Time is a very limited and valuable commodity in this day and age; and while we enjoy creating in depth posts about everything that is digital marketing; we understand that you might not have the time to sit down and enjoy it.
This is why this week we come to you with something different; a podcast.
Join us as Chris Muccio interviews content marketing expert Lorraine Ball on a brief discussion about the benefits that can be derived from content marketing.
Disclaimer: we suggest listening to the podcast to get the maximum insight from our expert speaker.
Introduction
Welcome to Digital Marketing Made Easy podcasts with your host Chris Muccio. Be sure to head over to www.socialfusion.com to subscribe to our weekly podcast series. Today our guest expert is Lorraine Ball. If you've ever wished to hear someone peel back the layers and explain the benefits of content marketing in a very practical sense. Sit right back and listen to Lorraine. You could learn more about her at www.roundpeg.biz.
Today, Chris and Lorraine are going to focus on some of the challenges as well as the solutions for content marketing.
Chris Muccio [00:00:42]
Let's start addressing some of the basic challenges. You know you are head and shoulders above a lot of us in the content marketing world. You have a lot of strategies, but someone sitting in the audience, they might say, "You know what Lorraine, this all sounds great I don't even know where to find source material." Can you address that?
Lorraine Ball [00:01:04]
Absolutely. At its heart, every piece of content should answer a question. So the first thing you should think about if you're going to be creating content is: what are the questions that you answer every day. Many companies have sort of an FAQ page, each frequently asked questions becomes a good starting point for a blog post or a white paper or a podcast. So I think the first thing any business owner can do is sit down and ask, you know when you're in the sales call, what are the questions that every customer asks you? Or should ask you?
When you get asked this question, what's the question that you know someone is really interested and ready to buy? Those are the questions, start writing and creating content. A lot of business owners get asked a question and they fire off an e-mail with a response. Guess what, that e-mail, if you take out anything that would identify the customer, makes a great blog post.
Now for one of her success stories.
The question we get asked all the time is: Why do I have to have a website? Hosting a web design, a domain name, and why am I paying for all these different pieces? The analogy I came to was; thinking of your website as a mobile home. At RoundPeg, we build a mobile home which has all these cool features but its no fun to live in if you don't pull into a trailer park and get hooked up to the electricity, and the water. And the trailer park is your hosting company. And then if you want anybody to find you, you got to have an address, that's your domain name. Well, I found myself telling this story over and over and over again I finally wrote a blog post. And so now every time a customer asks me, I just send them an email with a link to the blog post
Chris Muccio [00:03:22]
That's great. I found myself in the same position. I have to ask the same question over and over and over. I thought to myself, gosh the response is an awesome blog post so you can definitely agree with that. Earlier you talked about evergreen content, and you talked about timely content. How does someone look at content from a standpoint of them trying to extend the life of it?
Lorraine Ball [00:03:56]
A couple of things that you can do. One is you are you going to put it on your website and that's awesome. But where else are you going to promote it? So for example what we do is, we write blog posts five days a week. We write one newsletter a week and so we will pick one of our popular blog posts and then maybe we'll go back and look at related content that we wrote a month ago or two months or three months and we'll pull one or two paragraphs from the new blog post and then one or two paragraphs from one of the older blog posts and we send that out in an e-mail. And at first, you're thinking well but the information was on your blog. Why are you sending it in the email?
To give you some numbers, on a really good day, we have three to four hundred people that visit the RoundPeg website. Our e-mail newsletter list is almost four thousand people. And so even on our very best day, the most popular blog post we've ever had won't reach those kinds of numbers. There are thirty-seven hundred people whom I have a relationship with who have never seen it. And so, that gives me an opportunity to identify what was my best, most compelling content. Find what were your hot topics and send them to a wider audience. Bring them back to my website. Give them a chance to look around and go "Wow this is new, I didn't know she was doing that." And then at the bottom of every blog post is a download offer. So now a smaller group of those people would be like "Wow she's got a white paper. I want that." And so out of those 4000 people I get 10 or so that put their hand up. And those are the 10 I'm going to call this week.
Chris Muccio [00:06:07]
Again it is a great way tying back to what you said about shortening the sales cycle. But let's take two steps back for a moment. Maybe you just wrote a blog post on something that you're responding to in an e-mail. You use that content, created a blog post, you saw what was popular. Maybe you've combined that now with the older post, you took out a couple of paragraphs. You now have a nice newsletter. You're hitting a wider audience with this newsletter, you bring people back to your site. Of course, you have a download, and now you just streamlined that sales cycle down to those you know 10, 15, 20, people that went into that download. What you do with content marketing is awesome.
Lorraine Ball [00:06:46]
Thank you. Can I give you another example? So now you have that same wonderful blog post and we put it on both my personal LinkedIn page as well as my company LinkedIn page. Again it's on that same topic; there are people that I am connected to on LinkedIn, several thousand, who may not be on my e-mail newsletter. Maybe they are former co-workers, family members, friends of friends, people I'm in a networking group with who've never signed up for my newsletter. Same thing. I put the link there and again, I always link to a blog post with the download. I did one this weekend. I just wanted to see what happened. I actually put the content up at 4 o'clock on a Sunday afternoon. Now, this is because I know my audience is made up of small business owners who might work at weird times. Just between 4 o'clock yesterday afternoon and 9 o'clock this morning, 18 people downloaded the marketing toolkit I offered.
[00:08:03] Thank you for listening to our podcast today. To subscribe to the Social Fusion weekly podcast, go to www.socialfusion.com.
For more digital marketing insight be sure to check out the links below:
- 10 Common Content Marketing Mistakes & How to Solve Them
- Content Marketing Is Shifting In 2018: Here's What You Need To Know
- Revitalize Your Marketing Strategy With This 5 Step Content Audit
