Christine McGlade Archives - Canadian Small Business Women

Jul 21 2015

If It Doesn't Spread, It's Dead

I recently attended a meetup at Ryerson University, in their Transmedia Zone. It was a fantastic evening of discussion and debate about content, media, and how the platforms we are using to communicate – social media, Youtube, The Internet itself – are changing our ideas around production and consumption of content, and even ownership of media.

One idea that came up was the idea that media, or content (we were primarily discussing video but it could as easily have been a discussion of any kind of media), is no longer something that we just consume. It is something that we produce and in fact, it is a way we communicate as much as anything else.

We express our identities, our thoughts, and our ideas in media, as media. We speak “video”. And for those who don’t create their own, from scratch, we share what others have produced, as a kind of shorthand for what we want to say. When I share a captioned photo on Facebook, or content created by a brand like Coke or Red Bull, I am speaking volumes about who I am, what “tribe” I belong to.

Where does content marketing fit in?

I stared to think about what role content marketing plays in this content-sharing-as-communication ecosystem, and why it is so important for business. To define what I mean by content marketing, have a read of this article, or download a handy infographic here. Content Marketing is a system in which a business uses content, not advertising, to generate and nurture leads for their business, build trust with their customers, and get found online.

I encounter an objection again and again when I work with clients who are-shall we say-not digital natives, when we get around to a content marketing discussion. The objection goes something like this: “I am a private person; I don’t want to put myself out there in social media, or by blogging…I’m sure no one wants to hear what I had for lunch. Plus, I am not willing to give away all my secrets in a blog! If people want to get my help, they’ll have to hire me!”

That is kind of like moving to France and refusing to speak French. Digital Media is communication tool, and content is a language that, as a business, you can’t NOT speak. The best way to get your brand out there is to use media – video, photography, blogging, graphics – to communicate with your customers, and in fact to use media that they will want to share. To use what Henry Jenkins calls “spreadable media”.

Henry Jenkins: Spreadable Media

This video, titled Spreadable content makes the consumer king, is an episode from Pull: How Technology is Changing the Conversation. IT was produced by TVO and Q Media and it is taken from a discussion I had with Jenkins in 2013.

Spreadable media is the best reason I can think of to generate content marketing for your business. It is how you leverage your existing customers and followers as marketers, giving them the media they need to spread your message for you.

Jenkins also speaks in this interview about the new digital divide, that he calls the participation gap. He talks about kids in schools who may not have access to skills and opportunities, but it just as effectively applies to business people who don’t have the skills, the training or worse, the willingness to participate in this new language of identity and brands, the language of content.

As Jenkins says: if it doesn’t spread, its dead. Creating high value, sharable content that your customers can use is the best way to close that participation gap.

Christine McGlade is a Business Analyst, Content Strategist, and Usability Consultant. With over 25 years experience in the media business, Christine helps small business, social enterprise, and Not for Profits how to leverage the power of the Internet to grow their business. Learn more about Christine at analyticalengine.ca

Jun 21 2015

Benefits, Not Features

Benefits, not features: this is the mantra I repeated perhaps every week to my class when I was teaching New Media Communications at Centennial College. During our unit on writing for web, during our unit on social media: “Benefits, not Features”. I would tell my students that every time they are tempted to write the word “I”, they should consider how they might change it to “You”.

It is a great way to make sure you are really thinking about your clients or your customers, and not just talking about yourself: what are the benefits they are seeking? What’s in it for them? It’s what we generally want all advertising to do: Stop talking about yourself!

I found out the hard way how difficult this actually is when I recently delivered a pitch to a potential client, and said all the wrong things. We were the right people for the job. I knew what they needed and was certain we could deliver better than anyone else, and the only thing I needed to do in the pitch was convince them.

So I talked about all of the fabulous features that we had to offer: our media background, the fact that all of our employees were journalists , that I had worked in a newsroom…I talked about how we were usability experts and how experienced we were at dealing with very complex tech.

I used the word “I” A LOT.

And then: we didn’t get the job. And I thought back to the questions they asked me that I was uniquely unprepared to answer and I realised how I had completely missed the mark, because I hadn’t at all addressed their actual need. They needed to hear how working with us would make their lives easier, how it would save them money and time. They wanted to know how to better manage their staff and streamline internal processes. They wanted to hear how they would find our technology solution easy to understand and how it would make them feel on top of their game.

I spent all my time talking about how perfect the project would be for us, about our features, and none of the time talking about the benefits that working with us would bring to them.

Benefits, not Features. Listen to yourself: are you saying “I”? Turn it into a “You” and see what happens!

May 21 2015

Can you grow your business on passion alone?

Not everyone is as lucky as Dries Buytaert. Buytaert invented the open source content management platform called “Drupal”. Lots of universities and government websites are built using Drupal; it’s a bit like WordPress only more complex and arguably, more powerful.

I’m not suggesting that Dries is lucky to be successful: he’s a brilliant computer scientist and an even better businessman, having leveraged his opensource platform into a multi million dollar business called Acquia. This wasn’t the lucky part. He is lucky because he stared out by simply doing what he loved, and what he was good at: writing computer code. Dries Buytaert invented Drupal when he was a student, living in Antwerp in a dorm. He wanted to build a message board to exchange messages and meetups with dorm mates, and he couldn’t find anything that met his needs, in 2000, when there really wasn’t such a thing as social media. This is eerily similar to the Facebook story: sometimes genius consists of building the thing you need, because no one has built it yet, and then it turns out that millions of others need it too.

Buytaert is lucky because he was able to follow a relatively simple path as an entrepreneur, the kind of “dream” path that any entrepreneur would strive to follow: he built something that he wanted, and it turned out to be something that lots of other people wanted. He did what he loved, and it turned out that other people are willing to pay for it (or, in the case of open source, are willing to contribute to its success in a way that allows him to monetise it).

The perfect business formula

It’s not easy to find that perfect formula in business: we often go into business for ourselves because we just want to do what we love, until the reality of buying groceries hits home and, often at some point in the first year, we have to take a step back and ask ourselves some tough questions. Questions like: who is my ideal client? What is my niche? How can I best make money and grow my business?

There was a saying that I heard often when I was promoted into management during my relatively short time working inside a medium-sized organisation and it is “what got you here won’t get you there”. What that saying means is, everything that I might have done to rise through the ranks to a get a management position, wouldn’t be any of the things that would make me a good manager.

I have been reflecting a lot on this saying lately, as it has been slowly dawning on me that everything I knew about making money as a freelancer – what I have been for most of my career – is not much good to me as a small business owner. For example, one thing we tend to do as freelancers is say yes every job that comes along. And that is no way to run a business!

Identifying your niche as a business

The question we need to ask ourselves, especially if we are consultants, coaches, or running a small shop that provides a service of some kind is: what are the jobs we should be taking? Because there is a tendency when you start a service-or-expertise based business to start quite broad. But you learn over time that you need to go much more narrow, and in fact you need to have the courage to say no to some clients.

I was recently reminded of the book “Good to Great” by Jim Collins. Collins talk a lot about change in the book, and what it takes for a company to grow from a good company into a great company. He says there is no magic pill, but there is, in some sense, a magic formula, illustrated by one of the most useful Venn Diagrams I have ever seen, and here it is:

It shows so clearly where the magic formula lies: it shows what happens when, like Dries Buytaert, you can find that sweet spot where Passion (doing what you love) intersects with Ability (doing what you’re good at) and the Market (doing what people will pay for). That middle part of the diagram is your niche as a business, where you uniquely can make a difference, and make money.

This is a great tool to map your business against, and it will become part of my annual ritual to make sure I list all of our passions as a business, all of our capabilities, and what I’m seeing the need for in the market, against this diagram to make sure that I’m narrowing down the field of the ideal job, and the ideal client, and having the courage to say no to the less than ideal clients.

And, of course, making sure that all of my marketing language reflects the needs of my ideal client: the more we think through this puzzle, the more targeted we can be in our language, blogs, and social media. And this can only mean more of the right clients and less of the wrong.

For more resources and information on Content Strategy and to download a detailed description of what content strategy entails, go to analyticalengine.ca/resources or download a Content Strategy Info graphic at http://bit.ly/1qY9tYp.

Apr 22 2015

Map Your Content Marketing against the Sales Funnel

A real eye-opener that I recently learned is that the marketing objectives for a product or service has a companion, parallel series of steps or objectives called The Buying Process-or at least we hope it does! If marketing is to be effective, we have to design it to speak to our customers at each stage in their buying process, or to look at it another way, to speak to them at each place in the sales funnel.

For example, the standard marketing objectives for your product or service might be:

Domain Leadership
Position the product or service in the vertical or market
Make the value proposition clear, differentiate on the basis of value
Sales Promotion
Post-purchase customer service, retention

The parallel buying process might be:

Buyer recognises they have a need or problem
Buyer searches for information about their problem
Buyer evaluates the alternatives to solve the problem
Buyer makes a purchase decision
Buyer evaluates their experience and satisfaction post-purchase

If you were to map these processes alongside a typical sales funnel, it would look like:

In traditional models, marketing would do their thing and at some point, sales would take over. In digital, marketing and sales activities come together and merge in the areas of social selling and content marketing. What tends to happen is that buyers complete almost 70% of their buying process before companies even know they exist. Customers do all of their problem recognition, and information search, and evaluation, and often make and transact purchase decisions, online. So the most critical thing you can do as a business is make sure that you are there, online, with relevant helpful content, at every stage of that buying process.

In other words, when your buyer recognises they have a problem, you want them to be exposed to your Domain Leadership marketing messages. Often, your domain leadership marketing messages, if they are well-crafted, can in fact be the trigger for the buyer to recognise their problem in the first place!

When your buyer is searching for information, you want them to find your positioning messages. When your buyer is evaluating alternatives, you want your value proposition messaging to be what they are looking at. And so on.

The only way to develop the right content marketing for your buyer – to be in the right place at the right time – is to know your target customer really, really well. By knowing your target customer’s pain points, needs, and the questions they ask when they have a problem, sales becomes a matter of letting them find out if there’s a good match.

What does this look like in practice?

The first step is to create a persona of your ideal client or buyer, and make sure to include as many questions as you can based on what you get asked at trade shows, in client meetings, on the phone, etc. The best way to really get to know your target customers is to conduct customer interviews: if you’re unsure about their needs, or about the potential value in your solution, ask them!

Then, think about what kind of content are they looking for at each stage of their buying process. What can you teach them to help them understand if they are the right match for your products or services, and if you are the right match for their needs? Different types of content work to address different phases of the buying cycle as well. Map these questions, and these content types, onto the buying and marketing process.

For example, let’s say you are a small business law firm. Your unique offering is that you really understand green tech and the pain points of the small business person in this complex area building a green tech business with all of it’s unique regulatory policies and practices.

Your ideal client is a factory owner who is converting what was formerly a tool and dye manufacturing plant into a green tech business, manufacturing wind farm parts. This client lives and works in a small town outside Sarnia, and they don’t really understand the programs and support available for green tech: they just know that to save jobs in their community and protect their own livelihood, they need to capitalize on their physical facilities and equipment to manufacture something new. They are looking for plain-language legal and business development support, someone who will be a partner in building the business and who can help with some of the complexities of policy and government investment in this area. Let’s map this persona and her questions against the chart we created:

Try mapping your ideal customer’s questions and needs against this standard marketing and sales process, along with the content type suggestions. You’ll be surprised at how easy it is to come up with relevant, targeted content so that you can make sure your ideal customer is finding out about you during that 70% of their buying process when you’re not yet aware of them!

Mar 21 2015

Can Your Brand Become a Movement?

I just spent the last 10 days or so at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival. Not to be confused with the very popular music festival, SXSW Interactive is a yearly pilgrimage of the Internet faithful to Austin Texas, that happens right before the music part of the festival. There are upwards of 72 000 registrants at the festival, not to mention all of the speakers, and all of the people who don’t actually register for the conference but who travel to Austin for the networking and business opportunities. Suffice it to say, it is packed!

The conference takes place in the giant Austin Convention Centre, and in every hotel in the downtown core, offering literally hundreds of possible sessions every day. It is, in a nutshell, barely controlled chaos. But it is also a unique opportunity to hear from some of the brightest minds in digital content, marketing, innovation, and forecasting.

Every year, there are themes: there is always a buzz, an undercurrent of new thinking. This year, there was one standout theme that will change the way I think about marketing my business. That theme is that what we think about marketing and branding, and even building our businesses, is broken.

Now, some things that were said were not new; things like:

The customer is in charge: social media has meant that our customers often know more about our products than our sales staff, before we even know that they are interested in us. As a matter of fact, the average person is already 57% of the way down your sales funnel before you even know they exist, having gathered lots of information about your business and your products from friends, reviews, searches, and other touch points that you don’t control.
Your brand is not something you can easily control: it exists as much (or more) in the minds of your customers as it does in your own marketing department. Consumers today interact with brands as if they are people: they want to trust them as much or more than they want to find their products or services competent.
Our decisions are not rational, they are primarily emotional. We make decisions based on guts, feelings, intuitions, and connections. Think about buying a house (or in my case, a pair of shoes). The spreadsheet goes out the window when you get that signal from your emotional brain that says “I’m home”.

What was new was a different way of looking at how brands, businesses, and their marketing departments need to adjust to this new reality.

Storyscaping

One of the most compelling cases I heard was from Darren McColl, the Global Chief Brand Strategist for Sapient Nitro. Sapient Nitro was the company responsible for the “Best Job in the World” campaign , an incredibly successful tourism campaign for Australia that was rolled out on a very low budget. McColl talked about how, contrary to popular wisdom, brands are not built by telling a great story. Rather, they are built by creating compelling experiences or worlds within which the company, the product or service, the employees and other stakeholders, AND the customers coexist, and interact with the brand. It is described in their blog and book as Storyscaping. Storyscaping is a move from advertising and storytelling, which they refer to as “Story Yelling”, to creating participatory storyscapes. He points out that brands need more than a great story: they need a storyworld that leaves room for the customer to integrate the brand into their life and their story.

Brands as Movements

John Hagel, Chairman of the Centre for the Edge at Deloitte, took this idea one step further. Hagel’s talk was all about brands and movements, and he made an important distinction between story and narratives. As Hagel points out, a story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. It is told to a listener, and doesn’t really involve the listener. In contrast, a narrative is something different. A narrative is an idea, it is a story that doesn’t have an end, in which the listener is involved and in fact, is empowered to create the ending.

For example, a story might be told about an immigrant family who comes to Toronto and makes their life here. A narrative is “Ontario: the land of opportunity”. There is no ending to that narrative, it is dependant on the individual to create their own ending should they become involved in the narrative.

Narratives are Storyscapes. They are open ended, experience-based worlds that great brands create. Think about the Apple brand, and its devotees: the narrative is that the world can be a different, better place if we just “Think Different”, think outside the box, think creatively. Apple doesn’t really tell stories, rather, it invites customers to take part in what feels more like a movement and what has been referred to as a religion!

Making Change in my Business

The simple way that I bring this back to my own business is by asking these questions:

What is the feeling I want my customers to have when they interact with my products or services?
What is the experience I want them to share with their friends and colleagues?
How can I invite them to participate in helping me make the world a better place with my business offering?

You don’t have to be Apple to create a narrative or storyscape around your business, you just have to think in a radically customer-centric, customer-experience, customer-first way.

Feb 22 2015

Where do content marketing ideas come from?

Most business people feel like surfing the internet these days is like trying to sip water from a firehose. It is overwhelming, and with so many businesses out there, online, your business can seem like a grain of sand on an endless beach. How can a grain of sand stand out? The simple answer is, Content Marketing. What content to create is a harder question to answer.

In the last five instalments of this six part series I have walked you through the content strategy process which answers the questions:

1) Why does my business need to produce and publish useful, relevant content? Have a look at post number one, a content strategy primer, and post number two, which is all about getting started and defining your brand values.

2) Who do I target with this content (and where do I find them)? Have a look at post number three, which is all about understanding your target customers as users, and post number four, your social strategy SOS.

3) Where should I focus my efforts to get found? Have a read of Post Number 5, Getting Found by Search Engines.

Content Marketing is about using content to drive sales. And if you do it right, it’s your best opportunity to stand out and make more money. It is unqieuly suited to small business because smaller businesses are closer to their customers, with a greater ability often to engage in dialogue with customers and stay aligned with customer needs. That dialogue is where you find out what content you should be producing.

Getting content ideas from your sales funnel

I never realsied, before becoming a business owner, that I would also need to be a salesperson. But this is job number one for every small business owner, and content marketing is a great way to warm up your leads: it can help you to generate those leads in the first place and then move those leads down the sales funnel closer to purchase in a gentle, helpful, and purposeful way.

Your sales funnel is also a great place to look for content ideas.

Are there places in your sales funnel, or in the greater value chain that surrounds your business, that your customers are getting “stuck”? Understanding where your customers are stalled in the funnel is a good way to figure out what kind of content you need to produce and where you need to produce it.

When in doubt, ask!

In the Getting Found post in this series, we talked about the questions cusrtomers ask you as a great place to get keywords. This is also a great plce for content ideas. What questions do your customer ask you? When you’re at conferences or other events where your customers congregate, what questions do you hear people asking speakers or other vendors? As a speaker, I always ask my workshop attendees to tell me their biggest challenges, so I have fodder for blog posts, webinars, and podcasts in the future.

Interview your customers. If you’re not sure what to ask them have a look at your value proposition and circle your assumptions, then validate those assumptions with your cusomters. Google survey is a really easy tool, as is mailchimp for keeping email lists. Use these tools to ask your customers what they need help with!

Quality trumps Quantity

And don’t panic if you don’t have a huge base to work with. The Lean business development model recommends talking to 50 potential customers to find out if your business idea is solid. User experience designers often only interview 6-10 ysers to find out if their ideas address user needs. The average number of supporters it takes to fund a successful kickstarter camapign? Only 100!

You don’t need a huge customer base to do well, if your customers love you. How will they love you? Deliver content with TNT: that generates Trust, that targets their Niche concerns, and that Teaches them something, that helps them

The same principle applies to your content: if all you can reasonably manage is one blog post a month, then write one a month, but make sure it is of the higest possible quality, and filled with TNT (Trust, Niche, Teach). Conisistency also trumps quanitity: a regular monthly podcast is a better idea than a podcast published sometimes weekly, sometimes biweekly, or sometimes not at all.

Consistency is important in the visual langauge you use as well: make sure you maintain a consistent use of your logo, the colours in your brand palette, and that the visual language in your photography and graphics aligns with your brand values and your user needs.

Build your editorial calendar

A mistake beginning publishers of content often make is basing their editorial calendar around generic, seasonal events. Base your calendar on user needs, or events important in the lives of your customers. In terms of frequency of different types of content, and keeping in mind the advice above (quality trumps quantity), an editorial publishing pattern that quickly build a great content library would be:

1 blog post per week
1 piece of feature content per month such as
- ebook, whitepaper, or report
- infographic
- a webinar
- a presentation, workshop, or speaking opportunity
3-7 social posts per week

Your editorial calendar should capture the publishing pattern you choose and the topics you will focus on.

One advantage of building your library using the pattern above is that at the end of a year of publishing, you will have enough content to publish a book. Self-publishing is a great way to get your content into the biggest search engine for experts in the world: Amazon.

Benefits, not features

Your content strategy is the backbone of your online communications whether you are able to content market or not. If you don’t think your writing skills are up to par, hire a copywriter: your content strategy provides the guidelines they’ll need to review so they can write for your business. And if in the end you decide that content marketing is not the most effective way for your business to get found, (see last month’s post for more details), sometimes being useful is all about using benefit-driven language in your communications rather than feature-driven language. If you take nothing else away, remember “Benefits, not Features” as your guide when writing copy for your sales and product pages.

And, print out and post this handy infographic that sums up the content strategy process.

Jan 21 2015

SEO: Getting Found by Search Engines

In the fourth post in this series, I described social strategy: which social platforms you may want to prioritise for your business, depending on your conversion funnel. Over the next 2 months of this series, we’ll finish fleshing out the remaining pieces of the content strategy puzzle, and this month we’ll tackle a murky and mysterious area: search engine optimisation.

There are 6 basic ways to get your business found online, and while each one is important and some of them are closely connected, how you prioritize them and which one(s) you focus your time and money on depends on the way your target users are seeking your type of product or service, and the value of a conversion for your business.

The Six Basic Ways to Get Found

1) Directory Listings

2) Advertising (I’m referring to Google Adwords or Google display ads)

3) Having a Social Media Presence (covered in post 4)

4) Inbound Links

5) Content Marketing

6) Organic SEO or search engine optimisation

Organic SEO encompasses all of the other tactics to a greater or lesser degree, so it will be our focus for this article. And organic SEO is almost synonymous with, or at least shares many tactics of, content strategy itself. In fact, one of the primary reasons to have a good content strategy is so that your digital business will get found, because the bottom line is without content, you will not get found.

The intersection of organic SEO, content strategy, and usability or user experience design is a sweet spot where you will get found, get customers, and make money. We’re going to talk a lot about the keyword aspect of organic search engine optimization because it is a great way to focus in on the words and phrases that will best target your users and help them to find you. Getting found using organic SEO is all about search engines like Google, so it’s worthwhile to describe very briefly how Google works.

How does google work?

Google’s mission statement is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. In order to do this, they have what are called Search Spiders: these are little bits of computer code that “crawl” the Internet, scanning pages as they go.

Google has an algorithm that then ranks each and every page; giving it what Google calls “page rank”. Page Rank is based on multiple factors that only Google really knows, but they are things like:

Does this read like real content or does it sound false or fake?
Are there certain words that are used enough times (2-7% of the time) so that we, the robotic spiders, can guess what this page is about?
Does anyone else on the Internet, especially sources that have a good page rank and therefore good reputation, link to this page?
Does this page load quickly?

Then, when a user searches for, say, “Content Strategy”, Google’s algorithm looks for all the pages that it ranked as top quality for the words “Content Strategy”, and it serves them up on the Search Engine Results Page or SERP.

The goal of getting found online is ultimately to be there on the first page of Google’s search results when people are searching for the kind of product or service you offer. Very few people will ever look on the second page of Google, and in fact, very few people will ever venture beyond the first 3 results served.

Keyword Optimisation: the basics

To drive traffic and develop a relationship of trust with your customers, you really must create relevant, helpful content. But optimising that content for keywords is an important and useful practice, because it will increase your visibility in search and it will also help you focus your content. What this means is that you need to choose a word or short phrase that represents what you believe your target users might be typing into Google’s search box when they are searching for your product or service. You need to imagine what words THEY would use. Then, you need to make sure that those words comprise 2-7% of the text on the page you are optimising. Every page on your website should be optimised for one keyword (or keyword phrase); this keyword should appear in the URL for the page, the page title, in the body copy of the page, even in any image descriptions on the page.

There are lots of simple places to look to figure out what keywords you might use to focus on in your blog posts, landing pages, and product pages.

Look on competitor websites and see what kinds of words they are using to describe products and services similar to yours

Listen to your customers: what words do they use to describe their problems, their solutions, and their needs?

Type your ideas into Google and see what alternatives appear as you type

Look at the bottom of the SERP or search engine results page; you will see further variations there

Each page should also have 4-6 secondary keyword variations, so as you are doing this research, try to group keywords and phrases and their close variations together on a spreadsheet so you have lots of options when it comes time to write your blog posts, landing pages, or other site copy, and try to include location as keywords if your product or service is local. Imagine your website as a series of landing pages: every product page, every post, should be created and written with keywords in mind.

Keyword optimisation is something you should do on your website even if you are not blogging!

Inbound links

When we talk about inbound links, it’s really important to distinguish these links from the links that you might put on your website, between pages or linking out to other websites. When we say inbound links we’re not talking about the links ON your pages, we’re talking about the links TO your pages, FROM other websites

Inbound links are as important as keyword optimisation as far as helping your pages to rank well for Google. They are especially important if your conversion funnel is more weighted towards passive discovery rather than active discovery and they are critically important if your service is consultation, thought leadership, expertise, or education.

The easiest way to get inbound links is to submit your site to directories; while some directories cost money and therefore give you what is called a “no follow” link, they are still really important if you are a very active discovery type of business or to build your credibility as might be the case, for example, with being listed by your community’s Better Business Bureau.

However, if you are more of a passive discovery business where customers require multiple touch points before they make a buying decision, you need to use content to generate trust and develop the relationship, much in the way a traditional salesperson might do. This is where Content Marketing in the form of blogging, white papers, report, eBooks, videos, or info graphics can serve double duty. They can be keyword optimised to drive organic search traffic, but they also provide you with key pieces of content that can be leveraged to obtain inbound links from Influencers.

Influencer ‘Backlinks’

What is the ecosystem surrounding your product or service, the community? Who in that ecosystem influences your customers’ buying decisions? Making contact with these bloggers or businesses online and making them aware of content you might have that might interest their users is a great way to develop a mutually beneficial relationship with them, one in which they might link to your valuable content, giving you a valuable inbound link or ‘backlink’, and you will have access to their audience and may drive some of that traffic to your site.

Advertising

Google adwords can be an extremely inexpensive way to catapult your website onto the front page of Google in the form of an ad. Paying for advertising will not improve your website’s organic search ranking, but it will help you get your brand in front of consumers while you build your content marketing bench strength, and it is an excellent research tool, enabling you to really finesse your keywords and see very clearly what words to drive traffic and conversions. You need to figure out the balance between advertising spend, which can be very low, and organic spend. To do a good adwords campaign, you need continuity between your keywords, ads, and landing pages, so there is no way around having good, focused content on your website, but sometimes one really good ad & landing page can drive more traffic than a whole bunch of blog posts, so it can be a good idea to advertise early in your content marking lifecycle so you can drive immediate traffic while you build you bank of landing pages.

While there are no hard and fast rules, the 70/10/10/10 rule outlined in this chart can help you to prioritise your efforts:

On this chart, I’m assuming that active discovery means your users need very few touch points with your brand before they buy, whereas passive discovery means they need more touch points before they buy. If you need a refresher on active vs. passive discovery, have another read of last month’s post in this series. You can use the chart above to prioritise you SEO efforts behind specific tactics that will make the biggest difference, the most efficiently.

What we haven’t covered

This series is about content strategy, but when it comes to very thorough SEO, there are issues that impact on your ability to get found that are more technical in nature. The easiest and most important one to address is the speed of your webiste. Your pages should never take more than a couple of seconds to load. The bottom line for SEO is that if your site is reasonably fast and you have authentic, focused content, you have a great base on which to build your SEO.

Next month, the last in this series, we’ll cover Content itself: what are the options in how you can most effectively and inexpensively generate the kind of content marketing that will move your digital business into the spotlight.

Dec 21 2014

Social Strategy SOS

In the third post in this series, I discussed why you need to consider your customers as “users” and how you go about creating a User Persona to help you target your Content Strategy to your ideal users. Over the next 3 weeks of this series, we’ll finish fleshing out the remaining pieces of the content strategy puzzle, and this week we’ll tackle what is possibly the most perplexing and time consuming part of your digital business: your Social Media Strategy.

Do I really HAVE to have a social media strategy?

Social strategy is complex: there are so many social networks, and sometimes it feels like there is a new one every day. How does a business owner know which ones to pay attention to, and which ones to ignore? Engaging in Social Media can be extremely time consuming with little visible return on investment: It can be difficult to clearly see how a social media strategy can help your business.

But social media can also be a virtual goldmine of new customers. It can be a way that you can develop a relationship of trust with your customers, engage in customer service activities, and even recruit new employees. Social media is here to stay and it is an essential part of every business owner’s sales, marketing, and business development toolkit. A smart, targeted social strategy can deliver brand awareness, new customers, and even conversions, but it is important to understand why you’re doing it and what exactly you should do, and this is unique to each and every business.

Conversion has changed – forever.

Think about how your customers convert nowadays. It used to be that customers would become aware of your brand or product through a limited number of expensive and highly controlled channels: perhaps through a television, radio, or newspaper ad, or perhaps through word of mouth. Their decision to buy was made primarily at point of purchase, that is, when they saw your product on the shelf in the store: the “first moment of truth”, as it was called in the traditional marketing model.

Google has recently described a new model that very accurately captures the new way consumers become aware of, and make decisions to purchase, products and services today, and they call it the Zero Moment of Truth. The Zero Moment of Truth is all about digital discovery: the extensive searching, recommendation reading, and consulting with Facebook friends that we now engage in before making a purchasing decision. For products and services big and small, we rarely convert until we have had at least 7 and sometimes as many as 17 digital “impressions” or touch points with a brand.

This Zero Moment of Truth is perhaps the most compelling reason that each and every brand, every business selling every product or service, needs to ensure that when the consumer is engaging in this foraging behaviour, that they are there, building trust and clocking impressions that may lead to conversion. These impressions come from your business website and your social media activities, especially what people are saying with you and about you in social media.

There may be a small segment of the population that doesn’t use social media, but this is a rapidly shrinking segment. The fastest growing segment of social users is adults 45-54, and more and more seniors come online every day. In many ways, Social Media IS the Internet, and the Internet IS Social Media. It’s difficult today to grow your business without a strategy that covers how, for whom, and how often you will engage your customers in the two-way conversation that Social media has to offer as a marketing tool.

So Many Platforms, So Little Time.

Scheduling tools like Hootsuite make it easy to track and control the frequency of your social media communications, and they make it easy to post the same content simultaneously to multiple social platforms. But while it may be tempting to try and broadcast your messages to multiple platforms at once, it is rarely a good idea. In his book “Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook”, Gary Vaynerchuck makes a strong argument that business owners should heed: not all social platforms are created equal. The kind of storytelling that works really well on Facebook for a particular user will not work on Twitter, or Linked, In, or Pinterest, or….

Knowing which platforms to prioritise is perhaps the most difficult part of your social strategy but also the most critical. You stand to lose a lot of precious time if you prioritise a platform that really doesn’t work for your business, and you can even erode or undermine your brand if you post something clearly inappropriate for that platform: so how does a savvy business owner choose?

There are three factors to consider:

1) What are the various social platforms “good at”?

2) Which of the social platforms do your users tend towards?

2) What is the nature of your business conversion funnel?

1) A Brief Primer on Social Media

There is much crossover between the various major social media platforms: all of them are, of course, social, meaning they are about engaging in a dialogue with others. But because each one operates in a slightly different way with different rules of engagement, they require different kinds of Storytelling.

Twitter

Has over 230 million monthly active users
Twitter followers are 60% more likely to recommend you than a Facebook Liker
The average age of a Twitter user is much higher than Facebook, at 39 years
70% of Twitter users expect to hear back from a brand, and 53% want that response within the hour
Twitter is good for establishing thought leadership, expertise, for sharing news, and for customer service and customer relationship management

Facebook

Facebook is the largest social platform in the world: if it were a country it would the third most populated, after only China and India
Facebook does have an influence on purchasing behaviour, even if not a direct one. Your Facebook fans are more likely to convert than non-fans.
Facebook is great for visibility in social search
Facebook is getting into the retail game with Facebook shops if you are selling a product
The new killer app on Facebook is the short video

YouTube

Has moved from being primarily a video search engine to a powerful social platform where many brands have been born and built. Khan academy, for example, and Justin Bieber.
Web videos are a great way to reach out to new and current customers and generate inbound links to your website
Because it is owned by Google, embedding YouTube videos on your website gives those pages a double-boost in Search Engine Optimisation

Google Plus

Great for local businesses, reviews, and Google search “juice”
Ties your business address into a Google Map and ties into other Google services

Linked In

The largest professional network, you must have a personal page on LinkedIn; it is far more common to connect with business contacts on LinkedIn than to keep a Rolodex or stack of business cards or emails.
Linked in generates 200% more leads than the other social networks

The fastest growing as of December 2012
Pinterest is very visual, about ‘things’, items they find interesting, but it works even for small businesses that aren’t visually stimulating.
Pinterest is good for referral traffic because the source of the pin is a link to your site, especially images you might be posting in your blogs. Even if you don’t maintain a page or presence on Pinterest, installing a “pin it” button on your website pages is a good idea

2) Where Are Your Users Hanging Out?

The short answer is, everywhere. But you have to narrow that down a little to come up with a feasible strategy. It’s important to note here that there are multiple social platforms not listed above, many of them attracting niche audiences where you might find a treasure trove of users interested in exactly what you have to offer. This article outlines 60 niche social networks and it is worth doing a bit of digging to see if any of them resonate with your business goals. Another tool that you can use is socialmention.com; social mention searches blogs and social networks for topics or brand mentions and can be a good way of finding out where conversations are taking place that align with the kinds of conversations you want to be having with your customers. And social crawlytics at socialcrawlytics.com can be very insightful, generating a report that will tell you which pages of your website have been shared in social media, where they have been shared, and even by who.

3) What is the Nature of Your Conversion Funnel?

Typically, the more expensive the product or service, the more touch points the consumer will require before purchasing. What are you selling, and how many touch point’s do you think your customers need before they buy?

Is your product or service more suited to an active discovery process or a passive discovery process? For example, if I need an emergency plumbing repair I tend to engage in some very active discovery to find one. I search Google and will probably call the first few service providers I see. Social Media is better at passive discovery, at marketing products, services, and ideas that consumers don’t need right away or in an emergency.

Do you have a lot of competitors, so will need more touch points or more visibility in the market, or very few competitors? Are you in the B2B or B2C market?

How much customer service does your product or service require? And how much brand awareness do you already have in the market?

Document the answers to these questions on this worksheet; by indicating on the sliders in the worksheet where your business lands on these various conversion factors will give you some pointers towards which platforms you might want to prioritise as well as the frequency of posting you might want to consider. Note that the worksheet is more art than science and is intended only as a starting point: they only way to really get good at social media is by doing it, so start small, perhaps with your LinkedIn page, and build slowly using the worksheet as a guide.

The biggest question the Content Strategist has to answer is “Do I need a website AND a Social Strategy”? The answer is yes, for a myriad of reasons, not the least of which is the findability of your content in Search. Next month, we’ll cover Search Engine Optimisation and Influencer Marketing, the two biggest ways you can make your website work for your business.

Nov 21 2014

In Content Strategy, Your Customers are Users

In the second post in this series, I outlined why your governance model, or the “How do I do this?” part of your content strategy, is a good place to start planning. Over the next 4 weeks of this series, we’ll go through a full content strategy, and this week we’ll tackle the most important person in the content strategy room: your customer or as you will come to call him or her: Your User.

Content Strategy and User Experience Design

This week I attended a User Experience Design Conference, and I was struck by something that is important to consider as we embark on this month’s installment of your content strategy road map. As the speakers at the conference described projects they had been working on and case studies of both successes and failures, I was struck by how there has been a real renaissance in the world of business over the last few years. Now, so many businesses are taking a Design-Thinking approach to business planning and strategy. And the lines between designing a business strategy, a content strategy, and a website are becoming very blurry.

Traditional business planning has often started with the product or the brand. Now more and more businesses are taking a very customer-centric approach and taking pages from Design Thinking as they start their planning and strategy with the customer, or as we say in Design Thinking, with “Empathy for the User”.

Understanding the cares, context, capabilities and captivating factors of your User are the building blocks of a great business plan, and a great content strategy.

What is a “User”?

I am going to use the word “User” and not customer as I proceed to describe how we identify who they are, and create messages for them, in our content strategy. Why do I use the word User and not customer?

It used to be that when we said “User” we meant only those customers who were going to your website. But in his Book “Users Not Customers”, Aaron Shapiro makes the point that nowadays, every customer is a User, and thinking about them as Users allows us to always remember that they are coming to us for their own reasons, not ours:

“Users are defined as anyone who interacts with a company through digital media and technology. There are lots of different types of users, and while they each have their own distinct interests and objectives, they all want digital tools to easily and quickly give them a leg up”, Shapiro says, “Today, a customer must be thought of in a new way: as one segment of users, one of the many types of people who interact with your company through the digital version of your organisation. And they all want digital technologies to make their lives easier and better.”

Users aren’t just browsing, shopping, surfing. Users are seeking value, utility, and help. When we develop a content strategy based on empathy for that User, we need to understand who they are in a three dimensional portrait that we call a persona.

Personas: Not Just Demographics

Personas are detailed portraits of your users: usually you choose at most 3 or 4. Personas are both an art and a science to create, because they are based both on facts or what your know about your Users AND they come from your imagination. In order to create this three dimensional portrait of your User(s), you need to understand who they are across these 4 areas:

Care: What do they care about? What are their pain points? What matters to them the most and what are the minimum expectations you’ll need to meet for them?

Context: In what context will they be when they find your website or social media? This is not only a question of what device they might be using (for example, they might find you while using their smartphone on a crowded streetcar, or at their desktop computer in a cubicle at work) but also what time of day, what is their mood, their situation?

Capabilities: What are their technological capabilities? Are there any physical constraints they might have that will impact on how they are able to interact with you online (for example, are they older and therefore will very small text be hard to read, or might they have physical tremors that would make hitting very small buttons difficult? Are they colour blind, as many men are?)

Captivate: This is the most elusive, but possible the most important area of focus. What will really surprise and delight them? What are their secret desires that, if tapped into, will bring them un-matchable value and engage them in a real trust relationship with you?

How do I get to know my Users?

You can find out a lot about your users by looking at the analytics on your website, market research your company may have done, by speaking to your sales staff, or by examining competitor sites to “reverse engineer” who they are speaking to.

But to take a page from Design Thinking, the best way to get to know your Users is through observation: getting out there and meeting people, asking them questions and listening carefully to the questions that they ask you.

Can you observe your users using a competing product or even better your product? Watching someone navigate your website is often a harrowing and eye opening experience.

And listen to what they say: jot down quotes and use their words, base your content strategy on their questions and their language.

Persona Templates

Having personas developed is not only critical for the development of your content strategy, you need them if you are going to have anyone else writing product pages or emails, blogging, or engaging in social media communications on behalf of your company. Have them memorise the personas, and post the personas at their desk so they are always aware of who they are speaking to!

Here are a few sources for templates you can use to build your personas:

http://www.buyerpersona.com/buyer-persona-template

http://offers.hubspot.com/free-template-creating-buyer-personas

The Analytical Engine Persona Template

Your personas can be detailed or brief, but the main thing is that they are, for you, real: you want to have a clear picture in your head, and on paper, of who this person or these people are, because one of the biggest lessons to learn from the school of Design Thinking is: you are not your user! You don’t want to design your content strategy for yourself, you want to design it for your users, to deliver value to them, to speak to them, to meet their needs at their level, and if you’re lucky and skilled, to surprise, delight, and captivate, and convert!

For more resources and information on Content Strategy and to download a detailed description of what content strategy entails, go to analyticalengine.ca/resources or download a Content Strategy Info graphic at http://bit.ly/1qY9tYp.

Oct 21 2014

Your Brand Values and Governance Model: Developing Your Content Strategy

Part 2 of a 6 part series on Content Strategy for Your Business

In the first post in this series, I outlined what a content strategy is and why it’s a critical part of your digital business model. Over the next 5 weeks of this series, we’ll go through a full content strategy, but where to start? Sometimes it’s best to start at the end.

Governance: Start Your Strategy at the End

When it comes to Content Strategy, A Governance model is perhaps the most important factor. Why? Because if you understand up front what it will take to create, measure and maintain your online business communications, you will be more realistic and strategic when you develop your content strategy. In this post I’ll outline what your governance model will include, and then go into some detail on the creation of the first piece of your content strategy and resulting governance model.

What do I need to Govern?

Online business communications are the basics on your website, which might include

Your Home page
An “About Us” page or section
A services Section and/or product pages
Your contact page
Campaign based landing pages

Depending on your business goals, it might expand to include content marketing such as

Email communications such as e-blasts or newsletters
Blogging or articles
Info graphics or tools

And depending on your customers and where they are in the sales funnel, it might include brand awareness tactics like

Social media: Twitter, Facebook, Linked IN, Instagram, and Pinterest…
Influencer marketing

Governance of your content strategy means managing these communications, and it is like running a second business, your digital business. It is part marketing, part sales, and part corporate communications. And like any business, you need a plan: that’s what Governance is.

Your Governance model brings together all of the pieces of your content strategy into a structured, executable plan of action. Putting a realistic and actionable governance model in place means being very clear about your brand values and goals, your customer needs, knowing which platforms your ideal customers are using, and which blend of content types will give your brand voice consistency and regularity, and then putting it all in a calendar.

A Governance Model Outline

Your governance model will be made up of:

1) A clear statement of your brand purpose. This can be in the form of a mission statement, or it can be in the form of a message map, elevator pitch, or Value proposition (also sometimes called a unique selling proposition or USP).

2) A customer avatar or persona that describes your ideal customer

3) A clear idea of the conversion funnel for your ideal customer and which content types, on which platforms are likely to reach them.

4) An editorial calendar outlining when and what you are going to create or curate and some handy tools to keep it all running smoothly.

These things need to be written down! Don’t keep it all in your head. I keep my governance model in front of me in the form of sticky notes and charts pinned to a large piece of foam core that serves as my content strategy whiteboard. Knowing that these are the building blocks of your content strategy governance model, you can sketch them out very high level, and over the next 5 weeks we’ll fill in the blanks, starting this week with Brand Values.

Your Brand Values: Let’s Clarify

What are your brand values, and what are your business goals? By getting this down very clearly you will have some good material for your About Us page and a guide that will help you with your future content, customer, and platform decisions. The problem with typical mission statements is that they are very high level and often include a lot of jargon. For this reason I prefer to create more tactical artefacts, such as a Message Map or Value proposition.

Build a Message Map

A message map is perhaps the most tactical artefact you can create. It is quick and relatively easy to put together and is a good guideline document if you need to write something quickly such as a product launch announcement, or if you need to give something to your employees so they know the talking points on a particular product, initiative, or your business generally. CEO’s or PR writers use message maps if they are preparing to do a media interview, for example, or write a press release.

Watch this video about message maps, or use this basic formula, starting with a Twitter-friendly headline. This means a short, maximum 140-character statement about your brand or product. Then, write down 3 key points about your brand or product, making sure they are short bullets. Finally, for each of those three points, come up with a few supporting facts, statistics, or stories that bring the point home.

Clarify Your Value Proposition

Creating a value proposition using this template from copyhackers will give you a little bit more range of options in terms of how you might talk about your brand as a whole. Copyhackers has an excellent suite of worksheets and tools for all aspects of content strategy and a great process for figuring out your value proposition, that has you think about your brand and your service(s) or product(s) by filling in this grid. In the left-most column, write down all of the statements you can come up with that describe the benefits or features of your brand, service(s) or product(s), then really ask yourself if that statement gets a “tick” in the boxes to the right. When you have a statement that ticks all the boxes, you have a great value proposition!

My favourite tool is taken from the book “Gamestorming” because it brings customer target into the mix, and it is visual and easy to fill in the blanks. Try to make a few of these until you find a combination that feels right.

Once you have a clear idea, or collection of ideas and statements on what you have to offer as a business, the next step is having a very clear picture of your customer: knowing what they want, and where they are going to find it.

Over the next 3 installations, we’ll cover

Your Customer: figuring out what your customers want, who they are, and where they are.
Social media strategy: we’ll answer the question: do I need a website AND do social media? (The answer is, yes!)
Editorial and Content types: we’ll look at creation vs curation and finding the right balance for your brand and your customers, and why you need a schedule. Regularity and consistency is key to building audience.

This sounds like a lot of work

I could spend all of my time on creating and maintaining content. But obviously then I wouldn’t be running my business. Every business owner has to be a sales and marketing pro these days, however, and much of that sales and marketing activity is contained within the governance model of your online content strategy. It’s important to find the right balance-or governance model-for your business.

Sep 22 2014

Content Strategy: the Not-So-Simple Secret to Today’s Business Success

Part 1 of a 6 part series on Content Strategy for Your Business

You’ve poured blood, sweat, and probably some tears into building your business with a website, Facebook page, a Twitter feed-but no one is clicking/liking/following. Why does it seem so easy for competitors-maybe even with an inferior product-to generate traffic, likes, and credibility online while you are struggling?

Two words: Content Strategy. Without a coherent content strategy for your business, all of your hard work can be like that tree falling in the forest: no one will hear it and it definitely won’t make a sound. Content Strategy is just as important to the owner of a small manufacturing business as it is to the second-career consultant. It matters whether you are B2B or B2C. Content Strategy is the linchpin of your success in the current business climate.

What is Content Strategy?

Content Strategy is the strategic plan and implementation roadmap for how your business will generate trust, credibility, and engage your customers in your brand experience through the provision of timely, valuable content that addresses their needs and delivers benefits.

The extreme example of a business who has taken Content Strategy and it’s close cousin, Content Marketing to heart is Red Bull: no longer merely an energy drink manufacturer, Red Bull has become a brand that delivers an action adventure experience to its customers through their media production channels on Youtube, their publications, and their website.

Of course not every small business can be a Red Bull: but it is no longer enough to run your business and expect growth in the traditional way. Engagement driven by content is the new normal for companies big and small.

Content Strategy is made up of eight areas of focus that can be imagined as 8 “slices” of the Content Strategy pie. Each slice has some overlap with the others so it’s important to approach your content strategy holistically; it’s difficult to do one really well without doing them all.

A great Content Strategy goes through each of these areas: your Brand Values, Audience to determine your exact target demographic, Influencers in your field, Editorial planning and guidelines, Social and technological platforms, Search Engine Optimisation and marketing, Interactivity with your customer in the form of user generated content or reviews, or the provision of tools and dashboards, and most important: Governance. It is a deep and broad digital business planning process that ensures that all of your business communications are designed for maximum growth.

Isn’t Advertising Enough?

What has emerged in the last 3-5 years has been a complete upheaval in the world of media, business, and especially in advertising. Consumers today have infinite choice in their media consumption from a virtual firehose of information on the Internet. Media companies, Marketing agencies, and Businesses are all competing for your customer’s attention on the same vast playing field. And, you’re competing for your customer’s attention with your competitors and even with your customer’s family and friends with their opinions and perceptions, and the media they create.

The Internet is a double edged sword for business. On the one hand, it enables businesses to advertise and reach so many more people, almost for free. Did you know that for about a dollar a day, you can reach 4000 people each daily on Facebook? And these people will be exactly in your target demographic (if you’ve done the work to determine it!) . This is not only a fraction of the cost of television advertising; it is far more likely to lead to actual conversions. So this is the good news, and some form of paid advertising on Facebook or using Google adwords will usually be part of your Content Strategy.

The bad news is that advertising is not enough to get your brand and your business out there. In the race to gain your consumer’s trust and attention, the only way to stay in the race is to produce valuable content.

Consider these facts*:

20% of all Web traffic comes from shared content
70% of consumers prefer getting to know a company via articles rather than advertisements
67% more leads are achieved by companies with active blogs
80% of business decision-makers prefer to get company information  in a series of articles rather than an advertisement
70% report content marketing makes them feel closer to the sponsor
60% say that company content helps them make better product decisions

Content Strategy is a non negotiable, and what that means is that businesses, big or small, need to create valuable, findable content as part of their plans to generate leads and build their customer base.

*Facts taken from The Northwestern University Content Strategy for Professionals MOOC

Where do I Start?

It’s very easy to say that businesses need to become content producers, but it’s never easy for a small business owner to imagine how you will find the time, the skills and the staff to create content on top of everything else you have to do to sustain and grow your business. That’s where the Governance piece of the Content Strategy pie comes in: in the next post in this series, we’ll walk through what a content strategy Governance model looks like, and how a business of any size can make Content Strategy work to sustain and grow their customer base.

Christine McGlade is a Business Analyst, Content Strategist, and Usability Consultant. With over 25 years experience in the media business, Christine helps small business, social entreprise, and Not for Profits how to leverage the power of the Internet to grow their business. Learn more about Christine at analyticalengine.ca

Where does content marketing fit in?

Henry Jenkins: Spreadable Media

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What does this look like in practice?

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Storyscaping

Brands as Movements

Making Change in my Business

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Getting content ideas from your sales funnel

When in doubt, ask!

Quality trumps Quantity

Build your editorial calendar

Benefits, not features

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The Six Basic Ways to Get Found

How does google work?

Keyword Optimisation: the basics

Inbound links

Influencer ‘Backlinks’

Advertising

What we haven’t covered

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Do I really HAVE to have a social media strategy?

Conversion has changed – forever.

So Many Platforms, So Little Time.

1) A Brief Primer on Social Media

Facebook

YouTube

Google Plus

Linked In

Pinterest

2) Where Are Your Users Hanging Out?

3) What is the Nature of Your Conversion Funnel?

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Content Strategy and User Experience Design

What is a “User”?

Personas: Not Just Demographics

How do I get to know my Users?

Persona Templates

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Part 2 of a 6 part series on Content Strategy for Your Business

Governance: Start Your Strategy at the End

What do I need to Govern?

A Governance Model Outline

Your Brand Values: Let’s Clarify

Build a Message Map

Clarify Your Value Proposition

This sounds like a lot of work

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