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this is Andy from orbit media and this video is a content strategy framework that really combines a lot of the best stuff that we know about digital I'm gonna connect all the dots through to the very end showing how in a lot of ways your website and your digital marketing are sort of a bridge from google.com to your websites Thank You page lead generation creating demand why do some sites do it so well some content programs are so effective and create so many leads and other content marketing programs and strategies never really get there I want to start by explaining a myth and something that we hear a lot that doesn't really make sense to me or work that well it sounds like this keep on blogging that's sort of what they say you'll get enough traffic from search and social and email and visitors will move from your blog posts and content marketing content over to your service pages and coincidentally need your help that day after which they go to the about page build some trust fill out your contact form and make it to the Thank You page doesn't really happen that often or that well if you look at your analytics for any actually any b2b service company in my experience people who start their visit on a sales page or a service page are 50 times more likely to convert into a lead than people who start their visit on a blog post I created this by building just two simple segments in Google Analytics people that start their visit on one type of page or another type of page and I see this a lot it's just not that likely that visitors to a blog post ever really need your services or that likely to turn into a lead so what is the mechanic that makes content marketing so effective what if this isn't it then what does work well content marketing is critical partly because it gives the world something to link to it improves your domain authority indirectly by having link worthy content if you look at Google search console to see what people have been linking to on your website you'll probably see something like this it's all the blog posts because people almost never link to service pages why would they they're basically ads but people link to helpful useful con than all the time so this is an SEO driven content framework because those links and authority flow through the navigation on your website to every other page improving the likelihood of ranking of your service pages improving the domain authority of your entire website and that's what you need you could blog readers all the time that's lovely but to get qualified visitors who actually need our help to visit our service pages those are the people who are 50 times more likely to become leads that's the job that's the game that's one of the main reasons to do content marketing is to combine it with SEO to attract links links attract Authority Authority is what's going to help our service pages rank when those pages rank we attract qualified visitors and those qualified visitors are the ones who actually may become leads so I'm going to do this as an example I'm gonna do it for an office coffee delivery company we're making up a business here we're calling it speedy bean this is an actual content strategy framework for an office coffee delivery company and it starts with the core it starts at the beginning which is the nucleus of this demand gen program the search optimized conversion optimized sales page it is optimized to convert by targeting key phrase that it has a chance of ranking for let's start by checking the difficulty of the target key phrase office coffee delivery I'm using the mods link Explorer it's a paid tool but there's free ways to get these insights what we're looking for is an idea of the general difficulty for the key phrase in other words the pages that rank high for that phrase have how much authority in this case it looks like an average of the authority of the pages that rank put this in the range of about 20 out of 100 in other words the sites that rank are of medium to low authority what is our Authority speedy bean coffee has a domain authority of 16 so office coffee delivery service is a little bit out of reach that's why we're building a content strategy that is going to power SEO and have links and authority in mind but the other part about this page is that it is conversion optimized so it leverages human psychology visitors come with questions our job is to answer their questions unanswered questions would kill conversion rates on addressed objections kill conversion rates and we support those answers with evidence testimonials social proof any kind of evidence we can finally that page has to have clear compelling specific calls to action a page without a CTA is of course not going to convert as well the next part of our content strategy is the mission it's the foundation so it's very simple the idea is just to document who you're talking to what you talked about and why they care your content is in your blog your newsletter everything in your social streams is where audience X gets information why for benefit Z it's a fun exercise to do content strategists love this kind of thing it's fun so you'd think everyone would do it in fact only 39% of companies have a documented content strategy ing to the Content Marketing Institute MarketingProfs b2b content survey yet those that do are twice as likely to report success in their content that's not weird at all because one of the benefits of having a good documented mission statement is that it can be adapted into a great call to action just look at these two email signups this is for speedy bean get fun weekly workplace tips because no one loves a boring office that gives me a reason to sign up it's a call to action that's specific and indicates a benefit in a topic I'm gonna get workplace tips and they're fun look at the one next to a boring generic ineffective it says nothing yet you see these all over the internet people who just make newsletter signup submit just there's nothing nothing about it that would compel that visitor to take action it doesn't tell them what they're gonna get it makes no promises our content mission statement for speedy bean is this we are we're office managers find fun tips for the workplace to build happier more productive teams quite simple part three an hour of a seven step process is to publish original research it is an all powerful format for content research has shown this Steve racin from from buzzsumo did analysis on a million articles and found that most content doesn't really get any links or shares performs not very well at all and what Steve concludes is that if you want to create content that achieves a high level of both shares and links then you should concentrate on one of two things opinion-forming authoritative content or well researched and evidenced content in other words strong opinions and original research again go back and look at search console and see who's been linking to things in your content if you've ever published original research you'll likely find that it dominates the top pages in terms of link attraction these are the pages that are eminently link worthy because original research supports other people's messages and citing it a simple citation a link back attribution for the original source of that data is totally normal and simple best practices so there's three ways you can publish original research we've talked a lot about this in the past there's other posts on our site that explain this in detail you can do observation by either just picking a data setting analyzing the data or by aggregation you can combine data from other data sources to produce a research and data that is new and somewhat original or the mass outreach and analysis on big big outreach data such as a survey which is powerful because you can produce data that is otherwise unavailable without talking to people but regardless of the approach your ID your job here is to find the missing statistic find that missing stat when you find a missing stat you have contributed to your industry you've made yourself the primary source you are really adding to the conversation so we highly recommend publishing original research it is just that effective yet most people don't do it when we asked a thousand bloggers if they publish original research in the last 12 months we'll need 25% of them said yes probably because it's really hard to do it's like 10 times the effort but in our experience it is a hundred times the results and when we ask those thousand bloggers if they got results the people who have published original research were three times as likely to report strong results from their own content fourth step in the process is to write for our prospects write for people who are currently in our sales funnel if at all possible this is going to force you to be empathetic as a Content marketer so for speedy bean I ride along on some sales calls I'm listening in on some phone calls and I learned that people keep asking do I have to get a coffee grinder or why should we switch to whole bean fee or my team really likes those the instant k-cups okay I'm seeing a common objection or a concern or a question and if I analyze the conversations happening with our prospects I'll learn that there's lots of commonality a lot of people who come in have come have these specific questions so my job is not answer the questions of those people if I don't do this I'm going to be missing important content opportunities so when people ask me do I really need a coffee grinder my answer won't be good question I'll just explain here on the call my answer will be I'm glad you asked I'm sending you a link and then they get an article from me that explains an extreme detail hold the information about the life change in this case the life-changing benefits of whole bean coffee freshly ground each morning now my prospect sees it in a format that they can pass along to other decision-makers very important for b2b lead generation conversation by having it in private it's really a mistake to answer each sales question one-on-one or with the same email over and over without publishing that as content huge missed opportunity so what great content marketers have learned especially in b2b is that when the prospect asks a question the sales team answers that question but then needs to pass the topic along to the marketing team because the marketing team can then write an article that supports to answer answers that question and then give that as an email they can forward along as a to the sales team and share with the next prospect beyond text we need to go beyond text we're going to upgrade our content to visuals whenever possible because text is not the strongest format for content if that was a successful article I'm going to recreate it as an infographic here's the whole beam ground coffee smackdown 10 reasons why you need to get whole bean coffee assuming that's what part of my value proposition whatever is outperforming the other content I want to upgrade to visuals because there are laws of visual hierarchy and things that are large or obviously more prominent than things that are small I think it's a high on the page or more prominent than things lower on the page contrast as important colors important but look at the format movement and video has more visual prominence than image nikon's which is more visual prominence than text so we should always be looking for opportunities to go beyond text it's critical there are no super successful content marketing programs that lack visuals are a strategy for for images and video and it's the surefire success formula turn your top X into a y in that case I turned my top blog post into an infographic better yet turn it into a video or trim your top three articles into a guide or whatever your best Facebook post was make that into your next newsletter repurposing content is an absolutely amazing tactic that we should never miss especially when it's upgrading formats such as text to images Leonard Kim makes this point a lot he says everything we publish is either a unicorn or a donkey one of the main goals for analytics is to find those unicorns and then make baby unicorns cute as metaphor ever next we're going to collaborate with influencers the idea there is to build trust and prove the quality of our content we can increase traffic and the bloggers who do collaborate with influencers are the most likely to report strong results from their content the way in which this supports lead generation may not be obvious but bottom line you want to lead you to get a lead you need two things you need visitors you need to convert those visitors into traffic and a conversion rate but which source of traffic is the most likely to become a lead is it search or social or email it's actually search because those visitors have strong intent they searched for something they typed it on a keyboard they need your help so the goal there of course is to rank so why do sites Frank how do we get our page to rank well we need two things links and content as in authority and relevance the two main search ranking factors so we get to the most important question in all of digital why do people link to things well basically you need to have content that's link worthy we already covered that original research and relationships with people who create links right influencers content creators bloggers authors journalists editors it's really important to have relationships with content creators if we ever expect to drive enough authority to get those sales pages to rank to create a steady stream of qualified visitors and they're easy to find here's a Twitter search tool I'm searching for office managers perfect for my audience plus bloggers a writer or author make sure to add one of those words that you find people who are content creators people who create content create links and that is going to support our long term SEO goals but sumos another great way to do this you can search for influencers with filters such as bloggers influencers and journalists now the way to collaborate with these people is the fun part you can reach out to them and ask for a contributor quote you can include a group of them in a roundup where you ask them each a question or set of questions find one superstar content expert subject matter expert and do a deep dive interview you can ask someone for a guest post or you can pitch a guest post for their site but in the long run the idea is to get them into your content share ideas about content with that group include some of them in there as contributor quotes in the article with faces and names and makes your content more credible improves the quality and it improves the social sharing because they're more likely to help you promote write collaborative content is just going to have a larger audience because it has more people involved bottom line in Li in creating content is an ally in promoting content so everyone does it right nope only 18% of b2b brands have ongoing influencer marketing campaigns bottom line guys if you're not making friends you're doing it wrong so the seventh and last piece of our content strategy framework is to do outreach and writing for other websites we just touched on this take two marketers to content programs two strategies content program a rights to articles program B rights to articles and pitches one to an editor yellow in this case is our off-site publishing now that post is going to link back to the original in the author bio if nowhere else and they get another writer to contribute an article now there's two articles on the website from two different authors and one piece is on another website so we have three pieces of content associated with our brand a link back to our site to friends round to its linear progression you can imagine here but look around for nice blog buddy but this is what great web marketing looks like more friends more links more social shares more content so powerful so effective yet only 60% of bloggers ever write guest posts I've been doing content a very long time but to this day one-third of my articles are still written for other websites why wouldn't I the chance to collaborate with expert authors it's fun it's effective and it's friendship highly recommended get off your own site write for other sites makes a big big difference okay ready we're gonna put it all together let's do this I'm going to show you an example for speedy bean the office coffee delivery service a content strategy framework built specifically to drive search and leads keeping in mind that there are two kinds of visitors remember the transactional visitors need a product or service they need office coffee delivery they're 50 times more likely to convert but then of course the vast majority of visitors are just looking for answers transactional visitors search for commercial intent keywords the dollar sign phrases the information visitors are just looking for information and there are question mark key phrases commercial intent information intent so we have two kinds of pages on our website there's the products and service pages this is the brochure part of the website it's search optimized and conversion optimized and then there's the helpfully useful section the blogs where we have all the helpful information they drive two types of visitors these people likely to become leads these people might just subscribe or follow or maybe link back to us we need to get the the authority here to ever get these pages to rank so we have to build the mousetrap first Barry Feldman's metaphor if your website is the mousetrap the contents the cheese so we're going to start by building that core that mousetrap that's our office coffee delivery service page it is a red dot on this thing I'm going to build a framework and it has answers and testimonials and calls to action we talked about the framework for conversion then the pillar the main piece the center of the hub the original research I'm going to reach out to 50 different workplaces ask them what kind of office perks they have it's a lot of phone time it takes a bunch of work but I will end up with a legitimate study that shows what the top perks are at the top offices it's kind of charts and data and quotes from influencers and then if you want to you can subscribe visitors can get the content upgrade maybe they want to have been a more printable version or a more detailed analysis so I've got a piece of gated content potentially in this program now I'll write the how-to article how to retain your tap employees this is a keyword focused article as well it's got charts and data and links back to the anchor piece and I will pitch as a guest post how not to article a mistakes publish the best practices now I'm going to publish mistakes and pitch that to an editor I call this the evil twin how to lose an employee it's it's reaching out to authoritative websites linking back to the original or linking back to the the research and then turning that research of course turning that research into an infographic or something more visual maybe a video about the top perks the top offices basically a repurposing version of my larger research piece and that also makes a great guest post that's a great pitch would you be interested in running this I've got an article to go with it'd be great for your audience new data very likely that that would get accepted time to find some influencers to collaborate do an interview about employee retention find some HR authority that I can talk to the credible person and pitch myself as an influencer maybe to a podcast hey do you want to talk about this research just came out recently we would love to share it with your audience in my experience podcasters are not it's swamped with at with submissions so it could be good white space an opportunity there if you talk about the research of course you're gonna link back to the research and their show notes they'll certainly link back to you they would normally would and then finally we're just gonna do some blogging vibe workplace secrets inside the top offices coffee tea or beer what are they drinking at the top offices or the turn on dishes what's wrong with office kitchens so this create this plan obviously went far beyond regular blogging but I'm going to support it with more content this is the difference that's it can you feel it red is the core the service page the sales page conversion and search optimized the big dot in the middle is my research and I'm publishing in other formats publishing in other places publishing with different people and how often could I do this my framework I maybe could repeat this quarterly write full-time marketer could put this kind of plan together and do it on a consistent basis you know and you've got your upgrade you've got your media collaborations and PR because I'm guest post to support it so remember how much authority do I have how difficult is the phrase office coffee delivery not the easiest phrase to rank for the other high ranking pages seem to have more credibility than me in general they're all kind of in the mid 20s for domain Authority with 100-plus linking websites how much authority did I have I think my authority was like 16 out of a hundred that's my starting point I've got 42 websites linking to me so how long would it take me to create a consistent flow of qualified leads let's say each round of this research produced 10 or 20 links I would have 100 plus incoming links certainly by the end of the year I started at 40 right you just imagine how this would work I think I'm gonna be victorious and create a consistent stream of qualified visitors and leads through this strategy by the end of the year that's my prediction I'm very sure of it actually it no doubt at all I'd be a successful in that time with a plan this comprehensive because like like only 39% of companies I am research driven like only 25% of companies my strategy is anchored in original research and like only 18% of businesses it's powered by influencers right I've got credible people and experts in my content and that outreach piece right only 60% of bloggers are doing that so put that together 39 percent times 25 percent times 15 percent times 60% this is a strategy that really only one percent on average of content programs would include all of those aspects it's just not that common for people to combine these things and it's a problem because if you don't you're just far less likely to create the outcome you're looking for of consistent demand in the end there's really two kinds of content strategies their mission driven research anchored influence or powered and PR focus strategies and there's the 9% of people who didn't watch this video makes sense doesn't it very powerful when used in combination we hope this is a content strategy that you can use for your b2b program very confident in its success for you most people don't do it so there's still plenty of opportunity people say digital marketing is getting harder but in my experience the key to beating 99% of people is just to do what they don't do and that's exactly what we just did I hope this was useful we'll keep publishing more of these if you know someone a strategist or any anyone in digital who would find this useful I would be grateful if you pass it along again Andy from orbit see you next time