It’s the Little Things that CountIt’s the Little Things that Count
Effective Content 101: An Interview with Ahava LeibtagEffective Content 101: An Interview with Ahava Leibtag
by Kim Walsh-Phillips
Once your direct response social media marketing campaign is up and running, you are going to need a lot of content. What should you include to get the best results?
Digital content expert Ahava Leibtag shares what works best in digital content and the mistakes many marketers are making.
Ahava is passionate about content and prides herself on tackling the toughest content projects from health care to higher education to hip hop. Seriously. And she has more than 15 years’ experience in writing, messaging, and marketing. President and owner of Aha Media Group, she is also a well-recognized content expert and the author of The Digital Crown: Winning at Content on the Web.
Kim: What are some mistakes you see frequently?
Ahava: Three potential areas: people problems, process problems, and technology problems. Very often, there’s overlapping.
Lots of businesses are running in these silo camps. They have not learned to integrate their marketing departments well. Unfortunately, many older companies and big academic medical centers and universities are still set up with old school marketing departments. They’re really having trouble making inroads. They do not come at a project from the perspective of “Who are we talking to? What are we trying to say? When are we going to say it? How are we going to say it?”
Rather, they’re saying, “Okay, you go write a brochure, and you go write web content, and you buy the billboard, and you get the advertising campaign going.”
They’re creating duplicate work, which they’re paying dearly for and not seeing any return on investment.
It also creates confusion for the customers because they’re receiving so many different messages on so many different channels.
It’s important for these companies to recognize the problems can be fixed, but the work flow and process will also need to be redesigned so future projects don’t suffer the same fate.
Kim: When you have that conversation, what is generally the response?
Ahava: “We know.” That’s always their response. In fact, I’ve never gotten, “Oh wow, that’s a surprise.” They all say, “We know.” In fact, a lot of times, they’ll say to me, “How did you know that?”
They know. They all know. They’re all frustrated by it almost on a daily basis. I talk about the spectrum of dysfunction wherever I go. What I find fascinating and a little bit scary is that the bigger and more established the brand, the worse the dysfunction. Think about it. In order to get a company to grow to a certain size, you need to go through all these things that entrepreneurs go through. You have to start thinking about departments and silos, and who is producing what, and whose role is it to do this, and does it make sense for it to be like this.
Then they look at the talent and the workforce that’s out there. They don’t have people with integrated training, so they have to select people who are the best fit.
Very often, they engage me to reorganize their process and re-engineer it. We’ve had a lot of success doing that.
When I go in for reorganization I say, “My feeling is that you create roles. You can’t focus on the people you have currently. You create a role and you write a job description. If the people who are currently in these roles don’t fit, they either need to be retrained, moved to a different role, or they need to leave.”
That’s where I get the surprised look. “You can’t come in and fire people. We’re not going to do that.” My response is, “You don’t have to fire people, but don’t be surprised if you keep doing what you’re doing and keep getting the same results.”
Companies have to really start to ask themselves, “If we can’t produce what we need to produce with the team we currently have, what are we going to do? We can’t keep employing people or keep them in roles if they’re not the right people.”
The reason I’m so hardlined about it is that I want to qualify my leads. I want to make sure I’m working with people who are most primed for success.
If people aren’t ready to make those hard choices, then they’re not ready for my type of content strategy, internal workflow consulting. They just won’t have success with it because they’re not willing to say, “Okay, we really need to rethink what these people are doing.”
I always say you should give people a year to offer different training programs and compensation. But at the end of the day, I think there needs to be an understanding that at some point, we’re going to have to make some tough decisions.
I might only be able to solve up to 10% of a client’s problems on any given engagement. As a consultant, a lot of times, clients hire me because they want to point the blame at somebody when they can’t solve the problem. That’s very often why they bring in a consultant.
This is why I’ve shifted my business toward teaching. We teach you how to build the tools. I have a four-step proven methodology for doing this. Trust and vulnerability comes out best when I’m in tandem with the client and working with them as partner instead of telling them what to do. It really does have to be a lot of heads getting together and trying to figure out what’s the best solution for a particular challenge.
Kim: Would you mind sharing another mistake marketers make with content?
Ahava: The second mistake is people are still just talking about themselves too much and not thinking about the pain points of the end user or the person they’re trying to reach. I downloaded a white paper yesterday and read the whole thing. I was shocked at how poorly this white paper was put together. It had a soft beginning that told stories and gave you a couple of stats. Then three pages in, it started on that hard sell of why their software platform was the one to go with. I was actually kind of embarrassed because the think tank who helped them distribute the white paper is a really well-known content marketing group
I thought to myself, “Did anyone read this before it went out?”
This is exactly the opposite of what you’re trying to do with a white paper. You should try to address what the customer’s pain points are, not try to sell them on your particular software or why it’s the best.
I see it over and over again in companies’ tweets, in companies’ Facebook pages. There’s still so much focus on us, us, us, instead of about the customer.
Kim: Do you have any suggestions of what folks can do to help get that voice out more, that’s more focused on their prospects and not on them?
Ahava: A sales technique I’ve used that really helps me is this. After I talk to somebody and I get the feeling they’re interested but lukewarm about the next step, I’ll say, “I just want to leave you with one question, if you could tell me what do you think your most pressing content challenge is at this moment?”
A lot of times, the answers they give me turn into newsletter and blog posts. This is how I find out what people are really freaking out about right now, currently in the marketplace, and how can I respond to those questions and give them the answers they need. This helps them feel like, “You know what? This person gets it. I’m going to go talk to her because she knows what’s going on.”
I also think you need to be smart and have a traditional marketing mix.
I allow myself one newsletter per quarter to present a case study about something we’ve done. It’s clearly a sales email. It opens well but I never get any requests from it.
The requests I get are from the emails that answer the most popular questions on people’s minds.
One more tip is that what you think is bothering people is way more detailed than what’s actually bothering people. Folks are usually much more high level than what your solution provides to them.
Whatever you’re thinking, reel it back ten steps to the more basic form of that challenge, and then you’ve probably got yourself a really good idea of what’s going on with your customers.
Kim: Can you give us an example?
Ahava: I’ll give you a personal example. What I sell is sometimes referred to as both content marketing and content strategy. The two are actually very, very different. When I start to try to explain it to clients, I see their eyes glaze over. I was busy thinking about internal work flow and editorial calendars, personas, and messaging architectures. It took me awhile to figure out that really, people just want to know, “How do we create content?”
A lot of times, you see the flip side though. Clients come to you and say what they think they need. It’s like a doctor whose patient walks in with 400 pages printed from the internet and says, “You need to replace my hip.” Clients announce, “We need this,” or “We need that.”
When I’m listening I ask myself, “People, process, or technology?” What I find out is that the way they diagnose the problem is far more complicated than the problem itself. They’re so familiar with the problem, that they’ve turned it into an 80-point diagram.
That’s where the brilliance of bringing in a consultant is really important. It gives a different perspective. You just want somebody who is going to look at it differently than you do.
The whole problem is really just asking, “What am I trying to sell? What’s the simplest extrapolation of that idea?” The best content strategy solution is often the simplest question to provide that answer.
For more from Ahava Leibtag, connect with her on Twitter @AhavaL and AhaMediaGroup.com to sign up for her free newsletter, Content Ahas, and check out her fantastic book, The Digital Crown: Winning at Content on the Web.
Why Micro-Commitments MatterWhy Micro-Commitments Matter
Kim Walsh-Phillips
It is fairly obvious that those who know you will be more likely to respond to an offer than someone who has never heard of you before. The same is true of your social media audience. They see so many messages in a day from people they don’t know, connect with, or care about that they completely ignore. They don’t have time for nonsense or to figure out why they should buy from you. After all, that’s not their job. It’s yours.
Before you go for the sale, start from a position of value with your target market. First, let them know why you are a good match for their needs, why you are an expert in your field, and why they should pay attention to what you have to say. They will care because you are leading with messaging that is all about them.
And that’s all they care about.
The Year of the Blog
Each year the media declares it is the “Year of the Blog.” When researched, we found articles spanning back to 2004. This is so misguided.
Some of the titles:
• 2004 “The Eyes of the Nation: The Internet; Year of the Blog? Web Diarists Are Now Official Members of Convention Press Corps”
• 2005 The Daily Whim: “Another Year of the Blog”
• 2012 Non-Profits, Year of the Blog. Here’s Why You Can’t Afford to Wait Any Longer
A blog is just a channel. It is your content in a digital medium. You still need to have effective messaging in order to get a high ROI. Remember, for every channel, your customers and prospects are the ones holding the remote control. Do not give them a reason to hit the mute button.
What is true now is that your social media marketing efforts will crash and burn if you don’t offer content as part of the equation. And there are many reasons to develop great content.
GOOGLE SEARCH
Great SEO (search engine optimization) can no longer be manipulated with thousands of hidden pages or meta tags. Black hat tricks may work at first, but can make you lose an incredible amount of time and money later.
At one point, German car manufacturer BMW was blacklisted by the search giant Google. Google’s top rule is that companies should design websites for users and not search engines. BMW admittedly used “doorway pages” in order to boost its web traffic. For this offense, the car manufacturing giant saw its top ranking numbers dive drastically to a zero ranking.
Google has been paving its way through social media and making more of a name for itself in that social realm with Google+. From this platform, author ranking has become a key feature. Building your author rank with Google+ will allow you to gain trust and rank higher in the Google-sphere by the content you produce all over the web. The more your content is +1’ed or shared, the higher your rank and trust from Google will elevate.
Some of the things they are looking for include:
• Click-through rates. Once people come to your site, do they click around? Do they engage with your content in any way?
Tactic: Offer links in your blog posts and ask for comments and questions at the end of the post.
• Scroll rate. Do your visitors go below the fold when they visit your site?
Tactic: Break paragraphs and images up on your blogs so they are only partially visible on the top third of your web page. Entice your viewer to scroll down to see what else is on the page.
• Time on page. How long do they spend engaging with content on your page?
Tactic: Include multimedia resources such as audio files to listen to or videos to watch that support your blog content.
• Bounce rate (obvious sign for Google that your stuff stinks). This is if someone comes to your page and immediately leaves.
Tactic: Make sure your ads match what viewers will see on the landing page you are inviting them to go to. Speak directly to viewers letting them know that this page was meant for them.
• Spelling and grammar. Proofing does matter! Google is looking for content churned out by robots and checks for this by checking the grammar and spelling to make sure it is good.
Tactic: Make proofing part of your blogging strategy. And do yourself a favor and have it be someone else. We are never good at seeing our own mistakes. I have a full-time proofer on staff, but if you don’t produce enough content for that to make sense, use a freelancing resource or site like Grammarly or ProWritingAid to get your content checked.
• Facebook advertising. Facebook requires that you have relevancy for your audience. While there are numerous metrics to distract an advertiser who is trying to determine what is working and what isn’t, the relevance score tries to balance the positive and negative into one single metric. It provides insight into what Facebook is seeing and why an ad may be delivering the way it is. This means the content can’t be spammy garbage that is unwanted by your audience. You raise your relevancy by offering great content to identify your target market, and only once they have been nurtured do you follow up with them as a lead.
• Thought leadership. LinkedIn gives preferential treatment to long-form posts and will share them beyond your connections to build your follower count. This content is also SEO-friendly and can help your search engine ranking.
• Establishing trust and authority even more. Your goal should be to become THE expert and authority and leader in your marketplace. You want to create a channel of one. It should go without saying, but to be the thought leader in your market, you have to share your thought leadership.
• Identifying qualified leads. Blog content with clicks campaigns are an inexpensive way to identify qualified leads with any advertising you do. Once leads come to your site, you can then easily retarget them or get them to opt-in for your mailing list or blog. Social Media Examiner releases a blog once per day and through organic traffic only, it has been able to grow its opt-in email list to over 350,000 people. Their goal is to sell tickets to two annual events: one virtual and one in-person. Through this blog strategy, they have grown into a multimillion-dollar company.
So a blog? Yup, it’s not optional. It is the core foundation of an effective direct response social media marketing strategy.
To turn marketing into revenue, engage your audience in content that is useful before you start to sell. Use your content to build trust, bring attention to a problem, agitate the problem, and then sell your solution. This works much better than agitating first, which more closely describes Thanksgiving Dinners with an ex-boyfriend’s family and not how you want to market on social media. Creating a content plan is not difficult if you first set some goals, stick to a schedule, and commit to it throughout the year.
Set Goals
With an integrated content plan, setting goals for what is to be sold requires a specific and detailed approach. It is important to begin with a clear vision of your desired outcome, then create content which supports it.
Do you want to fill a workshop or seminar? Encourage prospects to schedule a sales conversation? Book your catering orders? Decide first your overall goal for your content. In this step, also determine the date the sale request will take place and any incentives you will offer to drive the sale home.
We use our blog (www.iocreativegroup.com/blog) to offer value to our audience, establish ourselves as experts and authorities in the marketplace, share case studies to build trust, and to get more leads for our business.
Our blog and weekly email is both the first and final step of a lot of our prospect requests. They come in through reading the blog, stay on our list for a few weeks, months, or even years, and then contact us to schedule a conversation.
Some of my most popular blog topics were all of the how-to variety:
1. Five Ways To Attract New Clients, Members, or Customers from Facebook
2. How to Increase Your Website Traffic Without Spending a Dime
3. Five Ways Facebook Can Grow Your Business While You Take a Holiday Break
4. How to Build Your Audience Quickly and Cheaply Using Facebook Impression Ads
After you develop your goals, create a schedule and stick to it. Whether it be once a day or once a week, consistency and commitment are key. Create your schedule based on one you can stick to in order to build your audience and generate those all-important raving fans.
Creating an Effective Blog
To blog in a way that is most effective and will give you the best end result, begin with the end in mind.
First, think of a blog as the editorial in your media channel. This is your owned media. You control it and you can use it any way you like no matter how big or small your audience is.
This is where you can appropriately express your opinions on a subject matter as they might affect your target audience. Content should focus on your prospects’ interests and pains to zero in on what they find important. The following are steps to creating an effective blog.
CREATE A BLOG BRAND VOICE
A blog should have an overall tone or theme, or be presented in one person’s voice. Focus your brand around your Unique Selling Proposition to reinforce why you are different from everyone else and how you can help solve your prospects’ pain.
Do not spend time trying to be everything to everyone. That will not create raving fans or turn traffic into buyers. Align yourself with a specific message that reaches a specific market.
For the work we do for GKIC Insider’s Circle, we stay true to its voice and do not try to appeal to the masses. It is a marketing organization that primarily targets brick-and-mortar businesses and members who come from a sales background. Its content is going to focus frequently on salespeople and big corporations making stupid decisions, MBA marketing types who are removed from reality, and Madison Avenue ad agencies. It is clear who its market is and who its messaging should target.
For a few examples see Figures 11.1 through 11.4 on pages 192 and 193.
Create an editorial calendar to plan topics that are complementary to your overall sales goals and communications strategies. Entice the reader of each blog post with a sneak peak into next week’s blog topic. Make sure to stick to your schedule and post consistently.
After you have established your goal, move to the next step.
FIGURE 11.1: GKIC Ad Aligns its Message to Reach a Specific Market
FIGURE 11.2: GKIC Ad Tip
FIGURE 11.3: GKIC Ad Tip
FIGURE 11.4: GKIC Link to Blog Post
CREATE A THEME RELATED TO YOUR SALES TOPIC
For example, look at magazine subscriptions. For many, each month, the magazine has a certain theme. For example, a sports magazine might have a preview of March Madness in its February issue. That February issue has lots of other things in it but it has a whole bunch of material related to college basketball.
In order to achieve your ultimate goal of a sale (or many sales), your role will shift to one of publisher and content provider while your prospect gets to know you.
When I wanted to sell tickets to an event focused on customer retention, I developed a monthly theme around this topic: “Why Customer Retention and Growth Marketing Is Important to The Success of Your Business.”
CREATE WEEKLY SUB-TOPICS THAT FIT EACH MONTHLY THEME
Your next step is to develop four subtopics that relate back to the overall theme of your monthly topic. Each week will focus on a different aspect of your overall theme, and all will lead toward week four (or day four if you conduct this for four days in a row) when you will make the offer to your audience with a call to action. This weekly content planning will ensure fresh, relevant content is always being added to keep readers interested and engaged up until the point of sale. Like two of my favorite TV series, The Blacklist or Scandal, each episode leads into the next. Here too each blog will lead to the finale of the item you are going to sell.
For our firm’s example, the four subtopics I chose were:
• Your customers are 66% more likely to buy from you than noncustomers.
• There are no costs in selling to your current customers.
• Those who currently give you money should not be treated the same as those who don’t.
• How do you thank your customers each year?
DEVELOP SUPPORTING CONTENT
One of the first things to do before writing any content is to make sure you do some research. Take a look at Quora, LinkedIn Answers, Yahoo! Answers, or other similar Q and A networks where you can find lots of people asking questions that relate to your specific industry. Identify their frustrations, objections, and pain points to address in your content creation. Bonus: You get the exact copy that people use when describing their pain points. This is usually quite different than the way those in your industry refer to it.
Researching these questions may create some ideas and directions for content. Also, take a close look at the links to content within the answers to these questions. Follow these links to see what others in your industry are doing with their content online. (Spying can be fun and profitable! Just keep those dang binoculars hidden.)
You may also want to set up and conduct a survey, or call your existing customers and prospective customers to find out what needs are unmet. When you begin to write your content, keep those unmet needs in mind. Use the information you collect to create a veritable library of remarkable content that is designed to help your customers get what they can’t get anywhere else. Storytelling, testimonials, and providing something of value that meets people’s needs should all be included in your content.
Each post can be anywhere from 350 to 2,000 words. The length should depend on how long it takes to fully get your point across. I have found my shorter blogs perform better with email list opt-ins and driving calls to action, but the same isn’t true for some of our clients. Test what works best for your specific market and be very wary of anyone who tries to tell you there is one end-all-be-all for every market.
WRITE SOCIAL MEDIA POSTS
Once you have your content written, use this content as the source for your social media posts for the month. Engage your social network in an ongoing conversation focused around your topic theme on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and other networks.
This way, all of your content is created with your sales strategy in mind. All of your posts and articles are about walking your prospect towards the sale.
A guideline for content/sales online is that your content should be 85% PBS and 15% QVC, meaning that you shouldn’t self-promote or sell more than 15% of the time. If you post one update per day (recommended), then in each month, you should have no more than four self-promotion posts.
For my firm’s example, posts were pulled from the four weekly blogs.
AUTOMATE PUBLICATION
On-time and consistent delivery is an essential part of making this plan work.
To ensure this, schedule all content in advance. The last thing you want is to have a blog post or social media deadline sneak up on you with no idea of what content to use. Use a service like TweetDeck or HootSuite to pre-program all your content on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Schedule your blog posts and emails ahead of time in your application as well.
For blogs, you should post new, relevant content at least once or twice a week. Your readers should also know the day you typically post and keep to that schedule. Alert readers via email about any new posts on your blog and promote these posts in your social media network.
For our firm, I was able to set up all of the content ahead of time and the system ran smoothly in spite of the fact that I was out of town for most of the month visiting private clients and for speaking engagements. (Marketing automation rules.)
PUBLISH CONTENT
This is when it starts to become fun. Launch your content and start to analyze the results. A/B test different times of day to send messages and post content, different subject lines to get your emails opened, etc. Tweak your remaining content appropriately.
Ask yourself if your content is useful to customers before publishing.
While your goal is the sale, the process of getting there includes being useful to your audience.
“Youtility is marketing so useful, people would pay for it. It’s a necessity for all businesses now, forced to compete for attention not just against other companies selling the same stuff but also against everyone and everything. In this hyper-competitive era, you don’t break through the clutter by shouting the loudest, you get noticed by being truly and inherently useful.”
—Jay Baer, author of Youtility: Why Smart Marketing Is about Help Not Hype (Portfolio 2013)
IT IS FINALLY TIME TO SELL
On day or week four (depending how long your series is), it is time to ask for the sale.
You have spent the three previous posts engaging your target market where they are. They are now interested in the topic you are focused on and are seeking a solution to the problem you have agitated. You have essentially led them to this moment when you reveal the solution. And, since you spent the previous posts providing useful content, you will be seen as the credible source for the solution.
When you are ready to sell, do not just make an offer to purchase something, attend something, or request something. Beyond the thing you want your target market to do, give them a deadline and an added incentive to do so. Creating a sense of urgency is an important part of driving your audience to action. Neiman Marcus, for example, gets me in with an exclusive 24 hour Prada Sale. (Or they would, if they would ever put Prada on sale—hint, hint, Neiman Marcus.)
When it was time to ask my audience to register for an upcoming seminar, I added an incentive of a free white paper if they registered by a certain date. This workshop sold out.
The payoff is a long-term, credible, relevant online presence that increases traffic, builds connections within a community, and creates a strong brand awareness for your product or service.
Consider a campaign example from one of our clients, Chanhassen Fitness Revolution (http://chanhassenfitnessrevolution.com).
When going after cold traffic, we first ran ads to a blog post about exercising:
FIGURE 11.5: Chanhassen Fitness Revolution Ad Drives Cold Traffic to a Blog Post
Then, we retargeted with an ad about the 21-day boot camp:
FIGURE 11.6: Chanhassen Fitness Revolution Follow-Up Ad Retargets Traffic to an Offer
And we then sent traffic to its landing page. See Figure 11.7 on page 200.
And then we sent them to another landing page to finish the signup.
We have tested this “connect first and sell second” strategy time and time again, and the total cost per lead and success rate always beats going after cold traffic directly.
FIGURE 11.7: Chanhassen Fitness Revolution Takes Warm Traffic to a Landing Page
Another example of an effective campaign:
1. Step One (see Figure 11.8 on page 201)
2. Step Two (see Figure 11.9 on page 202)
Sometimes your prospects will need an extra nudge. When you are going after completely cold traffic on Facebook, your audience may need more nurturing to turn into a sale. It is then that a micro-commitment campaign may be the solution. This is where through a series of content first, lead magnet second, and offer third you can turn a cold lead into a lifelong customer.
FIGURE 11.8: Facebook Ad Drives Cold Traffic to a Blog Post
How to Run a Micro-Commitment Campaign
1. Develop blog content that would appeal to your target market.
2. Develop a “lead magnet” giving your target market something of value such as a free report, ebook, video series, etc. (For a step-by-step “how to” on creating a Lead Magnet, visit www.NoBSSocialMediaBook.com)
3. For at least four weeks, run your blog content and lead magnet to your perfect prospects, targeting fans of your Facebook page, your website traffic, and fans of other similar pages.
FIGURE 11.9: Facebook Retargeting Ad Drives Warm Leads to a Live Online Event
4. When you start to run your main offer, focus on the warm leads you have created:
• Facebook fans
• Website traffic (retargeting using Website Custom Audience)
• Email list
When we went straight to cold traffic, our cost was $3.00 per webinar attendee and our show-rate was 20%. When we changed this strategy to a micro-commitments plan, our opt-in decreased to $.87 each and our show rate was over 50%.
Even if you add in the $1.23 it takes for us to get someone on our email list, we are ahead of the game by using this formula.
#NoBSsm Tweetable Takeaways#NoBSsm Tweetable Takeaways
Marketers talk too much about themselves. Think about the pain points of the end user or the person you’re trying to reach. #NoBSsm
Your prospects don’t have time to figure out why they should buy from you. After all, that’s not their job. It’s yours. #NoBSsm
Before you go for the sale, start from a position of value with your target market. #NoBSsm
Raise your relevancy by offering great content to identify your target market, and only once they have been nurtured should you sell. #NoBSsm
Do not spend time trying to be everything to everyone. Focus your brand around your Unique Selling Proposition and target market. #NoBSsm
Your content should be 85% PBS and 15% QVC, meaning that you shouldn’t self-promote or sell more than 15% of the time. #NoBSsm