An 11-point cheat sheet from a weathered Content Marketer to make it all better.
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I have clocked 15 years in digital marketing, 7 of those mad years in advertising agencies. But it just took a year in content marketing for me to be swept up in an organised chaotic frenzy of relentless creation, transcreation and optimisation that transcended digital production process, digital natives team management and technology.
Content marketing is intense, rapid, and above all, current and highly relevant. It’s marketing or advertising that requires its assets — articles, videos, images — to be consumed and engaged with to justify its existence. Its content has to be on-trend. The way we consume it, and the influence of technology on it forces us to move quickly, make cruel choices to respond or ignore content published by friends and strangers.
But ultimately, age-old human-ness — logic, love, empathy, the desire to do good — will still determine and slow down our actions to consume or cull, regardless of the age we’re in, or the medium we use to read material to satisfy our curiosities. It reflects human behaviour in our digital age.
It represents our zeitgeist.
Content marketing is fascinating, but I’m not going to wax lyrical about why you should care about content. I am assuming you already know what it is, you already care about its creation and the marketing of it. I am also assuming you know that we spend more than 63%* of our time online reading articles, liking posts, watching videos, then telling someone else about them.
What I am going to do, is to plunge into an updated 11-point cheat sheet to focus us on how to get you started properly in content marketing, and how to help you get better at it.
The list is broader than writing better copy, curating nice images or commissioning cool bloggers. These are the truths, lessons, tips, tricks I have learnt and I wanted to make sure the knowledge didn’t just stay with me.
Knowing these will make hopefully make you a better content marketer, or give you the head start to be one.
1/ ODD (NUMBERED) TITLES GET BETTER CLICK-THROUGHS.
We are still trying to find out why, and we may never do. But the data speaks for itself. Content discovery platform Outbrain has analytics that have stated since 2011 that articles with odd numbers in them have a 20% higher click through rate than those with even numbers (ref: http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2011/06/headline-click-through-rate/).
2/ BE PRECISE.
Simplify — write titles and content with consumer-speak and with precision. Cut through the clutter and get to the point. I don’t need to say more, eh?
3/ KEEP THEM SHORT.
Keep to 350 words for an article. This isn’t a magic number, this is knowledge from the fantastic global network I used to work for. This helps with readability on a mobile device for your responsive website. (Wait, you are already building responsive websites, right?).
4/ KEEP THEM UP.
Push your most important and most effective content “above the fold” to help attract and acquire readers. After that initial contact, these readers can be led into deeper pages to discover more content.
Before all that though, you need to work with your UX guy on what does “above the fold” look like on the different screens of our time. How large is that real estate above-the-fold on each device, and how many articles can it take? That’s the question you need to answer.
Then you need to tier your content. The most attractive content will lead readers into deeper pages. Use the tiering of your content to guide the reader into other pieces of content you want them to discover.
Effective articles are the ones that draw traffic into a site, then entrap the audience to engage with even more content.
It’s also important that your website has an agile design and CMS so this can happen on-the-fly. In the event a piece of content stops being effective in getting clicks or engagement, you need to be able to take it down, decide how to optimise it while replacing it with another piece of brilliant content.
5/ STEP AWAY FROM STOCK.
The Internet and its marketing content are filled with stock images that make the work look too “samey”. As we can’t escape from the visualness of our social and new networks, images to summarise and represent posts, articles and videos that look too samey aren’t going to cut through the clutter or get the attention it deserves. The sameness gives the impression the user has read your article before. We need an image that is fresh, that arrests, that’s relevant and relational.
Spend a bit of time to curate the right image for your post or article. Photography featuring talents or bloggers instead of models tend to feel more real; of course if you commission a photoshoot, it can certainly be art directed that way.
Personally, I have always been a fan of crowd-sourced lifestyle images from Flickr.com, Foap (a mobile app), Lensy.com, Dissolve.com, Gratisography.com (*thank you @laurent_thevenet) even Instagram, and less so from Shutterstock and Getty. I appreciate the alternative angles and visual voices indie photographers have to say about people and places.
Lastly, you can take the plunge, put a photography brief together and spend the budget to commission and direct your own photoshoot. This ensures you own the rights to the 200 photographs you commissioned for all media usage.
6/ LIFE HACKS.
Life hack or “how to” videos, even at 4 minutes, get the best time spent and lowest bounce rates. Everyone loves a bit of drama and a bit of help. No one can resist the “day after stories” that signposts them as a better wife, husband or home cook, ie “OMG did you see that video about how to cut 20 cherry tomatoes in 2 seconds with 2 plates and a sharp knife? Genius.”
7/ TRANSCREATE, DON’T JUST TRANSLATE.
Regardless of what has been said about the Internet having no geographic borders, we still identify ourselves in groups — as a race, community, citizens. We still prefer to read news from a certain country’s newspaper, we still read in a particular language, we still prefer Google to search for things in a particular domain.
What this means is that reading content in a slang, an accent and in the context we love contributes to our enjoying the content. So if you ever need to translate a piece of content, don’t just translate it. Take a bit of time to think through for whom you are transcreating for and what is the context of the content. Transcreate the content in-situ, keeping in mind for whom you are translating for.
8/ META DATA.
Please don’t ever be lazy and not include meta data in your articles. SEO is here, its real, it’s a standard digital practice now and a form of data science that help with organic search visibility. It’s not difficult to get started — grab your coder, get him to teach you where the meta data is in your HTML.
Start with the obvious tags that describe what your article is about and those become your meta tags.
Throw in a bit of background research on what related search words have been used by your target audience to look for similar content, and add those too into your meta tags.
All of the tags now become your articles’ meta data.
Now publish, be patient and wait to be found.
9/ AMPLIFICATION.
Content must be marketed via paid media for amplification – Facebook sponsored posts, paid search, paid video placements, video seeding, article placement, bloggers, even your website’s CRM or EDM programs. Your audience already loves you but they love other websites too — you need a bit of help to cut through clutter, post content at the right times and at high enough frequencies to get them back. .
Content can also be marketed by link-building. LInks to other articles can be embedded within your article, and vice versa. The starting point is make your own content search-optimized so others can find you, then link your content to others so they too can find you in that way.
Whoever tells you that content can go viral and be social all by itself just by sitting there on the Internet — therefore, “free” — is lying to you.
10/ PAY-AS-YOU-CLICK.
Develop a content creation model that is CPA. Writers get paid only if they achieve a certain KPI. Don’t just commission the writing, make sure the writer himself is responsible in some ways for optimisation.
11/ KEEP CALM AND OPTIMIZE ON.
Content is a living breathing property, it will evolve with human needs. A/B test even article titles. Guys at Upworthy write 25 different titles and A/B test all of them. Don’t just create the content — optimise everything else around it — images, meta data, time of post, and so on. Make friends with your site analysts so they are on the look-out, weekly, how well your content is doing. They will be able to detect anomalies while analysing site data and together you can expound on next steps for optimisation.
Put a process and timetable in place to enable optimisation to happen regularly. Align on KPI’s that you will always track, and compare results week-on-week. Make your content compete with each other.
Take heart though — within this structure, content marketing requires flexibility in your team set up to make better and more relevant content and make them more visible.
Be the Digital Native that you are — love your structure, but stay light and agile so you can be competitive and respond quickly to changing content needs or optimisation needs.
