Day: May 19, 2015

Joe Pulizzi has been a content marketer before content marketing had a name. While working at a media company in the Custom Publishing department, he had dreams of starting a small business, which he eventually did in 2007 by starting a blog about content marketing.

Fast forward 3 years later and he had built Content Marketing Institute, which is well-known today as a source of content marketing thought leadership, training, events and consulting.

Today, Joe is joined by many other companies who built their businesses aided by the power of content marketing, such as CopyBlogger, Social Media Examiner, and the team at TopRank Online Marketing.

Being the curious type, Joe wanted to know more about the paths which other businesses had taken in their journey to success through content marketing, so he did some asking around. The interesting thing he found was that when boiled down, there were remarkable similarities between these businesses in terms of the process and steps they had taken, which led Joe to the conclusion that there is a consistent formula for content marketing success.

In his session at the recent Authority Rainmaker conference, Joe shared six steps businesses should follow if they want to join the ranks of those getting incredible value from content marketing.

#1 Find Your Content Sweet Spot

It’s hard to make people care about a topic unless you care about it yourself and even harder to hold their attention if you don’t know what you’re talking about. The most successful content comes from people who have identified both:

• Their area of expertise: what they know
• Their passion: what they love

Of course, there isn’t always a perfect overlap between passion and expertise, but there should be some. That perfect overlapping area is known as your sweet spot, and that’s where you want to start to focus your content creation efforts.

#2 Find Your Content Tilt

While it would be great if we could all only write about exactly what we wanted (your sweet spot), unfortunately that may not pay the bills without some tweaking. Successful content marketing means serving others first, not yourself, so if your content sweet spot doesn’t align with the needs and interests of your community, it likely isn’t going to attract many eyeballs (or wallets).

Similar to expertise and passion, there may not be a perfect overlap between your sweet spot and what your community wants. Alternately, you may share your sweet spot with others who have well-established authority that would be tough to compete with.

Tilting your content means tweaking your focus so it aligns with an area of opportunity in the community that falls within your sweet spot. Even with the explosion of content on the internet today, there are still plenty of areas which aren’t being served effectively, or at all. If you can tilt your content focus to be the only one that serves the niche, or simply serves it better than anyone else, you can become an authority that attracts and audience and keeps them engaged all the way through to converting into customers.

The key is to be very specific, as this allows your content to be tightly targeted and specific to the needs of your niche community. As John Lydgate famously said, “you can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time.”

The goal for your content should be to please some of the people all of the time, so avoid broad content like a bad cold.

#3 Build Your Base

Before you can start to see business benefits from your content, you’re going to need a build a base audience. This takes time for everyone, so it’s important to be patient and set realistic expectations both for yourself and for your key stakeholders.

Brian Clark (CEO of CopyBlogger media) built his base for over 15 months before seeing any monetary gains. Joe admits that when he started the blog that evolved into Content Marketing Institute, he had an audience of one (his mom). It took time for the experts to build a base and it will for you too.

In order to attract an audience, you need to create a content hub for them to go to. While you will need to promote and publish your content to a variety of destinations in order to get traction, your content base or hub is your primary platform where publishing takes place and it should be a place you own, like your blog or newsroom.

The reason why it’s so critical to own your content hub is that it’s insurance for the future. Like many businesses learned last year when Facebook drastically reduced the visibility of brand content without paid promotion, building your content hub on rented land is a recipe for disaster if the landlord decides to change the rules, raise the rent or evict you.

#4 Harvest Your Audience

While our primary focus so far has been to attract new eyes to our content, it’s important to remember to pay attention to retaining those eyes. The internet is awash in content these days and people have short attention spans, so it’s important to keep people coming back or they might forget you.

The key to staying memorable with your audience is to maintain consistent regular touch points by converting them into subscribers. While it may not be the trendiest tactic in digital marketing, email lists are the gold standard when it comes to building a subscriber base. Joe strongly recommends prioritizing email far above social followers, as email tends to generate far better response rates and eventually revenue.

One of the best ways to keep your list growing is to make it dead simple to join. Prominent links on your site template, cross-linked in blog content and on your social channels are essential. Make sure to thoroughly test all your subscription forms as well as reduce required fields down to the bare essentials, as too many form fields are an absolute conversion killer.

While controversial, you should also consider using popup subscribe boxes. Joe was against these at first, but changed his tune when a test showed that popovers not only increased subscriptions but tended to bring in better qualified subscribers compared to the standard non-popup forms.

#5 Diversify Your Offerings

While you should never waver in your topic focus, it makes sense to branch out into multiple formats for your message, as this may help you to both reach new audience members and reinforce your authority among your existing subscriber base.

Joe recommends pursuing a model of content diversification, which includes:

• Personal content:
  • Blog
  • Book
  • Public speaking
• Business content:
  • Digital
  • Print
  • In-person

#6 Monetize

“First build an audience, then monetize it”. For Joe and his team at Content Marketing Institute, their monetization comes in the form of consulting, training and events. Your revenue source(s) will likely be unique to your business, but you should always be on the lookout for new ways to monetize your content marketing.

Although monetization is typically the last step in the audience building roadmap, you should never pass up opportunities along the way to get some monetary value from your content marketing. You may even come across revenue opportunities you never even considered at the outset.

Just make sure that you never cross the line of being pushy or dishonest with your audience in your attempts to monetize. The objective of content marketing is first and foremost to serve your community.

Disclosure: CMI is a TopRank Marketing client.

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Content Marketing: 6 Steps for Building a Massive Audience | http://www.toprankblog.com

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Quick quiz: What would you be willing to give up to receive information that interests you?

Chocolate for a month? Your smartphone for a day? Sex?

Sounds crazy, but according to a July 2013 study by Janrain, 25 percent of adults would be willing to give up chocolate for a month to receive content tailored to their tastes.

Twenty-one percent said they would give up their smartphones for a day. And yes, there were people who said they would give up sex to receive information that interests them. Thirteen percent, in fact.

And not just for a day. Nor a week. No. They would give up sex for an entire month.

A month.

Think what that says about the pleasure people get out of personalized information — content that adapts to the right person at the right time.

That might seem extreme, but more than anything it suggests people are fed up with irrelevant, banal content that doesn’t address their needs.

Sadly, that message doesn’t seem to be getting through to marketers fast enough.

Personalization increases conversion

According to stats from Econsultancy’s January 2014 Quarterly Digital Intelligence Briefing, more than half of marketers believe personalization is important. But a stubborn (and sizable) 27 percent still believe personalization doesn’t matter.

That’s odd considering the endless number of studies that suggest personalization increases conversion — so many studies, it’s almost safe to call this hypothesis a fact.

Perhaps marketers simply do not understand the technology needed for personalized, automated content. That’s understandable.

As a writer who suffers from Technology Anxiety Disorder, I worry that I’m falling behind the digital times. Yet, I’m prohibited from improving my situation by the stronger, oppressive fear that if I took the technology plunge, I would only royally screw things up and have to hire a developer to fix my problems anyway.

(The Rainmaker Platform is for people like me. And I’m certain I’m not alone.)

What should you personalize?

So far in our adaptive content series, we’ve seen that personalized content is about the entire journey, from start to finish. This is why a customer experience map is so important.

And we’ve also learned that the best way to convert visitors is through a signed-in experience which begins with identifying who is on your site. You can’t personalize anything until you understand who is on your site.

So our next question becomes: What should you personalize? Everything?

No, it doesn’t have to be everything. But as content marketers in an ever-evolving landscape, we should begin thinking about personalizing these eight parts of the content we produce.

1. Website home page elements

Elements on the home page that can be personalized include categories, navigation, and sidebar widgets.

If your home page also serves as a landing page, testimonials and endorsements could be tailored to appeal to particular people.

2. Search results within our websites

The search function within your website could personalize results based upon the words and phrases visitors use in their searches, as well as factors from their signed-in status.

When the search engine recognizes who is using the engine, it can tailor results towards her profile. In particular, it could eliminate items completely unrelated to the user’s needs.

For example, an ad writer searching for copywriting book recommendations may not be interested in book recommendations on SEO (at least not at this stage).

3. Hooks

A hook is the specific angle you take in an article or sales letter. For example, in this article, the hook is the sultry stats from the Janrain study. Not always, but the headline and the opening can be built around the hook.

In a personalized content world, that hook would change to reflect people’s needs and interests.

In other words, a different opening (and possibly a different headline) for each persona in your content marketing strategy.

4. Bullets

You can tailor the bullets on your landing page to be geared to a particular segment of your audience.

Again, the best way to know who is on your site is through a sign-in process.

5. Landing page offers

Landing page offers often fail because they try to do too much.

By an offer, I mean what people will get from an exchange with you. For example, half off the price when they buy today, or a lavender sweatband for donating.

Ideally, offers should be tailored to specific needs. If you look at the price and planning page for Synthesis, you see four different offers designed to satisfy four different needs.

Keep in mind that when testing offers it’s best to start with two polarizing calls to action. Starting with only two options helps you discover major insights about your customers.

6. Product page recommendations

The experience on Amazon.com is a case study for product recommendations. We all have been exposed to (and you must confess, don’t mind one bit) these recommendations.

There is a reason. They work.

There’s a saying in sales: Strike while the iron is hot.

If I’m looking for a biography on David Ogilvy, it’s more than likely I’ll be interested in other books by or about him, too.

Personalize recommendations, and you’ll make more sales.

7. Post-order email copy

Equally important is all communication that happens after the sale.

Remember, the customer journey doesn’t stop after the credit card has been run. Even after the sale, she is evaluating the experience. And she notices when the personalization ends.

A non-personalized post-shopping-cart experience is likely to make a customer feel used. Continue the personalization, and you will enhance her view of you and your business.

8. Triggered emails

Triggered emails are event-based, time-delayed messages delivered when a user performs a specific action.

Why are triggered emails so important?

An example: A few days after you sign up for their service, HelloFax sends a message to check in on you, their new customer.

Hard data says these personalized emails get 40 percent more clicks than standard newsletters.

In addition, the same data says the number of links inside the triggered email matters; an email with two or three links is more likely to turn into a conversion than an email with just one link.

So, what’s next in our adaptive content journey?

There is no doubt that personalization enhances the user experience. And as I mentioned earlier, if you’re struggling to find the technology that enables you to offer a superior user experience, our Rainmaker Platform helps simplify the process of personalization.

Next, we’ll address how to create all this content.

Because I know you’re thinking there’s no way you can personalize all these elements. You simply don’t have the time or money.

Fortunately, you don’t need either. In fact, all that content is sitting right under your nose. Stay tuned.

And what would you give up in order to receive personalized information that interests you?

Let us know on LinkedIn …

About the author

Demian Farnworth

Demian Farnworth is Copyblogger Media’s Chief Content Writer. Follow him on Twitter or The Copybot. In the meantime, subscribe to his podcast: Rough Draft. 

The post 8 Conversion-Boosting Ways to Personalize Your Content appeared first on Copyblogger.

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