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welcome everyone and thank you for joining us today for our digital marketing webinar titled content marketing for the life sciences this is andy henton from inside scientific and it's my pleasure to be your host for today's event as usual we have a full session planned today packed with valuable insights best practices and material tailored to address the fantastic input that was collected during our registration process so i speak for everyone that's been a part of this webinar production and first saying thank you for sharing such detailed information about your current content marketing goals challenges what's working what isn't and most importantly how you're looking to use content marketing moving forward so let's get started frank feel free to begin when you are ready thanks andy hi everyone thanks for tuning in my name is frank barker and i'm the marketing manager here at azo network we very much hope that you will leave the webinar today with some actionable insights into how you can develop your own content we've positioned today's webinar with a life science audience in mind but a lot of what you see today is applicable to all walks of science the format for the webinar today is a brief introduction to azo network and news medical life sciences we then move on to our subject experts who collectively have over 50 years experience working within digital marketing i should add that we want this to be a really interactive experience so you take away as much as possible throughout the webinar so we urge you all to use the resource center to ask questions and find extra takeaways where possible now first of all i'd like to give you a very short introduction into our marketing science journey back in 2001 having worked in the advanced ceramics industry for over a decade in the 90s our founder dr ian burkby recognized that engineers designers and scientists often required educating in the potential uses and applications of advanced materials before they could utilize them in their products and processes now this recognition of market demand coupled with the emerging power of the internet led to the launch of our first site azon.com or the 80z materials in 2001. now by 2003 we had hit three million visitors for the first time with azon and now we started to add more to our offering with newsmedical his medical life sciences azo nano and azo optics in the years that followed we added six more websites another 50 million visitors and we're in a position to take it to the next level with our first round of capital raising in 2012. but throughout our journey we've always stayed true to our principal aim sharing science technology and medical stories with people who can make a difference now we're often invited to teach content marketing internally for a lot of companies and will often be found exhibiting or even guest speaking at industry-leading events such as pitcon analytica and neuroscience to name a few now for all digital marketers into in 2019 i know one of the reasons that you're all here today is that one of our key challenges is that b2b prospects conduct around 12 searches before engaging with a specific brand quite simply if you're not there during every stage of the buyer's journey someone else will be now across the aso network we're fortunate enough to have around 6 million people per month interacting with over 700 000 content items consequently this big data allows us to generate many insights one relevant example being that around 62 million visitors a year find content on azo network using search engines and we share many of the same problems as everyone in the audience today we also use our vast audiences to gather survey data and gain insights into scientific marketing in a recent survey of people who purchase scientific products and services we found that 76 of scientists said that online publications had influenced their decision to buy or similarly around 84 of scientists and researchers said that application notes had influenced their decision to buy now over the years we've developed a strategy to simplify how to market science now this strategy is based on what we call our circle of success create great content use targeted distribution methods whether it be via email or the web or mobile and analyze the results for improvement although the core principles of digital marketing remain true the tactics have shifted in an ever enduring effort to gain exposure online if you're a marketing professional working for a scientific company then you'll appreciate that generic b2b marketing guides available don't always offer applicable or usable insights into the nuances on marketing scientific products or services so we hope during the course of this webinar you find practical insights into creating content for a life science and a wider science audience i'm now going to hand you over to my colleague james eyes who's going to talk to you about practical insights in creating content thank you frank welcome everyone joining us today my name is james and i'm the editor-in-chief for news medical's life science and medical website newsmedical.net newsmedical has over 5.7 million visitors every month of which over a million work direct in the life science industry it's important for us to stay ahead of the game when it comes to content uh throughout the webinar signup process we gather a lot of feedback about the greatest content marketing strategies that many of you are facing on a day-to-day basis out of everyone who registered 65 highlighted content production optimization and in-house resources as an issue although there's no magic wand we can offer to solve all these problems overnight we do have a huge amount of experience creating well optimized content for a scientific audience today i'm going to take you through some practical insights and hopefully send you away with methods and tactics for tackling some of your content challenges so let's dive in as many of you will know this year involved a large shift in the way that google ranks content and most of this was focused around eat or expertise authority and trust while eat updates initially affected your money or your life medical websites we're starting to see the latest algorithms start to affect websites that cater to other industries as well life science being one of them so what what is e18 so expertise is about whether the people writing content for your website are considered to be experts in their respective fields it's important to demonstrate your level of expertise on every piece of content that you produce authority is about your brand reputation if people are linking to your website and talking about both your website and content producers on social media you'll be seen as an authoritative figure by google trust is measure is a measurement of credibility and authenticity it's important that your site is secure from a developmental perspective and also provides users with good customer services good is now measuring the trustworthiness of a brand or website using the same types of factors that a real person would and to put this all together google is scrutinizing your brand your website and your content to determine whether a real person should trust the information that you provide throughout this webinar i'll be referring back to these three core values so you may you can begin future proofing your content let's start with generating new ideas for content these statements might sound familiar we hear this a lot from many of our clients and it's certainly something that came through from the sign up form from its webinar generating new ideas is one of the biggest challenges in content marketing and it really shouldn't be i would like to start by looking at how to generate content ideas one of the easiest ways to generate new ideas for your content plan is to talk to the customer support teams for your website if people are getting touch with them it can often mean they cannot find the information on your site an easy way to answer these questions is to create an interview not only will this reduce the workload of your customer support team it will also increase the trust with your audience and attract new customers around five to ten questions is normally enough depending on the focus of your interview and who will answer those questions utilizing the expertise that you have in-house is a great way to move forward interviews offer a quick and effective way of gathering content from your experts in your business it puts less pressure on the individual and gives you as a marketing person more control over the outcome 10 minutes recording some answers compared to an hour or more it might take a product or application expert to write an article will save you a lot of time and effort in the long run if interviews don't work for your audience then you can use the transcribed answers as the bare bones of your next article all you need to do is add the overarching narrative and create a great piece of content another easy way to maximize your content spend is to use google analytics to see what your current users are searching for on your site if you don't have an article on these search terms people be leaving the site without the answers they came to your site for scroll down the list and see what comes up and there's a really good way of generating relevant fodder for a weekly blog or eventual big rock piece of content such as an ebook your customers and visitors are almost providing you with the content page at the title on the subheadings of a great piece of content when it comes to eat google views websites that have an extensive library of content on a particular subject as experts in their field tools like this can help you build up your content library and better rankings as a result if you don't have streams of google analytics data like this a good alternative is to type a search time into google and see what questions come up scroll down to the people to ask part of the page for title or topic ideas to the article that you're creating you should also look at style of the top three results to see the type of content that you'll need to compete with and how you should position the intent of your article to be the top search result my colleague jess will be discussing more about this uh shortly journal articles are a brilliant source of ideas for new content especially seeing as more and more journals are becoming open access look for novel applications that will get people talking and use them to support your existing product or solution offering these can be presented as case studies if you have existing data in the same application areas for e80 demonstrating that your product has been used in a paper and showcasing the connection between those two pieces of content may enhance your position as an authority it also helps reduce the the resource requirement for creating content from scratch why not use what's already available to you and repurpose it for your own needs we do this for a number of clients involved in active areas of life science research providing a steady stream of valuable content that resonates with the intended audience how would you find those general articles quickly luckily google scholar takes all the hard work out of this for you simply type in your company name surrounded by quotation marks and sort by the year you can even set up alerts so that you receive an email whenever a new article is published that mentions your company or product now we've looked at utilizing various forms of written content i'm going to hand over to andy henton of inside scientific who's going to discuss a growing medium which is becoming increasingly popular among researchers webinars andy and thank you james now in terms of generating quality content and creating effective engagement with prospects and customers we are all well aware that webinars are a proven in reliable content marketing format however i'd like to take a few minutes to talk about how companies can approach planning and execute executing their events to better support overall content creation and meeting their marketing objectives first let's start with post webinar strategy many businesses are producing great live webinars we know this but they're falling short on using the on-demand resource both immediately following their live event and in the longer term so if your content is evergreen which you know many webinars in the tech space are you know we might have a fundamental principles of your technology webinar or an application workflow sop webinar and this is likely ever green content therefore it can provide value day in and day out it should be marketed heavily after the fact and long term but despite this we see marketing efforts lacking immediately after the live webinar it's you know the event has happened and we move on to the next thing so as this is great content you should be showcasing it in different ways time and time again also webinar content is pinnacle content or big rock content that used to create smaller assets specifically written content that will then highlight your expertise to google and the other search engines and provide additional porter portals for your customers to access all these educational resources so let's look at how webinars can be used as pinnacle or big rock content to create additional smaller assets and fill your library the strategy is quite simple what we suggest is planning your traditional 45 to 60 minute webinars in chapters so the content can be easily parsed after the fact again using a technology focused or theory of operation webinar as an example let's say we cut the full recording into the overview and fundamental principles section perhaps we have a handful of applications uh key applications that relate so we've got three of those and then we have a q a at the end with our key opinion leaders just cutting each of those sections five sections in that case would be a first step you could go the extra mile by actually looking at the q a material and cutting it down question by question by applying these simple video cuts you're now going to create a minimum 5 but likely up to 10 or more new content pieces which you could then create new landing pages all optimized with headers and keyword rich and help people navigate a larger piece of content or a larger subject matter easier and if you're really keen you can go the extra mile and go beyond what you have in video from producing your webinar but add on other media types that relate to the same subject so these could be application notes blogs and just any other content piece that pulls on the same subject and of course all of these smaller pieces or all of this micro content should have call to actions that drive people towards the full on demand webinar or other assets where you feel you can pull their personal information in exchange for access and i think the final tip on all this is to ensure that in all of these smaller micro content pieces you've provided an opportunity for viewers to submit feedback this is where your audience can bring more ideas to your team which will then guide future content marketing efforts okay and so my final tip about webinars and how they can be used to support your content objectives is all about format we often think of live educational webinars as this 60-minute session typically led by two to three presenters and we close with the 10 to 15-minute q a and while there's absolutely nothing wrong with that and it is a fantastic format that has proven roi it doesn't necessarily fit every subject matter or the objectives you might have in mind so i suggest removing the typical boundaries relating to duration and format when thinking about how you could plan your next webinar start with the end in mind and plan the event based around your desired outcome so here i've put together a chart that will hopefully help with planning or conceptualizing what webinars could look like for your company in the future of course this is accessible as a resource so you're welcome to download this at any time and with that i'll pass things back to you james thanks andy for sharing your insights into webinars uh that leads on to another great content solution the ebook similar to gated webinars ebooks are a great resource to drive downloads and leads and also to chapterize and provide micro moments that can resonate with a diverse audience in this example we turned an ebook into a series of articles uh that each flowed from one to another uh they all ranked well individually and boosted each other with course action that linked through to the next article in the series the final article links through to a product that has been mentioned throughout all three articles in the series and this has an additional benefit internal linking is a major ranking factor for google as it shows that you have a comprehensive set of articles on a topic so it's a win-win so how do you produce this content uh we'll start with the planning uh it's important to ensure that a person writing the content understands the audience it's intended for using a brief template can be a useful way of streamlining this process it will reduce your workload and cost in the long run as it outlines the components direction and technical level that's required it can also be especially useful when resources are short and you need a standardized way of communicating your goals for each piece we run the exact same system with our clients and the process is simple the client tells us what they want to write about we go off and write it ready for their approval and the outcome is a well optimized piece of content with a specific intention and audience finally i just wanted to touch on a couple of really important content considerations in the wake of the google eat algo update expertise is vital the great thing about scientific companies is that you have product managers and technical scientists at your disposal it's important that you showcase your expertise this means showing google and that a person who you're interviewing or author that's writing your content is qualified to talk about that subject an easy way to do this is linking to a short biography from the the content piece you'll also want to link through to their social media and linkedin profile to prove that they're a real person another key challenge is knowing when to use abbreviations and when to use the full phrase for example attenuated total reflectance commonly referred to as atr is a sampling technique used for infrared spectroscopy however when you type in atr into google this is what comes up a website called at the races along with 195 million other results you're therefore going to struggle to rank for atr as a keyword when you type in the full phrase however relevant results appear and there are a lot less of them 1.3 million compared to 195 million now we're going to look at the more technical side of content optimization and seo with my colleague jess maloney hi everyone my name is jess maloney and i am an seo account manager here at azo network today i'll be providing you with an overview of the content optimization considerations you need to be making when you're putting together a life science content marketing strategy we're going to be discussing these considerations with seo in mind but we do also have an seo webinar coming up in november which will cover seo in much more depth so let's dive straight in so keywords are undoubtedly the most crucial aspect of any content optimization and without the correct keyword research and implementation your efforts could be futile you need to choose terms that will have the biggest impact ensuring you get the best roi google's keyword planner search console and third-party tools such as semrush and muzz should be employed here as they take so much of the guesswork out of choosing keywords the search volume also called average monthly searches of a keyword should be one of the first things you discover when you're conducting keyword research there are lots of great tools out there that you can use to determine the search volume of keywords and the most obvious of those being google's keyword planner this is a free to use tool and if you have live google ad campaigns running then you'll get really accurate search volumes however if you're not running that campaign currently you will get more broader estimates sem rush and mars are both great alternatives to google's keyword planner but the numbers might vary slightly as they're not coming direct from the search engine in the example you can see here on screen we've used google's keyword planner to look at a few life science variations if we start by looking at the life science marketing versus life cy marketing example lifetime marketing has zero searches per month so if you were to optimize your site for this term and even if you got the top position for it the traffic you'd get from it would be little to none there can also be really significant differences in search volume with only a slight variation of keywords life science has over a hundred thousand more searches per month than life sci however it's not as simple as choosing a keyword with the highest search volume as typically the terms of the highest volumes are notoriously competitive to rank for you also need to consider things like the intent of your content item and the intended audience and we will look at both of these in more detail in a moment you really need to consider the competition of your keywords when you choose them the life science industry is very concentrated with many different companies vying for the top spot as i've just touched on the keywords with the highest search volume are often the most competitive because if you can get that number one position the traffic you'll gain will be huge the websites that often get these competitive top spots have very sophisticated seo strategies set up and they can't be achieved with just keyword targeting alone we will explore seo strategy in more detail in the seo webinar next month instead of targeting the high search volume highly competitive keyword terms it's often a really good tactic to focus on the mid to low volume keywords as they provide a quick win for example if you target a keyword term with an average of 200 searches per month and we know that the top position gets 34 of the clicks you're going to get 68 new users to your website just 10 of those turn into relevant leads you've got yourself six new prospects so you've checked the volume of your keyword choice and checked the competition but is it relevant being an expert in your field it's very easy to assume that the terms you use every day are universally known this is a common issue with life science specific keywords if we look at this example of pt or positron emission tomography you can see if you search for the abbreviation google provides you with results that aren't relevant to who you'd want to target whereas if you search for the full term the results are extremely relevant while this example might sound obvious there are lots of keyword variations that can decrease your relevance so it's always worth doing a quick search to see if google provides results that you'd want to be found for yourself any seo strategy needs to incorporate regular content it's no longer good enough to build and optimize a website and leave it static for every page of additional content you add to your site you're giving yourself an extra page to optimize and an extra keyword to target so the bigger your site the more you can rank for and the more traffic you can obtain this is really useful when you work in areas where there are multiple relevant keywords that overlap such as neurology neuroscience or neurological problems if you were to try and optimize one page for all three terms you'd get limited results as you're diluting the keywords down however if you have individual pieces of content that focus on each you'll have a better chance of ranking well regular content can also be used to help build an internal link in structure internal links are really valuable in seo as whenever a search engine crawls your page and clicks through an internal link it considers that link relevant to the next page for example if you had a blog post covering neurological diseases and treatments and within this blog you link the term neurology through to your main neurology page you will be telling search engines that this page is really relevant for the term finally regular content also has a technical seo benefit when you add new content to a site it encourages search engines to crawl your site again so more content equals more crawls and more crawls equals more chances to rank well in search engines next we'll be discussing search intent which is the idea that whenever a person uses a search engine they do so with an ultimate goal in mind this is by no means a new concept in fact the idea of intent is ingrained in how search engines like google function in a nutshell google uses algorithmic machine learning to rank serps in order of relevance this is determined by countless parameters including the perceived intent underlying a given search query in 2015 google identified just four categories of search intent i want to know i want to do i want to go and i want to buy these are known as micro moments and they've been a valuable tool in the seo arsenal ever since they allow seos to optimize content for specific keywords and to tailor that content for specific micro moments to maximize its chances of success for example we know from extensive market research that 97 of people conducting a search fall within the first three categories which also happen to be the least commercial regardless it is still possible to fine-tune your content to appeal to people who are conducting a search with transactional intent which brings me to how seos actually adopted this information into their own content strategies these four micro moments boil down to three forms of content navigational informational and transactional these respectively break down into where the researcher intends to find a site an answer to a question or a particular product remember seos aren't looking to classify or even understand the intentions of the users we are aiming to understand the type of content that google ranks highly based on its interpretation of search intent we don't know that a user who types in the query atomic force microscope is looking for informational content but we can tell from some rudimentary research that google ranks informational content highly based on that simple search term we can then use this information to write an informational article targeting the keyword atomic force microscope in the hopes of ranking higher in the serps however these categorizations rapidly run into problems for one they are far too broad and fail to prescribe for nuanced searches a practical example might be a search for marketing science experts is the user attempting to navigate to a specific site or make a transaction for service the serps are subsequently mixed forming an overlap the improvements to query refinement and the improved semantic intelligence of google means that the serps are now more intelligent than the traditional micro moment model one model suggests that there are as many as nine different indicators of intention breaking down navigational informational and transactional queries into format related serps for example there is a subtle difference between research-based queries and questions organic results for navigational search terms may be localized based on the user's ip address two searches for the same keyword with slightly different semantic variations may yield search with totally different visual information images versus videos here you'll see a quick comparison using the keyword atomic force microscope we can search the keyword on its own or we can add modifiers like best the difference is a totally different serp position one changes dramatically based on the modifier best a signifier of commercial intent with this information we can deliver content that is tailored at an increasingly granular level beyond those conventional micro moments practically guaranteeing improved rankings and user engagement thanks jess for that fantastic section on the importance of seo and now we're going to pass things back to frank barker who is going to talk about the role of analytics in understanding and tracking customer journeys so frank the floor is yours thanks andy uh i'd like to thank all my colleagues for their contributions and try and consolidate some of the key themes before moving on to how do we really prove that content marketing can work for you you've all seen how the circle of success forms the foundation for content marketing success and you've also seen the importance of quality relevant and timely content and how it can power the customer journey by providing the answers to the questions raised by your prospects and customers once you have generated your content we've hopefully given you some good tips on how you can use seo to ensure your content is found by the largest most relevant audience andy provides a good intro into webinars and similarly we would endorse using video as a key element into your content mix although somewhat outside the scope of this webinar the distribution of content via email continues to be a highly successful marketing approach we send out around 1.8 million emails each month across over 100 subject areas and are happy to discuss what works and what doesn't in terms of open rates calls to action and email content whether that's related to newsletter style content or even ultra targeted customized emails focusing on live science activities one other interpretation of content marketing is that it powers the marketing flywheel and allows you to attract engage and delight your clients and prospects flywheel courtesy of hubspot however although the generation of terabytes of great life science content is a wonderful thing have you really figured out why you are doing it and has it worked if lead generation is your goal have you also figured out what return you are receiving for your investment which tools are using to measure your goals and roi i'm sure that most of you are covered by the examples on this slide you're somewhere on the spectrum between a relatively simple google analytics installation or even a highly sophisticated relatively expensive marketing automation solution if you are using google analytics one tip please figure out how to set goal and event tracking or ask an expert to help we can help you with this it's relatively straightforward once you know what you're doing and does help to provide insight into which content is working for you in relation to specific goals whether that's top of funnel awareness or even bottle of bottom of funnel lead conversion as you journey around the circle of success with your content marketing efforts remember your role as a digital marketer is to use data analysis to turn data into insights those insights into actions and actions into commercial outcomes which brings the neatly onto our approach to data analytics now around five years ago we recognized the need to make sense of the interactions and engagement that we're generating on behalf of our clients across the aso network by building our own data analytics tool from the ground up which was in our particular sweet spot of marketing science this led to the development of our in-house analytics platform azo intel which i know many of you in the audience will be familiar with so you can see from this screen grab which demonstrates all the stats across our network that in the last 12 months we've had over 72 million visitors and 84 million page views generating 342 000 plus sales leads in addition to those headline figures we can also drill down into specific sector data such as academia healthcare and r d by way of example of what success can look like let's take this article which resides on news medical life sciences with the title what are lipids so you can see that it's a big rock piece of content that is well rated by site visitors it's written and reviewed by individuals with the aforementioned expertise authority and trust and it currently occupies number one spot on google out of 91 million entries when we zoom into some of the engagement stats using aso intel you can see that this article is averaging around 25 visits per hour and we can see some of the organizations viewing that content furthermore whenever there is a specific data capture on your content we can view insightful granular data we then use this data to score the lead objectively and automate any follow-up between sales and marketing so with a simple lead scoring framework and an api this is how we would automate the lead scoring and distribution process in essence we score leads on two types of data implicit and explicit or quite simply physical characteristics and lead behavior so physical characteristics can be anything from job title country company size seniority etc and lead behavior can be scored by browsing history email responses completed forms or brochure downloads so to give you an example if you imagine a head of r d research lab responds to your email campaign then browses your solutions pages before requesting a quote these are all positive contributions that would objectively contribute to a high lead score head of r d as a job title scores 10 points u.s company scores 20 points fortune 500 company scores 20 points we can then factor in the score of the behavior actions taken and we have an overall lead score you then just choose the threshold for a sales qualified lead say greater than 50 points or 70 points and you have an automated lead qualification and rota system so there is much more information available about aso intel in the resource center and we'd be more than happy to arrange a demo to show how it can help you on your website so the data has spoken and we're now at the end um we really hope that you've gained some actionable insights from today's webinar and we welcome the opportunity for a more detailed chat at any of these events i'm going to hand you back over to andy as we prepare for the q a session andy thank you frank and yes at this point we're going to move right into our q a session i would just like to quickly mention that we will also have matt pullen from the azo team joining us for the remainder of our webinar so welcome matt all right i'd like to direct our first question to you james and the question is what are your insights on the life science industry in terms of desired content yeah i mean the the key desire um for all content for all people is always the the same it's just to reach new people and whether that's with incredibly technical content or broad content or everyone's trying to reach new people um with with that to gain new leads to sell more products and really when people you know look to produce new content but they should look at how technical they want it to go um if they're a company that has a lot of uh technical information they might want to go more broad to kind of bring people in to their knowledge and if they have a lot of of you know broad content they might want to focus in on the applications that they've got to really show off how their products their services are are great within the industry um but yeah it's all it's all to do with just uh getting to a greater audience and you know i agree with you on the the point of apple application you know we find that a lot with the work that we do uh some of the most popular content and this is years running on inside scientific when it at least comes to webinars is the events that touch on a how-to subject matter so they can get into the technical nitty-gritty on sops best practices and application notes but i think it's also important that you have other content pieces that as you say might be higher level and bring them into your domain first to then point the point viewers towards these uh more specific content pieces yeah definitely i mean you've got to imagine the the people you're trying to reach are just not in the same stage um they're not all uh looking to buy right now some are just just starting their journey and if you can be there uh in every one of those points you'll have a much higher success rate as i think frank frank mentioned earlier on absolutely uh any other additions um from the azo team on desired content types or media media style uh you know i think i think it's really important to sort of understand either the questions that you're con you're asked and having content available to answer those questions and also how where you want to be considered from a thought leadership perspective or a general awareness perspective every piece of content that you create is going to be answering a question to someone being present and visible at that time where people are searching for that information is half the battle right i agree well i guess another quite an extension of this of this question knowing that you guys do a lot of video are you finding that there is a desire for an increase in video as a media type to explain certain things in the life science industry there's a really nice example i saw this the other day it was it wasn't strictly life sciences but it was um it was a project management tool that you might know monday.com um i'd been on their website um maybe earlier that day and then i was actually just checking out some some of the latest baseball games on youtube and before i was actually able to get to the clip it was just it was a busy marketing manager who's dealing with a lot of projects um so it pretty much spoke exactly to who i was um and it hit me with a series a short sharp series of explainer videos explaining their product and what it does i thought that was a really clever effective way of really hitting me straight between the eyes with stuff that i struggle with on a day-to-day basis so it's when using video in conjunction with clever retarget retargeting or social media strategy it can be extremely powerful yeah you know that's fantastic insights on this one a good start let's uh look at something else here um which i'm going to point again to you james but we've had some questions come in about creating effective methods and ways to get visitors to engage your content but be willing to share their contact information in that process and this subject is trending right now i guess we could say with uh the subject of gdpr and just internet privacy trends being on the rise enough and increased awareness over these last year and continuing through right now so let's talk about that for a bit okay um i think really you know when you're thinking about content that you create um it's all about you know relevance value and above all trust uh from from the user to make sure that they can trust you um the most successful businesses will teach their audience about their subject matter matter um and if you're creating valuable content that answers the questions your target audience are asking then you're building that trust and showcasing your expertise uh to that end um people will have no problem passing on their details because they feel confident in receiving a better value product what puts people off is when they don't trust the site um and are tricked by you know a title um they think they're getting one thing and they end up getting something else that's not a value to them um unfortunately google's becoming um you know more sophisticated in in ranking their pages ingly so this is becoming less common uh from a from a user perspective um so if you're producing relevant high value content you can ride that wave and see success you know i i would see that your your form captures as a as a transaction or a trade people view their their personal information as a commodity um that that's highly valuable to them um you know as you said um and you've got to think what are you offering in return yeah the the myth that gdpr has killed league capture is rubbish we've seen more lead capture from you know european countries than ever before um and it's taken us uh you know less than six months to recoup all of the the losses in our subscriber database from from pre um gdpr numbers um so we've made a lot of changes to make sure that our content is relevant to make sure that we're offering something to to our subscribers and to highlight that that we are a trustworthy source i think it helps as well that you're you're quite clear when people do download that they they can um leave at any point that's you know key really you know people people can can come in and come out i think i think that also helps to build trust as well the fact that you know if your content isn't gated and allows people to sort of dip in and dip out when they need it that builds trust as well and you're only going to gain their trust by as james said giving back um it's a trade-off but at the same time you're going to get them coming back because you're giving away the information freely and all it's going to take is a name um to get the information that you're looking for yeah well and i i think uh you know what you're touching on uh matt content ensuring that you plan with the end in mind and part of that planning is deciding whether a content piece should be gated or not and that's one of the biggest errors is trust cannot be built if you don't give away something um in our case for free that everyone knows this is a free asset there's no need to gate this this is a a small article this is not something that it provides value obviously but it doesn't provide value that meets um the the status at which someone holds exchanging their personal information right which is what you're saying james so it's about actively thinking about am i really in the position to ask for personal information on this one or should i just use it to build uh awareness brand value and trust yeah you've got to think about your competition as well if you're not offering something um as a high value but free resource and your competitor might be doing it and they might be getting that engagement that leads to a sale right that's right yeah it's not always about lead retrieval it's about engagement and people uh capturing uh the message that is that is the main purpose of the article or piece right very good let's talk about advice and tips and tricks for smaller marketing teams we've had a number of people interact as part of this webinar and on other initiatives that we've done where they've stressed we're a small team maybe even just one or two people how do we get it done so frank maybe i'll ask that you take the lead on this one yeah they're very pertinent to to myself having come from a a small team where i wear a lot of hats i get asked to do a lot of different things um i would say uh well principally automate whatever processes you can processes and workflows with uh you know some lots of clever marketing automation software out there crm i'd say any of that sort of stuff that can be automated take the time to find someone who can automate that for you or do it yourself that that will then free yourself up to focus on a bigger project um you're effectively a project manager spinning lots of plates at once so take advantage of insourcing which is you know the human capital available within your business so if you've got phds and masters students and people who've done a lot of research use them just get the information out of their heads and get it onto paper get it into video get it into webinars or infographics um you know it often helps if you can foster a lot of buy in there throughout from the company so getting a lot of buy-in from from the top down really helps in that instance uh so apart from insourcing uh i'd probably yeah find some trusted partners for your outsourcing as well so if there's like you say if there's a video or if there's content writing that needs doing um you you i suppose spend some time experimenting finding the trusted partners once you get them hold on to them look after them and uh and get it down to a set process so i pretty much say automate where possible in-source and outsource any other sort of uh the remedial activities i agree with this and you know another thing that comes to mind is is trying not to do too much and this applies to small and large companies i mean it's all um a challenge that's based on scale right um the larger companies are trying to do a higher volume and often try to do too much at once and the end result is a so-so piece of content or an okay webinar but that's also because they're trying to do ten at the same time whereas the smaller team of one to two might be trying to do one webinar one article in one video and they should have just picked one and done it really really well um and that's what i find is that there's this maybe pressure um because there's all these different ways to generate content and and to win in the marketing world generate leads increase conversions but regardless of size you can't do it all and so you have to pick your projects and do them well yeah i'd agree with that i think it also helps to have a sort of 12-month view of as to what your plan is going to be um we we often advise companies in fact we we do we employ ourselves so we we um we'll be going to four different shows uh this year over the coming 12 months and we will work back from those shows that we sort of hang our campaigns off the neurosciences or the pitcons or or analytica right so we'll actually run webinars and ebooks and blog pieces in conjunction with those shows so that by the time we get to those shows people actually know who we are and they come and speak to us on the booth right yeah that's a good example and i guess we have touched on this today's webinar but also the big rock pieces and the you know the example i shared the pinnacle webinar when your small team if you can try to knock off big projects it makes that um repurposing and uh cutting cropping and reusing materials to create smaller pieces of content all that much easier which um is the smart strategy absolutely yeah very good okay let's um here's another question uh it is do you have any suggestions for turning technical content into well-optimized and engaging online content and um jess maybe you could uh lead this one for us yeah sure and so i think there's a few ways that you can approach this for a bit of background i think review content at three different stages and ever funnel so we have the top of the funnel the middle of the funnel in the bottom of the funnel now this has been touched on a little bit in previous questions and but top of the funnel content pieces are usually interest-based general subjects answer questions like what is or how to and these two pieces of content are usually most suited for seo purposes because they are the traffic drivers but within these they do lose a lot of that technical content that you do want to keep in whereas the bottom of the funnel content is well is where most of the technical content would actually form now if you can get these pieces of content ranking well and rankings at the top of the search engine engines they would have a low search volume so you wouldn't get that much organic traffic to them so you wouldn't get a great roi on those so my suggestion would be to get this technical content ranking would be to use what you've got like andy's just kind of touched on then to cut it up into different pieces of content and create a series on top of this series as well what you can also do is create a top of the top of the funnel piece of content that relates to this technical article and within this um top of the funnel content you can provide links to the technical pieces to help drive track traffic internally and also what an area i touched on quite a bit before was the keyword research so i'd highly suggest doing the keyword research in the area of this specific piece of content and just to make sure that the keywords you're choosing are going to be relevant and provide you with the right audience as well agree they're 100 yeah andy so we've actually i think i touched on it before with the about the survey so we've got some tremendous data sets across you know hundreds of thousands of uh of sales qualified leads um with you know in conjunction with lots of content items we actually i think i think it's around about 90 of our sales qualified leads are driven by like five percent of the pages which are ultimately the bottom of funnel product style pages um whereas traffic is driven by the sort of type of funnel article where the traffic drivers will get they'll probably get about 90 of the traffic but they'll they'll generate very few leads but when when used in conjunction with a product profile or a technical piece of content then that's when um you can you can sort of drive that conversion i think it's also important to realize that not everyone is looking to buy now right um you know if you put this into real life you're not going to go and walk into a car showroom and say i'm going to buy this car right now you're actually going to do your research on it and research tends to start at the beginning answering a question or realizing what you're looking for and i think on average someone will someone might look at five pieces of content before they make a sort of a decision to even talk to someone so it's it's the long game you've got to be you've got to be patient but you've also got to be be producing content that answers questions all the way through the the funnel that that jess was talking about earlier yeah and would you say that um this is uh you know a strategy for having different type of ctas on landing pages that are high-end at the you know or at the top or middle of your funnel where you have these you know you've got different types of people browsing they're at different stage of the buying cycle but these varied ctas will then allow them just to jump forward to say yeah actually i need under i need product information i i want to start looking at specs and really getting into the technical detail versus someone who just needs to sign up to a dedicated list do you want to start receiving more information like this right so there's varied ctas did you see that um being effective to support this uh absolutely yeah so we've actually done uh we've done research on ctas as well we do a lot of a b testing um if if you're more specific the more specific you are use an action word um say like to discover more about i think there's a depot clear or atp or whatever it may be um it's it's far more effective than just uh download article it's if you're specific you combine an action word with a um you know with something a specific noun or some a specific subject then it gets it yields far better results