and with that i'm going to hand it overto guillame of scoop.it, the founder and ceo of scoop.it. and he's going to talk aboutlean marketing and lean content strategy. thank you, susan. goodnight everybody. so let me start by asking you a question. so how many in the room are marketers? okay. how many in the room are contentmarketers?
how about social media? bit of both? great. alright, so i'm gonna talkabout, you know what we learned. we'vebeen around for five years, and you know, i'm going to talk about what we learnedin what we developed as a methodology for content marketing return oninvestment that we call lean content marketing. so i'm gonna try to make thatsuper actionable, and my goal tonight is
that you take away with something thatyou want to try, that you want to experiment with tomorrow or next week. soa bit about me and scoop.it. i don't know. do all of you know scoop.it? some of you. who knows scoop.it? okay so we've been aroundfor a bit more than... it's going to be fiveyears in november, and we've been known
for our content curation service whichis a freemium product that anybody can try. we have three million users of thatproduct. more recently we developed anenterprise version of... which is a content marketing software platform. a bit about me. i'm a serial entrepreneur. scoop.it is my third company. i'm frenchas you can tell by my accent and my first
name. and unlike you, i'm not amarketer originally, so marketing was an obscure art for me. and i'm an engineerby training. so a lot of the things thatwe learn or things that i experimented with and think that i feltwere worth sharing. so with that i wantto start by painting a little picture of whatwe, what we've been seeing happening over the last five years since we started.
five years ago we started scoop.itbecause we felt content was an opportunity inmarketing. but in five yearsit transformed into an obligation. andyou know content can be used for all those different things which are marketingrelated from generating traffic, generating leads, engaging a community,nurturing prospects, brand awareness. andyou know on the right side you have a graph from the content marketing institutethat shows that content is really used for all those activities.
so it's allgood, right? well not really. this is, you know thelast 12-18 months we've been starting to hear a lot of negative vibes around contentmarketing. you know mark schaefferfirst started talking about "content shock." who's heardof "content shock?" okay, so we had this post by buffer who'slike a great example of "content shock" that said they lost half of their socialreferrals in 12 months.
we've had youknow velocity partners talk about hey, you know, we are gonna run the risk ofhaving a deluge of crap content. and mymost successful blog post to date is a blog post that i wrote which was "socialmedia publishing is dead." and the thingthat we never heard is this: absolutely no one said, it's too easy. and, yeah,creating viral content that's, you know, what i do you know during my breakfast. so you know there's, there's a questionmark as an industry that you know that
there's something we should wonder about. you know, is it really working? and thedata behind that that captures this you know every yearthe content marketing institute publishes a benchmark on youknow the state of content marketing. and you know they're super optimisticabout it. you know talk about seeing the glasshalf full. they're saying 30 percent ofmarketers say they're, they're efficient with content marketing.
which is ofcourse another way of saying 70 percent are not. which i think is a problem. so why is that? so i want to goquickly through the cause and then you know more importantly i wanna sharewith you some of the things we've observed that worked fromdoing research with you know the hundreds of thousands of marketers whouse our free or premium versions. buti want to go through the analysis
of what we... why we felt this was... whywe saw this was happening. so first youknow we all see that. you know it's aboutfresh quality content. but fresh isimportant and i like fresh tomatoes so nobody likes rotten tomatoes. andgoogle and facebook are now structured to prioritize fresh content. if you'vedone that beautiful amazing piece of
content that ranked number one in google12 months ago, if you didn't do anything about it, chances are it's not number oneanymore. so there's this freshness andquality... and i'll talk more that, you know that in a second. and of course the things is it'shard, time consuming, costly to create content. and it's not just you know atime versus cost trade-off. content isactually very hard to outsource. it'sactually very hard to tell someone and
say,hey write a blog post about this. youknow, it's all very subjective and it's hard to brief people to create goodcontent. content distribution is becomingmore and more complex because there are more ways to distribute content. but moreimportantly if you look at most of those logos out there... have an ad-fundedbusiness model. so what they're doing is pay-for-play. so they have natural incentive to makeit hard for you to get organic reach
and you know we've all seen thatorganic reach on facebook pages have been declining, has been declining. so i'lltalk more about that but, the consequence of that...and that's a study by our friends at buzzsumo. i don't know if youread that post, but they looked at you know all...a lot of content, and they realized that 50 percent of content - so halfof the content out there, and they're looking at blog content, so itmight be a little different for videos and
multimedia content, but halfof blog articles get 8 shares or less. in other words nothing. means they onlyshared it, i mean the guys who created share themand that's it. so the the other part ofthis is it's getting increasingly complex to understand what works andwhat doesn't. so it's not that it's a simple problemthat has you know a simple cause. it'snot that we see marketers always failing with the same thing.
they can bemultiple things. there are moving parts in contentmarketing and for them there's a lot of lack of performance metrics,performance measurement systems. sothere's another aspect of that. so like i saidyou know i'm not a marketer originally. so i don't like, even thoughi'm an engineer, i don't like complicated stuff. so i like to simplify.
so when istarted to look at all those problems, okay, i said,what is content marketing and how can we simplify that? how can wecreate a methodology where people who don't have a lot of resources we... youknow, for those who don't know us, our sweet spot is we sell to smallmarketing teams... so people who don't have a lot of resources, people who can't tellyou know, ogilvy, here's a million dollars go fix content marketingfor me. and so i wanted to go backto the basics and really understand
you know what would it take to get contentmarketing success? and so my definitionof content marketing which i don't claim is unique or original, but which really isdown-to-earth... content marketing is publishing and distributing content thatdrives people to take action. if youdon't get that that drives people to take action, you're doing content,you might be a writer, you might be a movie producer,you're doing art... you're not doingmarketing. and if you're just trying toget people to take action
you're doing marketing but not contentmarketing because it's really a combination of the thingswhich is important. and so whatthis means is, it's all about two things really: content production and contentimpact. and content production means you need toproduce enough, and we'll will discuss what enough.... enough is. enough relevantquality contents for your specific target audience. but if you do that andyou don't get the impact you want,
you've achieved nothing. so there's adistribution angle to this and it needs to be as efficient as possible, whichmeans you need to be able to define what efficient is. so you need to be able tomeasure. and again i'm just you know notpretending i'm inventing something crazy, but i'm just trying to be analyzing whatit means. and so to make that supersimple, what we tell to people who come to us, we tell them content marketingsuccess is about getting more / better
and whether you need more orbetter depends. and we'll go into that. butthat's only one part of the question, of the aspect. you also need to get morefrom your content. whatever distributionyou get you should try to get more distribution all other things beingequal. if you're doing two great blogposts a week, you should try to focus on
strategy that helps you get more fromthose two blog posts a week. and sothat's what i want to share with you now is i wanna,i wanna go into you know different things but i want to share with youactionable things that can touch on those three things,on those three aspects: more, better content, and more from yourcontent. so the first thing is there'sbeen a lot of debate about you know do you need more or better content? and i told youi'm an engineer by training.
myfirst job was to be actually an industrial engineer so i was in amanufacturing facility and you know there's a tendency of people to thinkthat you either have to choose between quantity or quality. and what i learnedbeing an industrial engineer is that good companies who are goodat manufacturing actually do both. and when you're not controlling yourmanufacturing process you suck at raising the volumes and youhave a lot of defects, a lot of problems. so that'... those are graphs are fromhubspot and they show that you
know actuallyquantity matters. you know those are,you may not, you know whether you're for- or nonprofityou might measure performance different ways, but conversions are a reallyinteresting way to measure whether people are taking actionafter they read your do they sign up to your emailaddress, to your email list. do theydownload some gated contents. so thatmeasures lead generation and traffic and you can see that the higher number ofmonthly blog post you have, the more
likely you have, you are to get trafficand leads. and that's from studying you knowthousands of blogs. so you know there'sthere's a really a clear interest to do a lot of volume, but the interesting partfrom a qualitative standpoint is to listen to that guy... i don't know if you... do you guys know marcus sheridan? have you read some of his content? i really recommend his blog.
you can google him - the saleslion. he used to be a guy who sold poolson the east coast right after the 2008 crisis and the only way he couldsurvive was by doing content marketing, so he started to do content marketingand you know i love his quotes because he said that,you know, some okay content is going to beat content that never getspublished or awesome content that never getspublished all the time. and he alsocaptures what i meant by, you know content is a production process,it's a production cycle
and you have to learnit. and the way to learn is practice it. if you're like spending three monthstrying to create that beautiful you know, pulitzer prize-winning blog post,you're not going to learn from your mistakes. so the way to get great contentis to produce average content and then improve. so quality and quantity,let's get both. so now how do you getbetter content?
the first thing is that a lot of peoplewill say is, it's all that the strategy and strategy sounds like a very impressiveword to some people and to me sometimes it sounds very bullshit. okay you gottafigure out a great strategy. so in orderto simplify strategy i want to leave you with onething. to me the most the most importantthing in terms of strategy is to answer your audience's question. if you...if there's one thing you need to get
right is, what do people expect? what arethe questions they have? what are the questions they're askingthemselves before they take the action i want them to take? whether it's donating,whether its buying a product, whether it's joining, you know, becoming a memberof something. they have questions. and youcan brainstorm with your team. you canask them, you know, what were the
questions you had? and answering thosequestions is a great strategy because you'll get them to find answers from youinstead of your competitors or you know independent sources. and because they'llget answers from from you they'll start to trust you and they'll...you'll create a relationship online with them. and that's by barry feldman, by theway, who's also a great blogger on content the other aspect to createbetter content, which is more, like,
in the execution part, is,don't think you create content in a vacuum, nobody does,not even the great writers. nobody evercreated art in a vacuum or content. so research is extremely important. you might not think of other bloggers ascompetitors and they might not be your direct competitors in the business sense,but from an intentions perspective your content will compete with a lot ofdifferent content, so you need to to study them. you need to research.
you need to find out for instancewhat is getting shared on the keywords you want to...you want to write about. you need tomaybe discover new keywords they're using thatyou're not using. you might think thatyou know, you're... you you want the... you might want... you might describe...be describing the problem saying, it's that and that, but people think of it as,this and that. so you might need todiscover new keywords to explain that particular problem.
and of course youknow by doing that, you'll ideate from the other peopleand you'll be better at understanding, okay, the industry is saying this,they're looking at the problem this way, and they're getting that answer,well i have a different answer i want to bring. and so that's how i can be unique,different and original compared to the rest of the industry. so that's essentialand that's about creating better content, but how do you create morecontent?
we've seen that you know it hasan impact on your traffic, it has an impact on your conversions, so all thingsbeing equal, you're going to be better if you create 2x the content you did youknow with the same level of quality. sohow do you do that? and how do you dothat without spending more? you knowthat's the key here. because of course ifyou can recruit, you know more people. if you can put more muscle behind this,then do it. but you knowi'm... the lean content methodology is about
how do you do more with less. so three ways i want to share with youon how to do that - content curation repurposing content, and developingcontribution and co-creation. so let's go in detail,so the first thing, and that's how we started,and that's how we we get successful as a company is becausecontent curation is a great way to either bootstrap supplements or enrich acontent production activity. socontent curation... raise your hand those of you who arecurating content.
do you do that forsocial media? so most people who docontent curation do share share content on social media. so i'm not going to go into that. it's great for social media engagement,but i want to talk about the other ways you can leverageother people's content. and the first one is to do what we callcurated posts, which is... we've seen a lot of people doing curated content, theycurate content, they share that through theirsocial channels and that's all good.
that gives diversity to your facebookpage or twitter stream, but it doesn't bring people to yourwebsite. what you can do with thatcontent spending a little bit of extra time is adding commentary to it,telling your audience why you think that piece of content is interesting, maybeelaborating or disagreeing even with the the author of the original piece. and soyou can now you can turn that piece of content into a quote, a backlink to theoriginal source to be you know ethical and clean.
it's not about stealing content. you'renot going to duplicate that piece of content, but you're going to enrich it,you're gonna elaborate on it, you're going to comment on it and you're going toturn that into a new piece of content on your blog. and by the way, in the processyou can add you know your sharing buttons, call to actions, and that brings youknow not just social traffic back to your website now, but it also brings seovalue. you should google thebruce clay seo friendly content
curation blog post. there's a lot ofexplanations there. i'll sharesome numbers. and it also brings credibilityto your editorial line. so that's a great way ofsupplementing your blog's content very rapidly. typically you knowit's a 15-20 minute process versus three, four hoursfor creating original the other way you can usecurated content is in email newsletters
and it's a great way to do a couple ofthings. first,make your newsletters more interesting to send them more often. if you're onlysending your own content, i'm sure you're kind of limiting yourself in one way orthe other in terms of the number of times you send those emails. because "a" if you're onlysending your own content, you know you're limitingyourself with your production capability. but you're also maybe concerned thatyou're maybe spamming your audience by
sending it too much. when you curatecontent in your newsletters, now you're sending other people's content andyou're helping people discover what's interesting in their industry. so does it work? to recap the benefits of curation, thegraph here is that actually the result of that bruce clay experiment i wasi was talking about. they took apiece of original content that was rankingnumber four for certain keywords.
so that was a blog post they had,they had created. they took it down and they replaced itby a curated post. and what... so... and theydid several form of curation, but you can see that when they annotated the the linkwith 200 words of their own original commentary, they were surprised to see itactually performed better and ended up ranking number one. and there's the wholecredibility aspect which is on the right, which is that by sharing other people'scontent your are being more credible.
and don't believe me,don't take my word for it. that's from a study that you can see herefrom the cmo council. so what i did here... okay, so the other aspect of it, thesecond thing i wanna i want to share with you is how to repurpose contentover and over again. so you need to thinkabout your content as an investment. every time you spend time doing contentfor content marketing, you're investing money, you're investing timeand this should pay off for as long as possible.
so there are lots of ways youcan reformat, repurpose content. and thegoal here is to actually turn something you've already created into a new formatthat some other people in your audience will be more receptive to. some peoplelike, like to go to events, some people like to read blogs, somepeople like to see videos, some people like to you know,rush through slideshare presentations. you know everybody isdifferent.
if you only do blog, maybeyou're missing out some people in your audience who are receptive to otherformats. and so you can, you know playwith all of this... sure... yeah, so that's a good question. so thequestion was you know are you going to be repeating yourself over and over ifyou do that? so here's... so it's not a, it's not analternate to creating content. you know,if you want to do, you know, content
marketing you'll have to have that freshstream of content. but what you can do isyou can do a lot more content. maybeyou're investing for instance on your blog channel. and all of those blog postsare going to be different. i'm notsuggesting you take a blog and you rewrite it to say exactly the same thing. buti'll give you an example of what we did was we took blog posts put them togetherand create an ebook with the blog posts
we had. and you know some people neverdownload this ebook because they had the content already on the blog but somepeople never read our blog... and had rather have the ebooks that you can readit on the plane or something like that. now the other thing, the other aspectto this question is don't look at your content... don't thinkyour content, your audience is looking at your content the same way you are. what i see a lot of people... you know,when you write a blog, you see everything that's on it.
you know what you'vewritten. but people don't do that. youknow if you look at your google analytic stats, look at the number ofpeople who read more than five of your blog posts, 10 of your blog posts. nobody knows your content the way you do. so we always get a tendency to think, ohmy god, i've already said that. ishouldn't repeat myself. well the reality is that you know peopledidn't hear you.
like most, like95 percent of your audience have not seen that one blog postthat you might be repurposing in a different format. and you know the thebest example of that is that you know tv and radio have been doing that all thetime. they've been repeatingexactly the same message. and i'll talk about you knowprogramming and and repeating content as well... yeah, and there are really two aspects tothis question.
and i'll talk aboutsharing multiple times your content as well which is another thing that werecommend you do. here we're talkingabout creating, repackaging this content in the new format. so i'll talkabout that and then i'll give you an example on how we've usedrepurposing and actually contributed content to... to create a newebook. and i'll share with yousome of the results we've seen.
so contribution is anotherway to create more content without having to you know spend more time or orget more resources. and i'm gonna... not going to go through all of that. i mean there are... you know this would bea whole meetup in itself on how you can get people to contribute your blog. but i want to... i want to sharewith you some of the things we learned.
you know we'vedeveloped a commit... if you look at our blog, you'll see that maybe we authormaybe a third of our content and the rest are contributors. and it didn'thappen in one day. it's not something where you could saywell, i'm going to start a contribution program and so next month i can go onvacation. it doesn't work that fast. it's it's along process but it really pays off. and now we have regular contributorsto our blog
and its really helping us a lot. so we started by identifying authors,influencers. and by the way,the mistake here is to go to the tier-one. we all have thoselists of influencers. we tend to focus onthe top ten. those people will neverlisten to you unless you're an established brand and probably you don'tneed that at this point. so start withthe...
i hate to put people in tiers,but start with people who really need to buildtheir personal brand, who are going to be partnering with you and you're going tobring them as much as they bring you. and it's going to be a win-win deal. and don't ask them for something yet. give before you get. start by sharing theirown content. bring them what they need. you know we started with authors who wereconsultants and we referred clients to
you know that's... that's how westarted building a relationship. and thenonce you build that relationship, start with somethingsuper easy to ask like maybe a quote. give me one sentence on this. and you know it will take them five minutes. and you know then they'll be involved inyour content. not only will you createbetter content, more content through this method, but they'll be involved insharing it as well.
and then you can buildyour way up to more, you know, to longer contributions. and the other importantthing is you have to do marketing of that program as well in the basic sense. so tell them you know what you'regoing to be doing with that content, where, how frequently you're goingto share it. you're asking them to do something forfor you and they're expecting a reward which is visibility. so tell them aboutall of this.
and by the way we have agreat example because dennis has been a key contributor to our blog and ourcontent so you can ask him a question on the the other side of that that thatprogram. and so to go back to yourquestion, this is the example i wanted to sharewith you. it's it's both an example ofco-creation and repurposing. so we'vebeen doing ebooks and white papers for a while and we have been doing so and ittook a lot of time. we were doing research,we spent hours doing research, interviews,
and then writing, rewriting, visual designblah blah and and you know it was really painful. and so at some point wedecided, well, why don't we take our top 10, 12 successful blog posts and packagethem in an ebook, add some contributor contributions like quote and validationsfrom some, you know, industry influencers, give them those blog posts to read,and see what do you think of that problem? can youelaborate on this? and maybe you know doa bit of rewriting, updating and
everything. and we ended up creating a 90page ebook. you know, if there's one thingto criticize in that ebook is was maybe a bit too big but we wanted to create thebible on lean content marketing. and youknow it took us actually probably... idon't know... 20 percent of the time it took our previous ebooks to be created. and you could say well okay but maybe itdidn't work that well. and actually,you know it actually generates
slightly moredownloads than the previous one. the blue ones are the oneswhich are a hundred percent original and the green one is thisone. so you know it took us 20 percent ofthe time for 120 percent of the results. so this really works andthis shows that you know people are receptive to a format. and nobody,by the way, nobody complained that, oh my god i read that blog post already.
how dare you send it to me again. nobody did that. okay so we've talked abouthow to do more / better content. and remember it's only half of the equation. it's probably the first thing thatpeople struggle with is: i don't have enough content on my blog, or you know,people don't tell me my content is awesome so surely it must be crap. and... but that's only half of the problem,so let's look about the the other half, which is how do you get more from yourcontent?
i think a lot of people neglectthat when there are some relatively easy things that you can do to get moreimpact from the content you do. so let'slet's look into that. we like peanuts. haven't you noticed? so we want to getmore peanuts. and of course it's aboutdoing that without having to pay for play. the number one thing you can do ifyou have budget to get more impact from
your content is you boost it on facebook,you boost it on twitter, linkedin, whatever. of course that takes money, but i'm goingto talk about how you can do that organically. again we're about being leanand efficient. okay so five things. first the idea thatyou need to focus on your content hub. i'll tell you what what i mean by that. and a number of you are in social so i'mgoing to say, don't share your content. of course what i mean is you need topromote it and i'll explain to you what
this means. but i feel like people justending at sharing content and that's not enough. getting your team to share yourcontent and actually not just promoting it, but amplifying it. and i'll tell you aboutwhat what we mean by... why we make a distinction and why it's important andi'll talk about content marketing animation which is another way you canleverage the content you have. so thecontent hub thing has been you know a very
fascinating thing to me. so when you get...when you get started with content marketing, and even some establishedmarketers are saying, well why do i have a blog? could i just be running my blogon medium or linkedin or maybe syndicating my content to an industryblog? i mean it's really hard to get people tomy website but if i publish this on medium or linkedin i got all of myfollowers to see my content. you knowisn't that a better way to do it?
isn't that a faster wayto get an audience? andit's true to some to some extent that you know you sign up into medium. suddenly all of your followers exist. you have followers from day one. you publish something. they'll see it something onlinkedin. you don't have any set upor maintenance. or you don't have tofight with an it department to change
whatever you want to change on your blog. but there is this light, which is, thisstory is very similar to the story we heard a few years ago about facebooktelling us, hey guys you don't need a website anymore because you can doeverything with facebook pages. and someof you might have done that and that you know to me i was really tempted to justbelieve that story. this is a... this is a chart that jay baer,another great influencer in content marketing put together. the the line isthe average organic reach of facebook
pages. and you can see it's been doingone thing and one thing only. it's beengoing down. and i'm sure you all see it. you know when we had 12 likes on a posta year ago now we have six. and when... if we had50 likes, we have 25 and same thing for the clicks and everything. and at the sametime the valuation of facebook has been going up.
and what's their model? it's advertising. so you know organic reachis declining and facebook is telling you oh but it's okay because you can boostyour content and pay and pay me ad money for that. so you know when you build on otherpeople's platform you create a dependencyand you know so there are other aspects to this. first long-term you might betrapped the way people who gave up on
their website and put everything on theirfacebook page are. they... you're dependent on payingadvertising, on pay-for-play but there's also no grand recognition like thereis on your own website. there is no callto action that you can really design and and you know make very compelling likeyou can on your website. and there's noseo, so you know you don't get this long-term, longtail source of trafficthat google brings you. so what i mean bya content hub is... and maybe
it's trivialfor for you guys, but we see a lot of people say, well now i'm going to do myblog somewhere else, think about all of your content being inthe home base in a content hub that's on your website. all of your blog posts allof your videos, all of your multimedia content and think of social as a greatway to distribute that content. and itmight be okay to syndicate initiallyand to bootstrap you know with linkedin and medium,but eventually you want to create this
relationship with your brand on yourwebsite and you want to get people to take action. because remember with thedefinition... if you agree with my definition of content marketing, it's allabout taking action so this orange box here whether it's through forms or landingpages or it's really important because that's what you want. otherwise you'rejust doing content for content's sake. so i said this, and i...you know we talked about repurposing - repurposing is creatingsomething new, but i would go a step
further and say your content needs,your content needs to be shared several times. if you share it only once because ofthat organic reach curve that i just showed - and by the way let me go backhere for a second - you see the person that the person herewe have that that's in february, right now people say it's 2 percent,so if you share your content only once... and whetherit's 5 percent or 2 percent it's not a lot. so if you share your contentonly once on social networks... so you
create a blog post, you share it onfacebook and then you tweet it and then you put it on google+ and you do thatonly once, you're reaching 5 percent or 2 percent of your followers. inother words you're leaving out 95, 98 percent of the people whodecided to follow you. so you're leaving a lot of audience andvisibility on the table. so that's anexperiment that mark traphagen did, sharing first time, looking at what itdid in his google analytics, sharing a second time, sharing a third time,sharing a fourth time.
and of course every time hedoes that he's getting a spike of traffic. so you should share each newpiece of content multiple times on all of your channels. and you know as susanmentioned you don't have to do that you know monthly and and you can you knowvary the message, and all of that, you can vary the picture,but don't think people have read it because you've just sharedit or published it once. the other aspectof it is you know, if brands are going to
be destroyed in terms of organic reachby all the social networks because they all have one thing in common -they sell ads, then it becomes essential to get real people to share your content. so it's about getting your team to shareyour content. and you know i said i'm anengineer so... so there are some numbers here and you guys can do the math andactually, i you know i didn't put this slide together, but if you have a millionfans on a facebook page you would think it's better than having a hundredthirty-five people sharing your content. well as a matter of fact it's the samething.
so if you have million fansand you get 1.5% reach that's 15,000 people reach. and if you have a hundredthirty-five advocates, even though they'll have an average 300-plus friends,their reach is going to be a lot higher. and so whether you have a million fans oryou have 10,000 fans, look at how many people are in your team or in yourstakeholder group that you could get to share your content and do a similarcalculation. you'reprobably better off finding a way to get them to share your your content.
and i'mnot going to go into like how do you get that done, because it's...but there's a blog post we have on our on our blog if you...where we give tips on that. so i talkedabout promoting but promoting actually is not even enough, so we did we did someanalysis looking at a number of blog posts, looking at you know... our oursoftware helps with a lot of the things i mentioned, but it does somethingthat you know is really important to this, is it gets you analytics. so to mepromotion is something you should do
with each and every blog post. you'vespent some time creating that content, you should promote it. but then as youmeasure its performance, you'll see that no matter how predictable you try to be,no matter how well you've been doing research and strategy, some content willperform, some content will not perform. so the question is, what can you dowith the top 20, 30, 40 percent of content that performs? well, so here'swhat happens on on that graph.
this is... this is a graph that shows...the bars here are the number of times you've been sharing the content on...on the different channels and so you can see thatinitially the post was published, and then itwas shared intensely, and then for after two weeks it stopped. what happens after two weeks? traffic orlead generation, which is the two... which arethe blue and the red curves start to plateau.
so you've invested in something,you've done what you could to launch it, but then you know it stopped producingresults. so your investment is now, youknow, not producing any more results. well how about this is... what if this thisis a piece of evergreen content that is still good? like can you say that everything youpublished last year is not relevant anymore today? it probably still is relevant. it's probably a lot of content youpublished in 2015 where you've
been educational, informative, or engaging,or fun that's still relevant today. and so here's what happens when you keepdoing the the promotion work... and of course you're not going to do it with thesame intensity, but here's what happens when you start adding those bars on theright side. so in this second casethere's some promotion which is pretty intense at the beginning for one or twoweeks. and then because the post is goodbecause it's converting well because it's engaging to the audience, we keepsharing it for forever. i mean there's really no reason to stopit.
and let's say we share it until itstops being relevant. and you can seethat it has a direct impact on the two curves which are you know what you knowgetting people to take action. so if youif you can identify the posts which are... which deserve to be amplified this way,you can really make a difference. we're talking about moving from 600 viewsto 2400. so we're talking about 4x moretraffic or leads or whatever metric you want to use... i mean 4x withoutcreating more content.
so that hasa big impact. so the other thing is...and that's kind of the the recap i wanna i want to give you is all of those thingsor most of those things are things that are, you know,can seem trivial but what we found is that in our researcha lot of marketers were not doing them. not because they didn't think thatyou know it made sense... you know there are someobjections here and there are about you know am i am i going to create somefatigue if i share too much?
am i gonnahave the same value if i curate versus i create? but a lot of people are actuallyconvinced that those are best practices but they can't find a system a way to doall of that because some of the things are really time-consuming. like if you, if i goback to the slide and i you know if you look at all of those barsi mean all of those points on the bars are a share on twitter, facebook or somesocial network or linkedin. it takes time.
and you know same thing with curation. curation is not you know is is a verytime-consuming process if you don't automate apart ofthat process. so a lot of the reasons wefound in our study, we have something you can check out which is calledthe content marketing roi grader. it's aself-serve interactive piece of content where it takes you five minutes and youcan grade your content marketing practices. and so i think we now had3,000 people take the test so we have
some pretty good data on how does bestpractices which seemed to be simple are being applied by experienced marketers. and we found that only 25,30 percent of them applied as best and they tell us it's becausethey lack the time to implement them. they make sense. you know they're not stupid. they know they can get more traffic,more impact if they do some of the things. but they don't do them because they failto have the time. so automating is anessential piece of the equation.
you canautomate all of those things. so content discoverywhich will help you with ideation, curation...that can be automated. that's actually how we got started. keyword research and discoveries aregreat tools out there. you can input youryour your own keywords. they'll give youother keyword suggestions of content of keywords you might want to use. there'smore and more technology now that can do
real time content audits. a content audit... who inthe room is doing regular content audits? who's going through all of your contentlibrary to find out you know what you're missing, how your content is for performing? yeah? okay, so there istechnology out there now that can automate this and do that on a real timefor you. so scan all of your contentlibrary, look at the performance metrics and identify those posts which you mightbe... that that might deserve to be reshared
again. well our own tool if you want me toplug... but kapost has a... has alsoa... if you go... if you google 'kapost audit' you'll find that. and you know if youcheck on our blog in a... within two weekswe will be sharing some other tools there. social media distributionand not just sharing as i mentioned, so all the scheduling, the programming, youknow there are lots of tools
that you can use in thatthat will help you not just share content once but apply ascheduled to your content. so if you wanttool names there are buffer, hootsuite and we do that too...you know we kind of do all of that, so, but i don't want to plug our ourproduct too much but you know you should really find out what works best for youin terms of being able to do the scheduling and the programming of thatcontent. email newsletter creation. i talked about the power ofcurated email newsletters.
you know a lotof people are still not sending newsletters because they're telling uswell it takes me two, three hours to do a newsletter, to format it and everything. that can be automated as well. analytics performance measurements...all of that should and can be automated so that you can identify the successfulcontent that deserves to be amplified. and by the way this amplification idescribed is fully organic but think of it if you have, you know, some budget toadd you know to do a bit of pay for play even though i said you know most alleverything i presented here doesn't
require the budget, it doesn't hurt ifyou're adding budget to that. you'veidentified a post which are solid ones, the top performing piece of content,you can mix organic and paid amplification. so that's whati wanted to share with you tonight. and to recap, i think, you know, if you're...if you came to this meetup thinking, hey i need to get better with contentmarketing, i struggle with engagement, with reach, with you know finding thetime to create more content, first, you're not the only one.
our approach to this has beenintegrally you know reconstruct re-engineer thecontent marketing methodology. again youknow think of it as more / better content and more from your content. and those are the best practices that wefound have been the most successful ones for a lot of marketers. and they'rereally... you know, things... most of thosethings are really easy to automate, so consider content marketing automation aswell.
i've been going quickly through allof those best practices so i wanna i want to save time for for q&a, butthere's lots of those things which are on our blog and our blog will lead youto ebooks, resources, if you don't like blog articles and you'd rather seewebinars or videos or download ebooks. we do apply the best practices ourselves. so check out our blog at blog.scoop.itthank you and i hope we have time for a few questions. i will. could you go over again what thedifference is between sharing and
promoting and amplifying? yeah, so sharingis what we see a lot of people do. they are creating a piece of contentand they click publish and then share it once. so they'll tweet it... they'll put iton their facebook page, put it on linkedin andthen they'll move to something else. and again that means that only 2 to 5 percentof each of your followers on those channelswill will see it. so promoting isactually do that repeatedly and give it
a different schedule. so for instance ifyou've tweeted in the morning, maybe you want to tweet it at night,because you know people are receptive at different times. so it's actually maybe sharing it 10, 12times over the last 2 to 3 weeks. and maybe you knowchanging the message, the picture here and there so that you don't soundtoo repetitive. and again tools will helpyou find the right balance in this. butthat that is what i call promotion.
andfrom that kind of promotion is something you do before you even know if yourcontent is going to be successful. but after those two weeks you'll startgetting statistics and analytics on whether this piece of content is worthspending more time distributing on. thenyou can start doing that again and again and again. it doesn't work if this is ablog post promoting an event of course. it works if it's evergreen content thatyou know has been converting. why arethose the two essential criteria?
well if it's not evergreen,it doesn't make sense to reshare it over and over again. but second it also needs to beperforming because you want to focus this effort on the top 20, top 30percent of your of your content. that... does that answer your question? so that so again sharing once,promoting, you know, sharing 10 or 12 timeswithin the next two weeks before you know if it even works.
and then if itworks once you've measured the impact, that's when you start amplification. i guess what he's asking is what is thedifference in the actual tactical process of amplifying vs... is it providingcontext or your own opinion on it? so that's a good question. in the way we do it, there'sa part which is common, and there's a part which is not common. the part which iscommon is the sharing on social channels. the part which might not becommon is maybe you want to do some
outreach to some influencers. like forinstance i have some influencers i created a relationship with that if i ask them toshare a piece of content they'll do it. but i'm not going to ask themto share every single piece of content on our blog,because we blog too much. so i'm going todo that only when i know this is a real goodpiece of content and i've measured its impacting. so think of it ofall the things you can do around content
distribution that that are costly,time-consuming, so you can't do them for all of your posts. and you can even go asi said to you know spending 500 bucks on facebook to promote a post. you you knowyou're going to be much better off spending those 500 bucks on one singlepost that you know works really really well, than spreading it outon 10 different posts. did that answer your question? cool.
you had mentioned keyword discoverytools. i was wondering i think somebodyelse asked for audit tools but um did you have anything like off the top ofyour head that you recommend for keyword discovery? yeah there's a there's atool which is called, is that keyword? keyword.io? i'll find out for you. but it's... it's a tool where you can putall of your keywords and what it'll send you...
what they'll give you is... you knowwhen you type in google something, google will try to guesswhat you are typing, and at the bottom they'll say, okaypeople also searched for this, this, and that. this tool will give youthis, this and that. so if you have like, so if you think ofyour keywords being you know a list of 10 keywords, you'll end upwith 200 keywords. i would love that. i'll find out the name and i'lltweet it out... if you tweet it out
with #octribewe'd all be able to see it. that would beawesome. thank you. and you know if you're... i don't know if some of you guysuse hubspot but hubspot is a similar tool built in theplatform as well. okay this one is from marc on thetwitter chat. he... yeah he's watching thelivestream... yeah!
we have people watchingthe livestream! that's actually...well that's him up there, but it's not his question so... hi marc! so he says,can you please speak to the role of a/b testing in contentmarketing? ah! interesting. so it's interesting because we do a lotof a/b testing ourselves on the product
as a start-up who does a product. wehaven't done all of a/b testing on content and i i've found it hard toreally do some a/b tests. there's a bitof a/b testing you can do for instance when you send an email newsletter youcan a/b test subjects subject line "a" vs subject line "b"and see you know what performs the best. there's been alsoyou know some people who you know buzzfeed and others who've been known todo extensive testing and all that.
i find it hard to apply myself. because when you're going towrite a piece of content you're not going to write an "a" versionand a "b" version. not if you're trying to be lean the waywe are. you're gonna create one version. so there's limited aspects of a/b testingthat i found useful but if you guys in the room have done some a/b test youknow i'd love to hear it and i'm sure marc would love to hear it. i mean beyond doing basic stuff like youknow trying subject line "a" vs. subject
line "b" and of course the equivalent ofthat on social media, if you're going to share your content multiple times...you know one of the things going back to this you know sharing, promoting,amplifying content... if you're going to be promoting, you could say, well, i'm gonnapromote that post 10 times. so you couldhave maybe three different tweets for the same content and you know one ofthem might be performing better and so that might be the message you use then whenyou amplify your content down the road. but besides of that i haven't really foundhuge wins from a/b testing. just a quickcomment on the a/b testing.
what i haveseen a lot is testing around the layout of an article for example. so it's notthe the body of content, as it were, but how it's architected and the bare-bonesskeletons of the content. does the visualcome first and then the headline or how can you switch up that order? because,to your point, you're not going to recreate the entire content of an article, forexample. yeah.
i mean it's beyond, to meit's a little bit beyond content marketing as well,but landing pages testing... we do... we do that as well. so if we have an ebookthat's gated behind a landing page,we'll of course a/b test the landing page andyou know tools like unbounce for instance are great to do that. what is the nameof the tool? unbounce.
unbounce? yeah it allows you to build landingpages without coding. so if you guys aredoing any form of gated content. you wantto put an ebook or a white paper behind a form so people fill it in... check it out. i think they're... they have aeven a free plan or it's free to try and it's you know really affordable so... other questions? yeah hubspot also has that.
yeah, yeah julie is our marketingdirector and she's a big hubspot fan so... oh you do that. questions from the 8, now i just saw8 people on the livestream. are thereany questions from there? you're monitoring, yeah. other questions in the room? alright. oh yes, thank you. so i am trying to bootstrap a newdeveloper community.
it does not existtoday and i'm hoping to go live and i've been trying to put together a contentcalendar. do you have any sense of...you know i'm looking at short form video and blogs and then promoting throughtwitter and google+ and that kind of thing. you have any sense of what typesof content are doing better with different kinds of audiences? so the answer is noand i would would refrain from believing people who will give youan answer to that question.
because... so i think it dependson a number of things. so if you're, let me give you an example. like some people will say oh my godi've done a podcast and you know i do a podcast for you know people who are inthe healthcare company and it works like a charm. but you don't know whether itworks like a charm because they're really good at podcasting or whetherthat's what the audience is receptive to. and it could be a combination of both. so my own answer to that is, you know,start with a, you know, content format
that you feel confident with, that youfeel... that that's gonna that's going to help you... that first of all you feelmotivated by doing, because that's important. you know being consistent isby the way the number one criteria for success. content marketing takes time. so you know if you if you're exhaustedafter two weeks of podcasting, then you know you're never gonna succeed. so, find a content format that you feelmotivated by, try it and it's also need
to be a common format that you caneasily measure the impact of. at theend of the day when... you know most of thetime... i would say 70 percent of thetime when people apply those criteria they end up blogging. and to me it's not a surprise,because it's easy to set up, it's easy to measure, you have lots ofanalytics tools, you can put google analytics. it's free.
and you knoweverybody knows how to write. and so, you know, so i recommend blogging. if i have to give an answeri'll say blogging, you know if you put a gun to my head,but most of the time i'd say no, try it try it and start with somethingyou like, and experiment with it. back to the audit tool real quick? does it work with technical content? in other words a medical communitywriting highly technical medical articles?
yeah, i mean so... so an audit wouldn'twouldn't be looking at what's in the content or you know whether the thecontent is well written from a... like a, like you know a human reader would do. it's looking at what it did in terms ofperformance metrics. you know, auditingyour content is looking at you know... if you do a full content audit you can youcan go, you know, very very deep into this, but i think the basics of a contentaudit is listing all your content, looking at the performance, like how muchtraffic, how much conversions you had from this piece of content, and sayingwell, maybe we've done,
i don't know, 50 blog posts. and some of them performed well,some of them performed average and some of them didn't reallywork well. and then you can you canstart identifying reasons of that and and you know improve byyou know, understanding what failed. but you can also take the stuff that worksand leverage it better as i explained. no, i get that. maybe i misunderstood. would the content audit tools give you backsubject areas that you're missing?
so at this point i don't know any tools thatwould do that automatically, but i think you know that's kind of that's, that's someof the things we're looking at is you know we're working on artificialintelligence and semantic analysis to do that. at the moment we don't do that. i don't know of any tool that does thatand i would tell you, okay, those 50 pieces of content, there are, you know,too much top of the funnel or they're too much on that topic and not enough onthat topic. the tool that that i mentionedkapost would let you tag those pieces
of content. and at the end of thetagging you'll realize that, oh, 90 percent of my content is on that topicand only 10 percent is on that topic. but you have to do it manually. eventually... that's a very good point...eventually i hope we'll build technology that does that automatically. hey there. i'm actually going back to thecontent question when she was asking what types of content get followed up.
and your answer was great. and that youknow focus on what you're efficient at, what you're good at, and what, you knowresonates well with the audience. but myquestion is does it make... is there any metrics or or findings aboutdiversifying the content you have? likeif you find your audience prefers one type of content and that happensto be what you're good at, is it good to still give out other typesof content, just so it's not the same type of content messaging?
yeah andthat's the whole... the whole idea behind repurposing. the question really usuallybecomes like can you afford to do that? of course in an ideal world you'd be...you'd want to be having the best youtube or vimeo channel, the best slidesharechannel the best blog you know and all of that. in reality you know most smallmarketing teams are struggling with this. and so the idea of repurposing contentbecomes... becomes interesting. at somepoint you know an experiment
with it is... you know for instancewe took we took some of our most successful blog posts andturned them in to slideshares, which doesn't soundtrivial. but you know i figured like theway we wrote our blog post is like one paragraph one idea. and if i cantake you know this idea make that the title and i put a visual, a lot of peoplewill still get it without having to have the full paragraph. so you know it was amatter of... it took a bit of time.
it wasnot a hundred percent repurposing, but we took a blog post that had maybe you knowten different paragraphs and it was about sourcing 10 images thatrepresented those those paragraphs. andso we did that and it was you know a marginal investment compared to, it tookus maybe you know one hour half to create, spending four hours doing a blog post. sothe answer is, yes, i think diversifying works well. the question is can youafford it?
and you know think about...thinking about way to repurpose the the content you have to do that. i think it'spretty good. i've seen other peoplesay, well, i do a blog post and then i do a podcast or vice versa. or doing apodcast and doing a transcript and making that a blog post so that you knowagain they're thinking about what is the marginal effort i can do to do thisdiversification? hi.
thank you for your presentation. i wonder if you can recommend any brandsand that are really good at content marketing? yeah, well, big brands orsmall brands or? kind of... i'minterested... i can think of a lot of b2bbrands that are good, but b2c i'm not so sure so maybe consumer facing brands. so i'd say b2c... but it's you knowit's kind of the opposite of my presentation.
i would say you know... to methe gold standard in content marketing is red bull. but you know it's... to me what they're doingis fantastic. they transformed their companyinto a media company that monetizes with soft drinks. they have you know... if you look at the red bull content pool,they have more than 50,000 videos and images you know people doing crazy stuff,and it's probably you know even for fortune 500 companies, it's probably outof reach of 97 percent of them
because it's a really a strategic shift. but to me that's a great example. you know i'm sure we've all been consumingred bull content and we know the brand and all that. and i mean remember thoseguys are competing with coca-cola. i mean that's who they're competing withand, if you look at their numbers and i meanthey're way way smaller and they've been around for a much shorter time, but theyare a worldwide brand because of content. so this is a follow-up from marc ontwitter.
marc was not happy with myanswer. well so he says, for sure subject linea/b, but what about testing different pictures? yeah i mean i guess i guess you can dothat... you know i, did we do that? did we see people doing that? i guess you canprobably you probably can. i mean soi'm gonna take my engineering... my engineer hat there... a/b testing if you'relooking at the... he's here.
marc are you an engineer? okay so the problem with a/b testingis that a/b tests are usually easy to design,but not easy to conclude from. like for instance, if you do a pictureof a blog post and you share it in the morning and then you sharewith different picture at night and you get a better a click ratein the morning is it because it was in the morning or whether it was becauseit was at night? i mean, if you do a/btests and you're not doing significant threshold analysis which... and i don'twant to go into the math of that, but
there are tools to do that, but ifyou're doing an a/b test and saying okay i got more click rates in "a"than "b" and you didn't do a test, then you'reprobably better off not doing any tests. and so i don't know maybe it's... i don't know... it makes me want to tryit. so marc, i'll try and i'll come backand tell you. we have time for onemore question in the room. anyone else? no.
okay you put a lot of pressure onthem. no, i know. the best question. the smartest question. so don'tforget that we have two people from salesforce here who want to ask you afew questions and pick your brain and maybe give you some money and so talk tothem they have an ipad. next month, wewill be having some digital storytelling- type community content,telling stories around your... telling
stories around your community... do we have anyone from... i forgot the company's name... so do wehave? yes. here he is, right here. sorry. so i'm with measure twice. we're a videoanimation and motion content company and we were going to... and actually this thispresentation leads into it perfectly
because we were trying to hit on why todevelop content and you did a way better than we could have. so that's that'sgreat. so we're going to do a little bitmore, just on storytelling and how to get the most from storytelling, most from thefootage you've already done, repurposing... same sort of ideas, but how you canuse motion content in different ways to get different looks on the same, you know,pieces of content that you have. sizzles,animation, all that sort of... and then ofcourse using story to promote your, your...
connect to your audience better. measure twice in september. blame it on the winefor me not remembering the name of the company. there you go. we have a social media manager job attechsoup. do not forget that. other thanthat, thank you scoop.it, thank you so much...
...guillame. and follow the hashtagand we will be posting a storify and we will be notifying you guys viathe hashtag. and oh, one other thing,in october we have a party sponsored by salesforce community cloudin partnership with us and cmxand it's just totally social - drinking, having fun,dancing, eating great food on the 4th of octoberbetween 5 and 7 pm. and it will be at galvanize.
so i hopeto see you all there. will remind youmany many times. and then october 26meetup, there's a panel with salesforce and some customers ofsalesforce talking about community best other than that, thank you very much. have a great evening. good night.
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