rest = dependent on product, clothes – portrait, housewares – square. Be consistent
  • Square images work well both on social, mobile and web as well (on desktop you can do 3 column layouts for it)
  • Design for mobile first – square preferred
  • Optimise images – speed is very important
  • Shopify generates other image sizes if you supply it with enough hi-res at first (eg it will generate mobile version for you)
  • As small as possible in terms of file size – for site speed. Image compression

 

BURAK Add videos to SSB

 

BURAK Use mobile banners not landscape

 

MOBILE NAVIGATION

 

  • Use first column in footer for further exploration eg. collection names not about us etc. It is the first thing they see after the product
  • E Commerce is mobile. ⅔ or ¾ of visitors are from mobile now

 

BURAK Update SSB footer columns

 

THEME CHOICE

 

  • Avoid commercial themes, go with free and popular themes
  • Must be responsive – probably no one is selling a theme not working on mobile but good to check
  • Security , these things maintenance. Especially in wordpress. What you want to be buying into?
  • Speed – shopify theme test
  • Functionality – filters
    • Shopify supply works with large inventories
  • Ease and simplicity
    • How does image view work on mobile?
    • Does it scroll well?
  • Inventory size – most built for small inventory
  • Longevity – will it be updated?

 

SITE STRUCTURE

 

  • Think about your main or sub categories
  • Collections are handier than categories
  • Consider SEO as well

 

VARIANTS

 

  • Variant = a variation of a single product
  • Variants are normally listed on a single page
  • Size colour
  • Style finish
  • It’s up to you to decide whats a separate product and what’s a variant
  • Crucial event is what works for the user?

 

SEARCH

 

  • Don’t use search as a sticking plaster for poor content architecture
  • It is a primary channel for people to find products
  • Google custom search – includes ads, potentially from competitors
  • CMS’s basic search usually not enough
  • Autocomplete search.
  • Algolia, instantsearch by fast simon, klevu, freefind
  • It isn’t easy and it can be expensive

 

PAYMENTS

 

  • Consumers like a choice
  • Paypal, amazon payments, stripe, sage pay, world pay
  • Consumers like a name they recognise
  • Has to work with your platform and market
  • Account based- paypal, amazon payments
  • Payment processors – stripe, worldpay, sagepay
  • Some require merchant account, others are all in one
  • Your responsibility for security varies

 

SECURITY

 

  • Your responsibility depends on your payment solution
  • Don’t keep handle any customer data you don’t need
  • Strong passwords
  • Avoid plugins as much as possible
  • Change default settings. No username like admin
  • Keep it up to date as much as possible
  • Customer fraud: claimed that they haven’t received etc. always track postages.
  • 3d secure to switch responsibility

 

LEGALITIES

 

  • Selling over the web – normal legalities (sale of goods, consumer protection, data protection)
  • E Commerce regulations 2002 info you have to provide during the sales process
  • Consumer contracts regulations 2014 cooling off period of 14 days
  • Info that must be on your site: company name, address, email, registration, VAT number
  • Payment card Industry data security

 

GDPR

 

  • Became law on 25 May 2018
  • More affirmative consent – end of pre-ticket boxes
  • Customer can ask for their data or to have it deleted
  • Need to include GDPR in terms and conditions
  • Service providers need to be gDPR compliant. If you are sharing info with them.
  • Refer to Paypal’s GDPR, mailchimp GDPR policies etc
  • Shopify GDPR compliance .

 

POS INTEGRATION

 

  • Physical sales, sell offline
  • Some platforms also include it Shopify – It only works on IOS
  • POS often involves ipad
  • Integrated POS means a single inventory control for online and offline

 

COMMON ISSUES

 

  • Store is too slow

 

BURAK SSB on mobile

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fststephensbooks.com%2F&tab=mobile

 

  • Store is confusing to the new visitor – what is it?
  • Products are difficult to find
    • Do user test, do it on mobile, don’t help testers
  • Tangibility  not achieved. Products don’t feel real enough

 

BURAK videos?

 

  • “Build it and they will come”
  • Locked into a platform / theme that is a problem
  • Seriously underestimating the competition
  • Failing to convert visitors to buyers

Strategic Planning

 

The Explainer: Porter’s Five Forces

The competitive forces that shape strategy — in under two minutes. For more, read “Understanding Michael Porter: The Essential Guide to Competition and Strategy.”

 

People make it happen

People watch it happen

People who wonder what happened

 

Strategic planning is an organization’s process of defining its strategy, or direction, and making decisions on allocating its resources to pursue this strategy. It may also extend to control mechanisms for guiding the implementation of the strategy. Strategic planning became prominent in corporations during the 1960s and remains an important aspect of strategic management. It is executed by strategic planners or strategists, who involve many parties and research sources in their analysis of the organization and its relationship to the environment in which it competes

 

Owners mindset

-prepared to trust others

 

Michael Porter wrote in 1980 that formulation of competitive strategy includes consideration of four key elements:

  1. Company strengths and weaknesses;
  2. Personal values of the key implementers (i.e., management and the board);
  3. Industry opportunities and threats; and
  4. Broader societal expectations.

 

You can not do strategic planning on your own, unless you are the only person in the business.

 

TOOLS

A variety of analytical tools and techniques are used in strategic planning.[1] These were developed by companies and management consulting firms to help provide a framework for strategic planning. Such tools include:

  • PEST analysis, which covers the remote external environment elements such as political, economic, social and technological (PESTLE adds legal/regulatory and ecological/environmental);
  • Scenario planning, which was originally used in the military and recently used by large corporations to analyze future scenarios. The flowchart to the right provides a process for classifying a phenomenon as a scenario in the intuitive logics tradition.[6]
  • Porter five forces analysis, which addresses industry attractiveness and rivalry through the bargaining power of buyers and suppliers and the threat of substitute products and new market entrants;
  • SWOT analysis, which addresses internal strengths and weaknesses relative to the external opportunities and threats;
  • Growth-share matrix, which involves portfolio decisions about which businesses to retain or divest; and
  • Balanced Scorecards and strategy maps, which creates a systematic framework for measuring and controlling strategy.
  • Responsive Evaluation, which uses a constructivist evaluation approach to identify the outcomes of objectives, which then supports future strategic planning exercises.

 

Currently there are 4 people in employment for 1 unemployed now

There will be 2 people in employment for 1 unemployed by 2050

What will be work life balance, pension age etc then?

Unless we build a different society now

 

COMMON ISSUES IN STARTUPS

 

  • Cash flow
  • Regular custom
  • Limited resources
  • Time constraints
  • Single skillset
  • Time management
  • Consistent processes

 

COMMON ISSUES – SCALE UPS

 

  • Financial management
  • Restrictive structure
  • Time constraints
  • Single skillset
  • Time management
  • Consistent processes and systems
  • Plan (medium-long)
  • Resource planning
  • Targets
  • Identify help needed

 

COMMON ISSUES – MATURE BUSINESS

 

  • Scalability
  • Branding
  • Competition
  • Structure
  • Control
  • Skills

 

Avg size of business in the UK 8-9 people

Backbone of the economy

 

ISSUES – EXITING

 

  • Hand-overs
  • MBOs
    • A management buyout (MBO) is a transaction where a company’s management team purchases the assets and operations of the business they manage. A management buyout is appealing to professional managers because of the greater potential rewards and control from being owners of the business rather than employees.
  • 3rd party sale
  • Consultancy – succession
  • Future income stream
  • Maximize sale value

 

ISSUES – WHEN IT GOES WRONG

 

  • Look in the mirror
  • People
  • Communication
  • Processes
  • Money
  • Markets
  • Brand
  • Infrastructure
  • Product / service

 

WHAT IS STRATEGIC PLANNING

 

  • Where are we now?
    • Thorough assessment
    • You can do a workaround at times. Then this workaround becomes a formal process. Then it is in the blind spot.
  • Where do we want to get to?
    • 5-10 years time scale
  • How do we get there?
    • Actions and timescales
  • How do we know if we’re on track
    • Monitoring
    • On going process

 

Strategic plan is your conveyor belt, taking you to strategic objectives

Business plans are shorter term plans

 

Importance of staff knowing your strategic plan

 

APPROACH TO STRATEGIC PLANNING

 

  • Planned environment
  • Resource led
  • Competitive advantage
  • Organic (learning/adaptive)
  • Pick the right things to monitor

 

WHY DO I NEED A STRATEGIC PLAN

 

  • Clear direction
  • Route-map to get there
  • Clear investment plans
  • Customers and employees know
    • What the business will provide
    • How the business will provide it
  • Build emotional attachment
  • Involvement

 

WHAT IF I DON’T HAVE ONE

 

  • Static business
  • Always firefighting, everything short notice and short term
  • Drifting away from core customers, more special offers
  • Managers and employees have different aims and expectations
  • Employees and customers feel no affection for the business
  • No development programme, employees keen to move on
  • No risk assessment
  • Cash flow
  • Customer service
  • Not prepared for anything

 

HOW DO WE CREATE OUR STRATEGIC PLAN

 

  • Strategic analysis
    • Internal strengths, weaknesses, structure, scale, ambition, resources
    • External opportunities, threats, competition, markets, environment
  • Strategy choice
    • Produce half a dozen strategies and select the one best fits
    • Aims, identify options, evaluate, select (suitable, feasible, acceptable)
  • Strategy Implementation
    • Changes, resources, culture, funding, timescales
  • Performance & Delivery Management
    • Responsibility, monitoring, reviews

 

If you are stuck in the middle, you won’t go anywhere

 

Value proposition canvas

 

FURTHER READING

 

Value chains

Force field analysis

Ansaf

 

Instructor, Keith

https://www.mistral-associates.co.uk

 

Product Photography Tips

Who is the buyer?

Target them. Even the photo does not have to be pretty. It needs to be interesting to the audience first.

Eg. Linkedin – it needs to be relevant to your audience

Build your audience according to who you could sell to.

 

You can use typography in your visuals given that it is consistent –

Use same text, same font, same color, same layout.

 

You might need to give credit for photographers.

Put in contract that you can use the photos anywhere, anyway you like.

 

On Instagram, your images need to be beautiful / pretty.

Typography on images is not welcome in Instagram.

 

People should feel better when you look to your content / images. Be positive all the time.

 

Emails – you need offer people something.

Just plain information is never interesting.

 

Images on your website should not be named IMG-5232 .

It should be named like someone put that keyword on Google.

 

Pinterest is used about how to stuff.

 

Aperture

 

In optics, an aperture is a hole or an opening through which light travels. More specifically, the aperture and focal length of an optical system determine the cone angle of a bundle of rays that come to a focus in the image plane.

 

Shutter Speed

 

In photography, shutter speed or exposure time is the length of time when the film or digital sensor inside the camera is exposed to light, also when a camera’s shutter is open when taking a photograph.[1] The amount of light that reaches the film or image sensor is proportional to the exposure time. ​1⁄500 of a second will let half as much light in as ​1⁄250.

 

ISO

 

White Balance

 

A white paper should look white in a correct white balance settings.

 

Camera Presets

 

Use 300 dpi for print images, this is dots per inch

72 dpi – dots per inch for web

 

Websites images needs to be the size that they need to be. No need for uploading massive hires images.

 

Work with RAW formats. You can downsize a RAW format but you can not upsize a lower quality.

 

If you are using it in only social media etc you don’t have to work with RAW

 

16:9 vs 4:3

For Instagram you might want to use 4:3, a more square feel

16:9 is more suitable for desktop / TV type of screens.

 

CMYK vs RGB

 

Get a proof of paint in the post

Printed material shows colors differently

 

Exposure

 

Look for texture.

 

Parts of the photo should not be all white (over exposed) or all black (under exposed)

 

You can correct some shooting errors to a degree in Photoshop

 

Rule of Thirds

 

Professionals do not take flat photos

Amateurs take flat photos

 

Pros want something to be in focus and rest out of focus

 

Depth of Field

 

Be Consistent

 

Use same background, colors, layout etc for branding

 

Uniform the styles

 

Close up

 

Copyright

 

You automatically have copyright of the material / documents / photos that you created.

 

You can search with usage rights on Google Images

 

https://pixabay.com/

Pixabay License

Free for commercial use

No attribution required

 

https://www.pexels.com/

 

A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted “work”.[note 1] A CC license is used when an author wants to give other people the right to share, use, and build upon a work that he or she (that author) has created. CC provides an author flexibility (for example, he or she might choose to allow only non-commercial uses of a given work) and protects the people who use or redistribute an author’s work from concerns of copyright infringement as long as they abide by the conditions that are specified in the license by which the author distributes the work.

 

Royalty free does not mean free

 

It means you don’t have to pay commission every time the photo / video is used

 

Advertising standards

 

https://www.asa.org.uk/

 

Shooting photos of people

 

They need to sign if they wanted their photo taken

To edit

To be shared on eg website

To be shared on social media

 

Separately

 

If you are shooting in a crowded place, make sure other people are out of focus and non-recognizable

 

Talent Release Form

 

https://www.google.com/search?q=talent+release+form&oq=talent+release+form&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l5.4113j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

 

If under 18, no one can sign for them. So you need parents signatures.

 

Editing Software

 

GIMP https://www.gimp.org/

 

Video Marketing

A visual could be worth 1000 words. Video can be 1 million. It is a moving picture.

 

Within the next 4 years Facebook could be “All video”

  • Nicola, VP for FB EMEA

 

YOUTUBE

YouTube is ranked as the UK’s second most popular social media channel with almost as many users as Facebook.

 

Last year, it was reported by Flint that 37.1 million adults are using the platform in the UK. Although there are no up to date statistics, we can see that YouTube and Facebook regularly battle it out for the most visited social media platform every month.

 

Globally, the average viewing session is 40 minutes, up 50% from last year according to Omicore. Many brands are now using YouTube as it’s a great place to host longer form content. Unlike other social networks, where users scroll passively through newsfeeds, Youtube users are intentionally searching on the platform for videos to watch.

https://www.avocadosocial.com/latest-social-media-statistics-and-demographics-for-the-uk-in-2019/

 

Types of Youtube videos

 

Talking head

indoors, lightning to be considered

Zoella

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWRV5AVOlKJR1Flvgt310Cw

 

On screen demonstration

People don’t have access to good teachers can still access

people don’t appear on videos

https://www.khanacademy.org

 

How to use website videos

Shopping cart, show people how to use it

Might not have use on youtube, but you can include it on your website

 

Hand video

FunToys Collector Disney Toys Review

https://www.youtube.com/user/DisneyCollectorBR/about

 

Ryan ToysReview
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChGJGhZ9SOOHvBB0Y4DOO_w/about

 

Eye contact is important in videos

 

Youtube quality content about 10 mins

Longer videos live in Youtube, shorter videos are more suitable for Facebook

 

Attention span 

of about 7 seconds

You need to cut / edit

Can get multiple shots that can be used together

 

Get ahead and schedule on your video production

Preferably post 1 video every week

 

Largest Youtube channel

https://www.youtube.com/user/PewDiePie/about

 

Things to watch out for video quality

Sound is vital. You need external mic

Shot framing is key.

If talking head, center, or side, bring something (graphics etc) to the side

 

Half a million Royalty free music that you can use on your Youtube videos

But not anywhere else

Avoid music license issues

 

Sunlight is very good if you have it

 

Youtube Business Benefits

  • Free video hosting platform, very fast
  • You need to use it as a Social Media, eg. comment on other videos etc
  • Powerful advertising tools
  • Second largest search engine

 

People looking for reviews, tend to be ready to buy those products

 

Product showcase

Will it blend

Actor is their CEO

https://www.youtube.com/user/Blendtec/about

 

Don’t wait to be forget, then you will never be able to start

 

Brand sponsored channel

Mum’s eye view

Powered by Asda

https://www.youtube.com/user/MumsEyeView/about

 

Finding Youtubbers

https://famebit.com/

Influencer Marketing Made Easy

Have Control Over The Content Your Customers See

With FameBit you can launch a campaign for free, receive proposals from interested influencers and easily track the metrics that matter all in one place.

 

Viewability

Youtube is almost viewable everywhere (eg on Twitter, it is embeddable)

Facebook as a video platform

It is not a good idea to post YT video on FB because FB limits the amount of its reach. Because FB is promoting its own video platform

 

Shareability

FB video is very unlikely to be seen outside of FB. Walled garden.

If I am on TW, I might not want to leave TW and go to FB to just a video.

 

Vimeo, 1/10 of the size of YT. Videographers, Web developers

YT includes all kinds of people, low quality comments etc

Vimeo community feels a bit more professional, quality of the videos are much better.

Provides you with a ad-free embed option

 

Dailymotion – EU equivalent of YT

Stuff with copyright

 

Wistia – embed your videos on your website

You can consider SEO benefits because your websites are ranking better

 

I’m not a YouTube partner, so why am I seeing ads next to my videos?

Ads may appear next to your uploaded videos even if you haven’t monetized the videos yourself.

If your video contains content to which you don’t own all necessary rights, the rights holder may have identified his/her content in your video and chosen to place ads on it. Ads may be displayed on your videos if they contain soundtracks from the AudioSwap library or if the content in your video has been identified by Content ID.

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2475463?hl=en

 

Sprout video

Vzaar

Payment gateways –

 

Youtube channel art

https://www.canva.com/templates/web-banners/youtube-channel-art/

YouTube recommends uploading channel art at 2560 x 1440

 

Channel Trailer

 

Playlists 

are crucial to enable people to watch more than one video

 

35% drop in viewership if you start your video with a logo

Start immediately adding value.

After 10-15 seconds in, you can mention branding

Unlisted videos 

Does not physically show up on your channel

But still, link is shareable.

You can embed it

No notification goes to your subscribers.

 

It is good to repeat the title of the video on the first sentence in description. You can change it slightly though.

You can use these in your titles:

Type of video – what it is about – who it is for

 

Add every single one of your videos into a playlist.

 

Thumbnail

People see it on search

If you embed it, people will see it before playing

Custom thumbnail – and they don’t have to show in the video

Pick a style you stick to it

You can do it on canva

 

Keywords on websites are not effective or even spammy in terms of SEO

But keywords on youtube is still relevant (tags)

 

Editing a video is possible in Youtube (beta)

 

CTA Cards – Call to action

Watch another video

Promote another channel

Poll

Approved website link

 

Captions – transcribe the video

 

Facebook video

You can tag products

Include cost, description, image and link back to website

 

Promoting your videos

 

https://answerthepublic.com/

 

Live streaming

Focus on content

Quality might be lower but that’s the point

You can go live in a Facebook group.

Twitch – screen broadcast not just games

Connection speed

It should not look too staged

Start when you are going live, don’t waste time at the start

 

Product Demonstration

Product review

 

Hyperlapse

https://hyperlapse.instagram.com/

 

Boomerang

https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/boomerang-from-instagram/id1041596399?mt=8

 

Youtube advertising

Trueview watch: 30 sec – TrueView: Views: The number of times your ad has been viewed. For TrueView in-stream, this is the number of times a viewer watches for 30 seconds of your video (or the duration if it’s shorter than 30 seconds) or engages with your video (in-stream), whichever comes first.

https://support.google.com/displayvideo/answer/6298774?hl=en

You can get YT views for 1-2p per 30 seconds

 

Intro to Google Analytics

WordPress – MonsterInsights plugin can be used

 

GA code is better in the head so that more users can be tracked. If at the end, and user closes the tab, it might not track those users. Also GA code loads in the background.

 

GA Chrome Extension to see what percentage of people click on your links.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/page-analytics-by-google/fnbdnhhicmebfgdgglcdacdapkcihcoh?hl=en

 

Search Console setup – link to Google Analytics

 

Google Ads data opt-out

https://adssettings.google.com/authenticated

You might need to link to this page if you are using remarketing or ads features of GA

 

Cross Device Tracking

Google Signals

https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/7532985?hl=en

 

Under GDPR you only can keep user information as long as you need it

You need to be able to explain whether if you need it or not

 

IP Anonymisation

https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2763052?hl=en

If you don’t have this code in your code, you might be breaking GDPR

 

Goals – What you want your visitors to do on your website

Sign Up to an emailing list, add to cart

Without goals, you don’t know how well your website is working

It tells you where the value lies

 

Google Analytics for Power Users course

https://analytics.google.com/analytics/academy/course/9?utm_source=support.google.com&utm_medium=promo&utm_campaign=aa_summer18_hc_promo&utm_content=button

 

Excluding your own visits

https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1034840?hl=en

 

Keep in  mind of seasonality

 

User details

 

Demographics overview

 

Interests

 

New visitors is almost certain that is over reported

Because people might have cleared cache, moved to different devices etc

 

See your Facebook Ads cost & ROI in Google Analytics reports

https://supermetrics.com/blog/see-facebook-ads-cost-roi-google-analytics-reports

 

Social Plug-ins

You can track social shares on your websites but you need to add a bit of code

Or use integrated services like add this

https://www.addthis.com/

https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1316556

 

URL UTM Tracking

https://ga-dev-tools.appspot.com/campaign-url-builder/

 

Event tracking

(email address clicks, downloads etc)

Live chats need to fire events as well

Monster Insights can track events as well

https://www.monsterinsights.com/your-ultimate-guide-to-monsterinsights-dashboard-reports/

 

Advanced Filters

Bounce rates more than 60%

Sessions more than 100

Priority pages to be optimised

 

Digital Growth

Slides

 

David from Google Digital Garage

 

Digital Garage Online

https://learndigital.withgoogle.com/digitalgarage

 

Google Analytics

  • How visitors found you
  • What have they done after founding you
  • Who are your visitors
  • What demographics they have

 

There is a misconception that the internet is a mass communication channel. If you can focus on a specific customer audience online, then you can make an impact.

 

People don’t like typing on mobile phones. They have shorter time spans. They experience content in a different way. You need to have content spread out to be easily clickable on mobile.

 

B2B customers tend to use desktop over mobile. But they still still find you on mobile as well.

 

People with short customer journey, buying something smaller are buying on mobile phone.

 

People looking for a car, house or travel, tend to look it up on the desktop. Long decision journeys. People can still find out about you on mobile as well.

 

You can make important business decisions based on Google Analytics data. Explore potential markets etc.

 

https://grow.google/

 

If there are obvious assumptions about your potential markets, it is good to prove yourself wrong in Google Analytics. Because then you know and your competitors don’t.

 

eCommerce experience in real life:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Sk7cOqB9Dk

 

SEO in 2019

 

Basics still apply

  • Title tag
  • Meta description

 

Search Console

https://search.google.com/search-console/about

 

Page speed insight

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

 

Lazy loading

https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/lazy-loading-guidance/images-and-video/

 

Google Medic Update

https://yoast.com/googles-medic-update/

 

YMYL – your money your life

https://www.semrush.com/blog/eat-and-ymyl-new-google-search-guidelines-acronyms-of-quality-content/

 

E-A-T: Expertise, Authority, Trust

https://www.semrush.com/blog/ways-build-expertise-authority-trust-boost-seo-semrushchat-sherry-bonelli/

 

Write more content

Make sure stuff is up to date

Proof you have expertise

Citations

Like a Linkedin profile that has certifications etc

 

Links are still very important

 

Reviews on 3rd party websites – how you are perceived on these review sites

Google is well aware of the reviews on these websites

Online reputation

What is the sentiment what people write about your brand

 

Use HTTPS

 

Natural Language Processing

https://wordlift.io/blog/en/advanced-seo-natural-language-processing/

 

Neural matching

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-neural-matching/271125/

 

Content Quality

  • Get rid of low quality pages
  • Duplicate pages
  • If you can not get rid of them, exclude them on the Google Index
  • Mostly similar content

 

Practical Application

  • Connect questions to answers
    • 1 or 2 sentence answer you’d expect from a voice assistant
    • (entity) is (answer) uses the question in the answer
  • Identify units, classifications and adjectives
    • Use expected units, be specific
    • 200 degrees Celsius not 200 degrees

 

Keep it simple

 

 

Avoid unclear antecedents

  • The cat was often in the tree but now it’s dead
    • Whats dead, the cat or the tree?

 

Being correct requires clarity

  • Specific, short answer
  • Answer boxes in the Google
    • 2-3x click through rate

 

Related searches

  • Found at the bottom of the search results
  • Auto completes

 

Facebook Groups

 

Paid Media

 

20-25% of ads in UK going to social. But 5-10% of website traffic is only from social.

Digital marketing is bigger than 51% since 2017 in the UK.

 

51% of digital spending was search in 2017 in the UK.

 

The 2018 Omni-Channel Retail Report: Generational Consumer Shopping Behavior Comes Into Focus

https://www.bigcommerce.co.uk/blog/omni-channel-retail/

 

AI

 

How marketing fits in?

 

  • Search
    • SEO
    • Can we show up on voice searches?
  • Email
    • Provider choice
    • Email marketing tools
  • Ecommerce
    • Platform selection
    • 3rd party AI integration
    • Product recommendations
    • Mass personalised ads

 

AI for Robotic Process Automation

  • Data entry
  • Workflows
  • Data translation
  • Data transportation (routing)
  • Reporting and analysis
  • Integrations

 

Chatbots become CaaS

  • Chatbots mature
    • Move from procedural to more conversational bots
    • Decision trees and NLP – machine learning

 

Voice Search

  • NLP – Natural Language Processing
  • You get a voice answer, not a results page
  • It is like talking to humans

 

Content Marketing

 

Youtube video ideas

  • Questions and answers
  • Product demonstrations
  • Collaborations
  • Drive traffic to the website

 

Social media groups

 

Worldwide, there are over 2.32 billion monthly active users (MAU) as of December 31, 2018. This is a 9 percent increase in Facebook MAUs year over year.

https://zephoria.com/top-15-valuable-facebook-statistics/

 

Planning a Website

Purpose of a website

  • Provide information:
    • Company, product, service, expert info
  • Sell online
    • Subscription service, products via ecommerce
  • Marketing material
    • Landing pages, videos, brochures and whitepapers
  • Provide a digital product or service
    • As a service model
  • IT
    • Integrate with other internal systems
  • Customer support
    • Help desk, knowledgebase
  • Operations
    • Reduce costs by streamlining a process
  • HR and Recruitment
    • Advertise jobs, communicate culture etc

 

Planning your website

  • Review your current site
  • Benchmarking
  • Define goals and objectives
  • Develop personas
  • Use personas to develop user journeys
  • UX and site design
  • Choose a build option
  • Technical considerations
  • Build your site
  • Test
  • Measure against your goals
  • Continually review

 

Website benchmarking

  • Understand how your current website is being used
    • Use Google Analytics to understand your users and their current activity profile
  • Understand who is using your current website
    • Use google analytics to understand demographic information about your current users ie age, sex, location, how they find your site etc
  • Understand current goals and how they are being met
    • Customers interviews
    • Online surveys

 

Website goals statement

  • SMART
    • Specific (simple, sensible, significant).
    • Measurable (meaningful, motivating).
    • Achievable (agreed, attainable).
    • Relevant (reasonable, realistic and resourced, results-based).
    • Time bound (time-based, time limited, time/cost limited, timely, time-sensitive).

 

Example website goals statement

  • Generate more sales
    • Increase monthly bookings by 15% within 6 months
  • Increase sales conversion rate
    • Increase the website sales conversion rate by 5% over the next 12 months
  • Improve sales support
    • Improve sales support on the website through inclusion of knowledgebase articles,
    • Increase avg review rating to 4.5+ within 3 months

 

USER JOURNEY

 

What is a user journey?

  • Series of descriptive steps
  • Typically between 4 and 12
  • Represent i real world scenario
  • Demonstrate how a user currently does something
  • How they could do something in a new and improved website

 

Why should we use user journeys?

  • Demonstrating the vision for the project
  • Understand user behaviour
  • Identify possible functionality at a high level
  • Define your taxonomy and interface
  • Highlight similar journeys

 

How do I create a user journey?

  • User’s goals
  • Their motivations
  • Their current pain points
  • Their overall character
  • The main tasks they want to achieve

 

What should a user journey include?

  • Context
    • Where is the user? What is around them? Are there any external factors which may be distracting them?
  • Progression
    • How does each step enable them to get to the next?
  • Devices
    • What device are they using? Are they a novice or expert? What features does the device have?
  • Functionality
    • What type of functionality are they expecting? Is it achievable?
  • Emotion
    • What is their emotional state in each step? Are they engaged, bored or annoyed?

 

Create a user journey

  • Remember to consider
    • Your user’s goals
    • Their motivations
    • Their current pain points
    • Their overall character
    • The main tasks they want to achieve
  • Don’t forget to include
    • Context
    • Progression
    • Devices
    • Functionality
    • Emotion
  • You can have different feature boxes for different personas, addressing their needs
    • You can utilize different color codes for these different user journeys

 

USER EXPERIENCE

 

Why does User Experience matter? 

  • Good design sells
  • Strong consumer trust
  • Perception of your product or server
  • User-friendly content
  • Good first impression
  • Sets you apart from competitors
  • Consistency = quality
  • Motivate people to take action

 

What is UX (User Experience)?

  • Human interaction
  • Design / aesthetics
  • Utility
  • Usability
  • Performance
  • Ergonomics
  • User Experience

 

How to do UX yourself

  • User journeys
  • Look at the entire process
  • Prototype / wireframes
    • Challenge the status quo
    • Try new ideas
  • Don’t just focus on aesthetics
  • Simple is usually best
  • Test with real users
    • Prototypes first
    • Once built
  • Use date
    • A/B testing
    • Once live use analytics
  • https://www.hotjar.com/

 

Digital Agency

  • Offer full range of services
    • Designers
    • Developers
    • UX experts
    • SEO experts
    • Project managers
  • Things to consider when hiring a digital agency
    • Do they work with similar companies to yours
    • What project apprıach do they take – agile or waterfall
    • How easily could you move from them if you wanted to
    • Are they selling you their own website product or a known CMS
    • What are their ongoing support and maintenance costs
  • 4-6k standard website
  • 10-15k custom website
  • 10-30k ecommerce website

 

Freelancer

  • Technically skilled
  • Cheaper than an agency and may well have agency experience
  • Flexible
  • Usually a faster turn around than an agency
  • Might work with other freelancers for design, SEO, PPC etc
  • Things to consider when hiring a freelancer:
    • Make sure you own the code / IP
    • Be aware that they might not be available if they are with another customer
    • Be mindful that they need to be paid on time
    • They might work strange hours

 

WEBSITE FEATURES AND FUNCTIONALITY

 

Standard Features of a website

  • Navigation
  • Homepage
  • Content pages
  • Footer
  • Contact form
  • Newsletter signup
  • Blog
  • Carousel controls
  • Video content
  • Social links and widgets
  • Custom features

 

Navigation

  • Main navigation
  • Footer navigation
  • In-page navigation
    • Internal links
    • Off-page links
  • Think about information architecture
    • Categorising of information
    • Meaningful ways for users to find and move between information
    • List pages
    • Paging controls
    • Descriptive links

 

Homepage

  • This is where you make your first impression
  • Communicate your businesses personality
  • Give visitors the information they need
  • Provide options for routes into your content

 

Content pages

  • Publish information about your business, product or service
  • Standard layouts – maybe 2 or 3 page templates
  • Concise and relevant copy
  • Use images (ideally real images of your offering not stock images)
  • Make sure content includes links to other relevant content on your site
  • Consider SEO
  • Include call to action (CTA)

 

Footer

  • Contact details
    • Address
    • Phone numbers
  • Legal links
    • Terms and conditions
    • Privacy policy
    • Cookie policy
  • Newsletter sign-up
  • Social links
  • About us paragraph
  • Copyright
  • Company number and or VAT no

 

Blog

  • Communicate with your audience in an informal tone
  • Publish domain expertise
  • Present you organisations personality
  • Build trust with your customers
  • Attract inbound links
  • Increase search rankings
  • If you have a blog, make sure you post to it regularly
  • Integrated or stand-alone?

 

Social widgets and plugins

  • Great if you are active on social media
  • Remember that your posts will be seen on your website so be mindful of what you post
  • Some plugins and widgets are easy to add others require a developer

 

Choosing a domain name

  • Choose a domain name that represents your business
  • Avoid hyphens or numbers if you can
  • Think about domain suffixes
    • Com
    • Co.uk
    • Org
    • Uk
  • Since 2015 there are hundreds of new domain suffixes
    • .london
    • .name
    • .agency
    • .shop

 

Buying a domain name

  • There are lots of places that will sell you a domain name
  • Ultimately all domains are registered on a central register
  • Make sure the domain is registered in your company name, not the company you are purchasing it via
  • 123-reg.co.uk
  • Costs range from 1-100 GBP

 

Hosting

  • Your own server
    • Located at your business
    • Limited resilience / failover
    • Requires IT to take responsibility for security and updates
  • Dedicated server
    • Locate in data centre
    • Shared responsibility for security and updates
    • Can be expensive
  • Virtual server
    • Located in a data centre
    • One of many virtual servers on one physical server
    • Often includes automatic security updates
  • Cloud hosting
    • On demand resource provision
    • Very scalable and can be cheap at the entry level

 

Hosting and website builders

  • Hosting is included
  • SaaS model means you are in effect subscribing to a hosting package
  • Check terms for usage limits
  • Once your site is built and hosted with a service such as wix.com you can not move it another hosting provider
  • Some builders such as wordpress do offer an export / backup restore feature meaning you can move it to another hosting provider
    • This can be time consuming and might cause issues

 

Cross-browser testing (F12 key)

  • Web browsers render HTML as web pages
  • Each browser has a slightly different rendering engine
  • Make sure your site looks the same in all browsers / devices
  • Most website builders will have cross-browser compatibility covered
  • Most frameworks ie Twitter bootstrap have it covered
  • Most modern themes and templates will also have it covered

 

WordPress Plugin Recommendations

  • Yoast
  • Smush
  • WP-cache

 

Developing Content for the Web

CONTENT MARKETING

 

You can use fragments to move users to a place in that same post. Similar to an outline.

Get the right context and focus on every single post.

Authority, you know what you are talking about. So make sure you reflect this.

 

It’s all about the content

  • At the end of every link is content
  • There are lots of content type
  • Information
  • Meaning
  • Context
  • Authority
  • Credibility
  • Content that will drive traffic that will convert

 

Why is content important?

  • Content communicates your message
    • Brand
    • Product
    • Service
    • PR message
  • Builds a community of loyal customers
  • Helps make your brand an authority
  • Get to know your customers better
  • Improve SEO
  • Adds value

 

Effectiveness: The degree to which objectives are achieved and the extent to which targeted problems are solved.

 

Setting content goals

  • Goals give us something to measure against
  • Clearly defined success criteria
  • Understand how effective we have been
  • Modify goals based on data insights
  • Set new goals once a goal has been met

 

Content goals statement

  • Increase brand awareness
    • Double the number of social shares within 3 months
  • Drive more traffic to your website or blog
    • Increase the number of unique visits to my blog by 20% within a month
    • Hit 10% returning customers in 12 months
  • Generate sales leads
    • Generate at least 5 new sales leads per product video published
  • Convert more leads into customers
    • Increase conversion rate to 15% on landing pages published in the next 6 months
  • Improve retention and drive upsell
    • Increase revenue from “Customer also bought” feature by 8% over the next 4 weeks

 

What is content?

  • Company info
  • Sales info
  • Customer service content
  • Event content
  • Employee generated content
  • Marketing content
  • Campaign content
  • Advertising content
  • Customer generated content

 

Content marketing is a strategic marketing apprıach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience – and ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.

 

What is content marketing?

  • Attracting an audience to an experience or destination you own
  • Linked to a marketing objective or business goal
  • Not overtly selling a product or service

 

  • Make your buyer more intelligent
  • Consistency
  • Value driven
  • Expertise
  • Knowledge
  • Part of the team / club

 

CONTENT TYPES

 

  • Website content page
    • Clear descriptive heading
    • Short but descriptive summary
    • Section headings
    • Links to other relevant content
    • May have a CTA
  • News article / press release
    • Headline
    • Summary
    • Body content
    • Image
    • Publish date
    • Author
  • Blog
    • Title
    • Summary
    • Body content
    • Images
    • Lists
    • Links
    • Quotes
    • Comments
    • Category
    • Tag
    • Parts
    • Quality over quantity: Generate more quality content with the same amount of time and energy.
    • Analyse, use data, make research, expert opinion
    • Use visual breaks in the blog posts to rest people’s eyes and minds
    • https://buffer.com/resources/
    • Storytelling, enough words
    • Good content, helping people with their problems

 

https://backlinko.com/hub/seo

 

6 RESOURCES

 

  • Social
    • Employees can link business related posts on their personal linkedin
  • Images
    • Format
    • Size
    • Resolution
    • Colour
    • Style / filters
    • Alt text
    • Usage rights
  • Videos
    • Professionally produced
    • Produced on mobile
    • Hosted
      • Youtube
      • Vimeo
    • Embedded
    • Shared
    • Meta info
    • Comments
  • Web forms
    • Gather info
    • Simple
    • Multipart
    • Surveys
    • Questionnaires
    • Dynamic
    • Embedded
    • Secure
    • Autofill
    • Rich controls
    • Make sure it is working
  • Infographics
    • Visual representation of information / data
    • Diagram
    • Chart
    • Dataflows
    • High design values
    • https://www.canva.com/
  • Podcasts
    • Digital audio file
    • Series of episodes
    • Downloadable
    • Subscription
    • Free usually
    • Can be consumed while doing something else (eg while driving)
    • Accessed via apps, itunes, google play
    • Utilize another podcast that has already have a following
  • Whitepapers
    • Heavy weight content
    • Domain expertise
    • Technical knowledge
    • Pretty valuable
    • Designed as a print or pdf
    • Formal language
    • Includes images, charts, figures and stats
    • Sometimes paid for content
    • or require email or other info before download (gather leads)
  • Comments
    • User generated content
    • Moderated and edited
    • Onsite ie blog posts – probably no one will comment on your blog
    • Easier to get comments on social
  • Testimonials
    • Provided by customers
    • Short form – quote
    • Long form – more descriptive
    • Versatile content type
    • Customer trust
    • Credibility

 

Who creates your content

  • Marketing department
  • Technical experts
  • Products owners / specialists
  • Suppliers
  • Customers
  • Industry experts
  • Not recommended but can be tested, relevant freelancers

 

Created by your business

  • How regularly will you create content
  • How will you ensure the tone is correct
  • What media items will you need to include
  • Who will check content before it is published (it should not be the author)
  • What extra support do non-marketing team members require
  • What feedback will provide
  • You can record meetings or internal talks and transcribe them into blog posts

 

Created by others

  • What value does their content bring
  • How can you make sure it fits your guidelines
    • Provide guidelines
    • Edit once submitted
    • Does it even matter?
  • What about deadlines?
  • Can you offer to create content for them?

 

Ingredients of effective content (for humans)

  • Information
  • Attraction
    • Being different
  • Engagement
    • Being funny is a way of doing it
  • Strong message
  • Memorable
  • Be developed with an audience in mind
  • Consistent

 

Ingredients of effective content (for search engines)

  • Well written, natural content (like humans like to read)
  • Semantically well formed
  • Descriptive content
  • Inbound links
  • Good use of images (don’t forget alt tags here)
  • Design
  • Well UX really
  • Bounce rates are a good indication of the quality of your user experience
  • SEO for beginners by Moz

 

Audience

  • Understanding who you are developing content for is very important
  • Style
  • Tone
  • Language
  • Attention span
  • Level on knowledge
  • Propensity to share
  • Appetite

 

Content Marketing Infographics

https://www.pinterest.com/michaelschmitz/content-marketing-infographics/

 

DESIGN AND LAYOUT

 

Why Design Matters?

  • Good design sells
  • Strong consumer trust
  • Perception of your product or service
  • User-friendly content
  • Good first impression
  • Sets you apart from competitors
  • Consistency  = quality
  • People get attracted to design.
    • But they do get attracted to different things, different designs
  • Motivate people to take action
  • Design is more than how it looks, it is how it works, too. (User experience)

 

Designing effective web content

  • Ensure your html is correctly formed
  • Ensure all relevant tags and attributes are included
    • Meta tags
    • Image alt tags
  • Clearly defined section headings
  • Short concise paragraphs
  • Responsive content
  • Whitespace is important
  • Lightweight
    • Performance
    • Device
    • Connections
  • Consistency

 

LANDING PAGES AND CTA’S

 

  • Usually a standalone web page
  • Communicates a single message
    • A promotion
    • A product launch
    • A whitepaper download
    • A newsletter signup

 

Before you start for the landing page

  • What is the goal
    • Buy something
    • Fill out a contact form
    • Signup for a newsletter
    • Define the conversion
  • Who is my audience
    • Who are you hoping to attract and convert?
    • We’ll do more on personas later
  • How did they get to my landing page?

 

Anatomy of a landing page

  • clean , uncluttered and short is key
  • Impeccable grammar – you can’t afford to lose trust due to a silly mistake
  • High quality content
  • Single idea
  • Testimonials are great – trust indicator
  • Buttons and CTAs should stand out – make it really easy to convert
  • Make sure the design is really good – you only have a moment to impress
  • Limit your links – do not distract users
  • Use images and videos that relate to the copy – strong imagery
  • Shorter to conversion, the better

 

What is the call to action (CTA)

  • CTA is an element on a webpage that invites a user to commit an aciton
  • CTA is a priority item on a page
  • Every page ideally have a single CTA

 

Content strategy steps

  • Define customer personas
  • Create a keyword list
  • Identify which types of content you are going to create
  • Develop an attractive personality and style
  • Determine a frequency problem
  • Decide how you are going to promote your content

 

What is a persona

  • Represent a major user group for your website
  • Express and focus on the major needs and expectations of each user group
  • Give a clear picture of the user’s expectations
  • Describe how users are likely to use your site
  • Help to uncover universal features and functionality
  • Describe real people with backgrounds, goals and values

 

How to create a persona

  • Describe the user
    • Age,gender
    • Highest level of education / expertise
  • Profession
    • Professional background
  • Motivation
    • What is your person motivated by?
    • What are they looking for?
    • What is your person looking to do?
    • What are their needs?

 

B2D Persona

  • Lara, 40 years old, has 2 kids, employed
  • Does most of the household shopping
  • Tech-savvy, uses mobile for ecommerce
  • Value seeker, bargain hunter
  • Searching for air travel, new house and car so higher end of value seeker
  • Interested in cooking, travel, celebrity news
  • Motivated by the needs of her family and looking for ways to add value (find a bargain)
  • Don’t really have much time, quite busy with all the housework, kids and work.
  • They want a good deal, trusted seller, frictionless ecommerce experience.

 

Keyword Research

 

Choosing Content Types

  • What content do your customers currently engage with
  • What are they asking for – do you get asked the same questions a lot
  • What do your competitors do
  • Do you have the skills
  • Does the content type fit with your overall goals
  • Can you calculate a ROI
  • What tools are out there that I can use

 

Personality and style

  • Conversational
  • Formal
  • Technical
  • Funny

 

  • B2B
  • Consumer
  • Adult
  • Teen
  • Children

 

  • High design values
  • Quick and dirty

 

Content Promotion

  • What channels are you going to target
  • How will you promote?
    • Organic SEO
    • Social shares
    • Paid advertising
  • Are there specific channels for different content types
  • How can you use your community
  • Promotion calendar / schedule

 

Sharing your content

  • Social media
  • Email marketing
  • Direct email (B2B)
  • Industry websites / publications
  • 3rd party websites

 

Scheduling

  • What time is best
  • What platforms are best
  • Cumulative campaigns
  • Re-scheduling

 

Social media scheduling tools

  • Buffer
  • Hootsuite
  • Sprout social
  • Viralheat
  • Socialoomph
  • Tweetdeck
  • Sprinklr
  • Watch out: Algorithms are demoting content posted by these tools

 

Testing your content

  • Content goals statement
  • Measuring success
  • Improving our content
  • Repeating what works
  • Stop doing what doesn’t work
  • Our Facebook page appears busier
    • Instead, double the number of shares in 3 months
  • Data is key

 

A/B Testing

  • Also known as split testing
  • Compare 2 versions of a web page
  • Discover which performs better
  • Experiment with 2 or more variants
  • Variants shown at random to users
  • Statistical analysis
  • Results based on predefined goals

 

Issues with A/B Testing

  • Usually tests small variations
  • Small changes often regress back to the mean
    • Small changes = small results

 

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