Developing Content for the Web

by

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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