How Organizations are Leveraging Content Across the Buyer Journey

When you hear the word content in a business context, you probably automatically associate it with marketing.

As a tactic, content marketing has been around for hundreds of years, while the term content marketing has only surged into popularity (and regular marketing lexicon) in the past 6-7 years. And it shows no sign of slowing down in 2016, 88% of organizations claim to be using content marketing as a key B2B marketing tactic.

The undeniable popularity and widespread usage of content marketing points to the effectiveness of content. However, content isnt only effective in the strict marketing sense content satisfies the entire buyer journey, from awareness, to engagement, to lead generation, to sales enablement, and even to customer success.

Consequently, the way we think about content is changing: content no longer lives exclusively in the marketers domain. In fact, content is the lifeblood of your entire organization.

Content in every corner

Content certainly starts with marketing, playing important roles in generating awareness, engagement, and of course, leads. But this is only the start of the buyer journey.

As a lead converts to an opportunity and enters the sales realm, content can (and should) be leveraged by sales teams to handle objections, build relationships, and target key accounts. Building a content library for sales enablement is a powerful way to educate and nurture potential customers, clarify value proposition, execute account-based marketing tactics, and ultimately, expedite the sales cycle.

Content plays an equally important role once the prospect has converted into a customer. Your customer support or success team can (and should) leverage content to coach and empower your customers. Building a knowledge base or resource center with product-centric content improves customer marketing effectiveness by allowing the nurturing process to be continued even further. Filling your knowledge base with bottom-of-the-funnel content that enables customer self-service will increase your success teams productivity and, more importantly, improve your customer retention rates.

Why content isnt enough

Understanding why and how content satisfies the entire buyer journey is the easy part, and creating content to better satisfy the journey is an important first step.

Simply creating the content, however, isnt enough. Organizations must be able to easily leverage this content for more than one purpose and one campaign in order to satisfy the buyer journey. This is where marketing automation comes into play content fuels lead nurturing campaigns and helps build up your lead data based on conversions.

But as much as your marketing automation platform can help you deliver the right content to the right person, it cant help you deliver the right content experience for the end user (be it a reader, a prospect, or a customer).

What do I mean by this? Well, your content experience is the place where all the user action takes place. It's the destination that you send your prospects to. It's where your visitors consume your content, where they convert to a lead, and where you can measure how effective your content is at every stage of the journey.

Sending your end user (regardless of where theyre at in the buyer journey) to a non-contextual, generic blog or resource center wont help them find the information they need to move further down the funnel, and it certainly wont compel them to continue their content journey. Your content will be far more effective if youre able to send the end user on a tailored engagement path.

Delivering a well-optimized content experience

Lets take a look at this in action.

Your marketing team produces an eBook. They can leverage this eBook for lead generation, targeting the particular buyer persona for whom they created the eBook using marketing automation and paid promotion tactics. Adding this eBook to your internal library for sales enablement, your sales team can leverage it to speak to a particular pain point that one of their prospects is experiencing. Or, similarly, your customer success team could also leverage this eBook in their knowledge base to provide more high-level information for your customers.

Those are three different use cases from just one eBook, within one organization. Each use case has different end goals and requires different context.

So, how do you optimize the content experience for each?

Tailor the experience Ensure your content is targeted, personalized, and strategically organized for the particular use case. For instance, if its an advanced-level eBook, dont include a CTA to sign up for a beginner-level webinar.

Facilitate further content discoverability Dont let your content pile up by date, or by type of content. Regardless of the use case, people are much more likely to search for a specific answer than they are to search for a white paper.

Include targeted and contextual CTAs Provide a logical and contextual next step to continue the buyer journey.

Conclusion

Content begins with marketing generating awareness, engagement, and leads but it also feeds into sales enablement and customer success, fueling your entire organization and propelling your end users throughout the entire buyer journey.

However, organizations must think beyond individual content assets and start producing relevant and contextual content experiences for the desired end user. By leveraging content experiences at every stage of the buyer journey, your content will not only become more valuable to your end users, but also to your organization.

Content can do a lot of things for your organization, but not if you don't start thinking about it in a larger context. Download theModern Marketing Essentials Guide to Content Marketingand start thinking. And doing.

Google Compare Will Sunset In March

The lead generation product aimed at helping searchers find and compare financial services products like mortgage rates and auto insurance quotes never gained enough traction.



Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.

One More Word about Staples (Not Sponsored)

This post isnt sponsored. Im only posting it because I was thinking about another company and how they operate pretty much the exact opposite of Staples, and it made me want to write this to you.

The Best Allies Think Ahead FOR You

I just saw an ad for a high speed Internet provider. The rate they quoted was really attractive. I realized that I could probably get 40-50 more megabits of download speed and 90 more megabits of upload speed for $40 less a month than what were paying now. And then it dawned on me that my current Internet provider sure hasnt done much to make sure Im getting the best price.

Continue Reading

The post One More Word about Staples (Not Sponsored) appeared first on chrisbrogan.com.

8 Tools That Will Help You Get Inside Your Readers Heads

Do you hate the phrase getting inside your readers head?

Althoughyou know you are supposed to be able to do it, you dont haveany specific instructions onhow to do it.

Of course, its important to understand your currentreaders and those you are trying to attract with your content, but thats one of the hardest skills you have to develop as a writer.

Its going to take years of continuous improvement to become really good at it.

However, there are ways for you to get thisinformation much soonernamely, formulas and tools.

In this post, Im going to focus on the latter.

Ive put together a list of the eight best tools for getting inside your readers heads.

They will give you tangible data you can use to produce content that resonates with your readers.

Finally, Ill show you how to use the key features of these tools. I promise that none of them are difficult to use and that they are worth your time.

Tool type #1 Hard demographics data

If you want to know what your readers think, you first need to know who they are.

Thats where demographics come in.

Essentially, any statistic that describes a characteristic of your audience is a demographic. The most common are:

• age


• location


• device preference


• gender


• marital status

The tools in this section will help you figure out who you should be targeting in the first place. They can be used whether you have an existing audience or are just starting off.

1. Demographics Pro for Hootsuite

This tool is one of the most complete Ive ever come across when it comes to demographics.

The only significant limitation is that it draws its data from Twitter.

However, as long as people in your niche use Twitter (which is likely), its really useful.

While you can sign up for Demographics Pro directly, its pretty simple to use this Hootsuite app.

When you click the link in the title for this tool and then click the Install App button on the page, youll be taken to Hootsuite, where youll see a pop-up like this (if youre signed in):

Once you install the app, youll see a new tab on your account called Demographics Pro for Twitter.

To use the tool, simply enter a Twitter handle (e.g., @NeilPatel), and click get profile.

Thatll automatically bring up some basic data:

More useful, though, is the view full profile option. Click that link, and youll see an extremely detailed panel like this:

From this, you can get a ton of demographic information about your (or their) followers and even some psychographics (more on that in section 2):

• gender distribution


• marital status


• parental status


• age


• average income


• location


• types of jobs they have


• types of hobbies they have


• types of brands they like

Its a gold mine of information.

If youre already using Twitter, start with your own profile.

Then, get the stats of some of your top competitors. If you dont know who they are, head to Buzzsumos amplification tool, and search for some keywords that describe your niche:

2. Sprout Social

This is a similar type of social audience analyzer. However, it analyzes both Facebook and Twitter, so theres a potential to get a few different insights.

Once you sign up for an account (free trials available), you can connect your Twitter and Facebook accounts (only your own).

That will populate your account with a bunch of social trends data, but more importantlydemographics.

On top of getting a gender distribution of the audience on each platform, you get a detailed breakdown of their age brackets. Thats another important insight into your audience that will come in andy.

3. Google Display Planner

It might surprise you to find out that the Google Display Planner is another decent source ofdemographic dataeven though itisnt the tools primary purpose.

When you open the planner, you have two options for searching:

• keywords, topics, or sites


• a landing page

I recommend doing both, and several times if possible. The larger your sample size, the more accurate your demographics data will be.

You can enter your own site, a competitors site, orkeywords that you will be targeting with SEO.

Once youve picked an option, click the blue button to proceed:

On the next page, youll get a whole bunch of suggestions for ad keywords. Ignore them.

The only thing we care about here is the panel in the center of the screen that breaks down the demographics of people who search for the terms you entered (or terms found on the page you entered).

It looks like this:

Again, you get a gender and age breakdown.

Additionally, you can record which devices that audience prefers to use.

Is all this information redundant? It is to a degree, but its still useful. By now, you have demographic data from three different tools.

That data may look the same, but there may be differences because its collected from different sources.

Having data from multiple sources ensures that it wont be skewed. You can take an average of all the data you collect or keep it as a range (i.e., average age might be 25-34 and not just one specific number).

4. FollowerWonk

The final tool in this section also uses Twitter to retrievedemographic data. However, it provides one important feature that the others miss.

Once you create an account, go to the Analyze tab on the top menu. Enter your Twitter handle, and let the tool scan your followers.

On the next page, look for a graph like the one below that shows at what times your followers are most active.

This information will be useful when you are promoting your content, especially on social media.

Tool type #2 Understand your readers thinking (psychographics)

Once youve nailed down who your readers are or will be, its time to start figuring out how they think.

Ideally, you want to answer questions such as:

• what are their biggest problems?


• what type of content do they like the most?


• what kind of language do they use?


• what bores them, and what excites them?

The tools in this section will help you answer these questions and eliminateguesswork.

5. Faqfox

This is a simple tool that makes getting useful data from forums easy.

Basically, you enter a keyword and sites to scan, and the tool pulls up relevant thread titles for you. You can search multiple sites at once.

Start by inputting a keyword into the first field. You could manually enter sites, but an easier option is to simply pick one of the preset categories. If youre not sure which one to choose, pick generic:

The tool will load the results after a few seconds of search:

I recommend downloading the results into a spreadsheet and analyzing them there.

Remember those questions you need to answer? These results will help you do that.

Youll have some irrelevant results, so start by removing those.

Once you have a few hundred relevant threads left, dig in.

Note down:

• common questions (those thatcome up more than once)


• any phrasing that you wouldnt normally use yourself


• any other keywords that you havent thought of (that you see in the titles)

Then, repeat this whole process at least a few times with different keywords.

6. Crazy Egg

If you know me well, you know I founded Crazy Egg.

Ill let you judge the tool for yourself, but it can be incredibly useful for understanding the behavior of your readers.

The one catch is that you have to actually have readers before you can use the tool.

Assuming you do, Crazy Egg will give you a variety of heatmaps that will show you exactly how readers interact with your content.

There are two types of maps youll want to look at.

First is the scroll map, which tells you how people scroll through your page. You can tell what portions of the page they pay more or less attention to.

Its natural for the percentage to decline asyou scroll down, but you might seethat it declines at certain sections in the middle of the content.

This is a clear indication that something on your page didnt interest your readers.

For example, if I looked at a heatmap for this post and saw that theres a huge drop off withinthis section, I could conclude that my readers dont like reading about heatmap tools (or potentially about psychographics).

Similarly, hot spots lower down the page indicate that youve touched upon something that excites them.

Record this information forall your content, and youll start seeing patterns in the type of content,the tone, and the formatyour readerslike.

To get even more insight into your readers preferences, you can use click heatmaps, which show you what readers clicked on:

Youll see that certain things attract their attention more than others. Again, look for patterns.

7. Buzzsumos Top Content Tool

The heatmaps can give you a lot of insight into what excites and bores your readers.

However, sometimes you need more, or you dont have enough readers to use heatmaps yet.

Thats where Buzzsumos top content tool comes in.

Youll want to make a list of keywords youll be using within your content. Then, search them one by one in the tool:

The tool will return a list of the most popular content in the past year (sorted by total shares).

Visit as many of these pagesas you can, and record down the answers to these questions in your spreadsheet:

• What format does the content use? (lots of images? videos? big font? small font?)


• What tone does the content use? (news articles? personal stories? conversational?)


• Why would your reader be so excited about this topic?

You can leave the last one blank for now if you dont know, but come back to it later.

When you have a good understanding of your readers, you should be able to figure out why these top articles would appeal to them more than the average content.

Finally, searchall theanswers to all those questions for patterns.

For example, if a large chunk of the most popular posts are mainly image-based, you know that your readers love images.

Tool type #3 Assemble your data, and make it useful

If youve used every tool up until this point, you have a lot of useful data.

Dont justputit on a spreadsheet and forget about it.

Instead, create reader personas. Itwill help you and your team when you need to be remindedfor whom you are writing.

I created this final section for a single tool because I feel thatalthough it is a small step you need to takeits a very important step.

8. Make My Persona

This tool was created by Hubspot, and its brilliant.

It guides you through a simple process that uses allthe different demographic and psychographic information youve collected with all the other tools.

It also ensures that you dont forget any key part of creating a reader persona, e.g.,putting a real name or face to it:

Once you answer all the questions, the tool will producea well-organized persona summary:

First, you should share this with everyone whohelps you with content.

Next, you should be looking at this before you write any content yourself. Always ask yourself what this person would find valuable and interesting. Print it out, and hang it up if you need to.

Note that you can create multiple personas if thats what the data supports.

Conclusion

This is not a huge list, but every tool on this list can be useful.

The better you understand your readers, the more youll be able to write exactly what they want to see (and value).

I recommend trying at least a few of the tools, but if you really want to get a clear picture of what your readers think and care about, use them all.

If I missed a tool that can help writers understand their audiences, please post it in the comments below, and Ill give it a look.

SEO Is An Integral Marketing Channel

SEO Is An Integral Marketing Channel written by Guest Post read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Earlier this month, Google surpassed Apple as the worlds most valuable company. The two companies have yo-yoed for first place since then, but the point is that Google is one of the most successful companies in the history of capitalism.

How Did This Happen?

There are more than 3.5 billion Google searches every day. Thats more than 40,000 searches per second.

Google Search has evolved into a fundamental part of the purchase process. This is a nice way of saying that Google has monopolized the way we search for products, services and information on the Internet.

No matter how your prospects hear about you, they are unlikely to buy from your company without Googling it first. You know its true. If they cant find your website, or dont like what they see in terms of your web presence or reviews, they buy elsewhere.

Your website is so important, in fact, that a Stanford University study concluded that 75% of people judge the credibility of a company based its website. Every time I quote this statistic it just blows me away. Credibility. Wow. If you are a small business owner, people now judge your entire lifes work based on the design and content of your website. Think about that next time you look at your website traffic and bounce rates. Google gets the horses to water, but your site and its content must get them to drink.

If you dont get SEO and your website right, many of your referralleads, trade show leads, and advertising leads bounce right into the arms of the competition.

Outbound marketing and advertising create demand. Inbound marketing and SEO capture demand as it filters back through the Internet.

I Never Click On The Paid Ads

Virtually every business owner we talk to claims that they do not click on Google Ads. That may be true for most of us. Depending on who you believe, AdWords pay-per-click ads get anywhere from 5% to 30% or more of all Google search clicks. Yet, Google makes most of its money from the AdWords platform. The point is that just by siphoning off a small percentage organic clicks in into paid AdWords clicks, this company has been able to grow into the worlds most valuable company. In my opinion, this fact alone underscores how important organic search has become for modern marketing.

But What About B2B?

Many B2B companies ignore SEO and Google because they think their customers buy at trade shows or via other old-school channels. Yet, this recent study of 3,000 B2B buyers by Millward Brown Agency shows how influential search has become in the B2B purchase process:

• 89% of B2B researchers use the Internet during the B2B research process


• 71% of B2B researchers start their research with a generic search engine search


• 42% of B2B researchers use a mobile device during the B2B purchasing process


• 46% of B2B researchers are millennials

That last statistic is really important. At my agency, we have seen first-hand how the C-suite is assigning millennial staff to search the Internet for potential vendors in order to develop short lists for in-person meetings.

This younger generation of digital gatekeepers does not have the experience to know who the players are in your space they depend on Google to serve up the best companies. If your website is up to date and professional, your online reputation is strong, and your content conveys authority, you get on the list. Its that simple.

SEO For Growth

Referral marketing may be one of the best tactics on the planet and one every small business needs to master but its impossible to scale a business on referral marketing alone. One the other hand, if you seriously want to grow your business, you cannot avoid Google.

The good news is that everything you should be doing to establish a strong digital presence also helps your SEO rankings. Many of the Google ranking factors that count the most are things you should be doing for your business anyway. Social media, blogging, and reputation management are all elements of SEO that also carry additional marketing and advertising value.

SEO is no longer about writing a check to someone to do SEO on your site. As a business owner or marketer, you should develop an SEO frame-of-mind. Your website is an investment, not a digital brochure. The more you view your website as your marketing hub and as a content publishing platform, the better it will rank on the search engines.

Phil Singleton is a self-described SEO grunt obsessed with tweaking websites for search engine optimization and conversions, and creating WordPress SEO & PPC plugins. He owns & operates Kansas City Web Design, a Kansas City inbound marketing agency, and Kansas City SEO. Phil is co-author author of the Amazon best-seller The Small Business Owners Guide To Local Lead Generation (2015), and author of the Amazon best-selling Kindle eBook How To Hire A Web Designer: And Not Get Burned By Another Agency (2015). Visit his websites at http://kcwebdesigner.com and http://kcseopro.com, or connect with Phil Singleton on LinkedIn.