Transcripts
1. Introduction: I'm Garrett Moon, I'm the CEO and Co-Founder at CoSchedule, and we are a marketing calendar that helps teams get organized. So CoSchedule is really all about taking action on your marketing process. It's about scheduling content, it's about scheduling your social media. It's about making sure you can can see and utilize everything in one place. One of the things that we see that differentiates those teams that are most successful in their marketing strategy or with our tool, is really the overarching strategy and process that they use for deciding what projects to work on, and put on their calendar, and which ones to leave off and not to right now. Content can come in many forms. I mean, the most common thing that a lot of people think about is the blog post, but there's so much more to it than that. There are infographics, there's email marketing, there's the social media aspect of promoting your content, and make sure people are seeing it on social, and driving traffic to your site. Content really becomes the kind of binding thing that tells the story for your company and I think that's what makes it so powerful. In this course, I really hope to go into some of the things that made us successful. How can you create content that is free from competition, so that you can get the most value for the content you're producing. Then, going down into the individual steps it's going to take to get it done. We are going to talk about marketing counters, we're going to talk about workflows, how to get the team on the same page. Content is always been the cornerstone of what we do. We believe that content really allows you to establish yourself as a subject matter expert. Your product should really focus on providing value to your customers, just like content should provide value to your readers. So, there's a lot of synergy between creating a product and a tool, and creating content for those customers as well. I'm excited to get started. Look forward to seeing you in the class.
2. Step 1: Find Your "Competition-Free" Content": So, a long time ago, I read a business book called Blue Ocean Strategy and it really talked about how in business, you have two different oceans. We have the red ocean, that's bloody with competition, where you're competing against a lot of different companies. The key for companies is to find that blue ocean. What's the clear wide open ocean, where they're free from competition and can do their best work. I really feel like that same concept belongs in content marketing and with social media. It's something I call competition-free content. So, really what we want to look at here is, how can you create content that's free from your competition? Is that what you're creating really stands out and is actually impactful, and meaningful? When you look around the web, I think there's a few examples of some people who have done this really well their content. One of them is Groove, which they build help their software. So, this is a very competitive market. There's lots of different tools that provide software that allow companies to interact with their customers via e-mail. Groove is doing a great job with content marketing. They were publishing regularly, they had good topics and they were getting pretty good traffic. What Groove did, is they looked at that landscape and said, "We're publishing what everybody else is publishing, we're doing what everybody else is doing" and it's working. But it's really not that different, it's not that unique, it's not making a big impact on what we do. So, they shut down the entire blog and they started blogging about something that only they could talk about, and for them, that was their specific numbers and metrics. The actual nuts and bolts of their business. Now, for them as a company that makes a tool that's frequently used by startups. Telling their startup story, adding transparency, talking about revenue, and numbers, really stood out, and they gained 5,000 subscribers I believe in a week or two. Going from that me to content, where we're creating the same stuff that everybody else is. To moving to something that's competition free, creating something that no one else can. I think that's the real key. So, there are a few tactics that you can use for finding competition free content. I think the first thing you have to do, is just sit back and observe a little bit. Go to your nearest competitors and really take a diagnosis of what they're doing. What type of content are they publishing, how long is it, how many image does it, does it have, are they using video, what networks are they publishing into, how effectively are they using e-mail? You have to dive deep into what they're doing. So, the first thing you really just have to do is just understand what your customers are seeing. So, you can start to find the cracks and where you can create something different. So, the next thing that you need to do is, once you can understand what your competitors are doing, start just doing some really simple searches on Google. Pick some topics that are really a good match with your company. Look at the top 10 results and what do you see there? Again, look at the length of content, look at the images that are being used, look at their writing style. What is consistent about them, is there anything there that stands out? I think compiling that list and even building that into a little spreadsheet, where you're kind of mapping, what everybody else is doing, will probably make finding that competition free-zone very, very easy for you. So, as you're doing this process, you just want to ask yourself some questions. One is, what are you really good at, what is your team really good at? Really understanding what you can do better than anyone else, is really important at this stage. Not just looking for something that's different, you're looking for something that's different that you can execute really well. Where the patterns that the industry is falling into that we can try and disrupt, and really provide something different? What's in it for the customer? That really should be your guide. Because the tactics that you use, probably don't matter to your customers so much. They probably don't really care, if they read it on your blog, or on someone else's, or on Facebook, or wherever it might be. What they care about, is the message and the content that you're sharing with them. So, always focus on that first and that should create a winning strategy. A few other things you should be asking yourself would include, looking at your audience. Are there people in that audience that you didn't know where there and that you're not really serving very well in terms of the content you're publishing? Then, the other one is, what is some of the stuff that you've created already, that you're the most proud of? Are there things that you've done, that you're proud of because it worked well or because you could create them at a really high level, and you could execute them really well? So, the way this look for us at Coschedule, is we really looked at the market and looked at what people were doing. Most of the advice at that time we found was, a blog post should be about 500 to 1,000 words and they should always include an image. But a lot of times, it was one image, it was stock photography. Maybe some sort of illustration but very very simple. We just kind of look around like there's some really big opportunities here. Our competition-free content, really came about in terms of okay, we're going to publish stuff, it's very actionable and unique. We're going to publish posts of three to five times longer than the average post, and we're going to include five or six times more images. So, our post really took on a very different flavor. Once, we did this exercise because we realized is that we're really good at written content and it can leverage the strengths of our team, and we can do it better than anybody else. So, once, we implemented our competition-free content, we noticed an immediate impact. Our subscriber base was doubling in terms of what we were seeing before and that we had lost a really large impact in terms of results we're seeing on Google and Search. It's really become that type of content, that content strategy is becoming the number one driving force behind our business. It brings in customers all the time, because we've been doing it consistently for many years. So, we've looked at two really different examples. Looking at Groove, they found competition-free content by talking about their own metrics, something that no one else could cover. When you look at CoSchedule, our competition-free content was more about the method and the tactics that we use to actually create the content itself. I think that it's something to keep in mind. It doesn't always have to be completely radical. The topics don't necessarily have to change, your customers probably care about those topics. But you have to find a way to stand out within the topics that you need to cover, that relate to your product, that relate to your customer base. So, the important step with competition-free content is really keeping it at a high level. We're looking for a high level strategy, some key bullet points and ideas that will take us forward, and define everything that we do later on. The next step is really going to be taking that high strategy and making it a detailed plan that your team can put into practice, and execute on a weekly basis.
3. Step 2: Prioritizing 10x Opportunities: There's always a temptation at this point to just roll right into creating content. You've got to fight that urge. Here's the thing that can happen. So, when you do that, there is always it creates the what I call a blinking cursor problem, where you've defined a high level strategy and then now, you just jump right into creating a piece of content. When you start creating that piece of content, you're going to develop the first idea that comes to mind. It's not necessarily going to be beholden to that strategy. It's not necessarily going to be having evaluated against some of the other opportunities that existed or other topics that were out there. So, it's really important to slow yourself down and not just jump in to writing, but take the time to compare a few different ideas, a few different pieces of different opportunities back to your strategy. After this process is complete, we're going to start putting these ideas and these opportunities onto your calendar, and actually scheduling them. That's where we can start to think about, "Okay. How do we actually start to get this stuff done?" But it's important not to get too far ahead of yourself in the planning phase. The way we like to do this is put everybody in a room or even you can do it individually at your own desk. Start putting all the ideas that you have for content opportunities on the board. It's really important to just to get everything out there. Remember, that we're not just talking about specific blog post ideas that should be one piece of content that you're putting on the board, but then, you should also be thinking of other marketing projects that your team might take on. These could be related to feature releases or to key milestones within your company that are coming up and you know are going to be important. It could be those dreaming big projects like, "Hey, what if we could build this? What if we could offer our customers this thing?" So, you should really allow this phase to run the gamut and make sure everything gets a post to note. All ideas are good at this phase. We'll evaluate them later and get them on the board. So, once you have all of your ideas, your content opportunities, as I like to call them up on the board, the next thing we're going to look at is two methods that we like to use for trying to define which ones we should take action on and which one we should put on the back bar. So, the first one is the 10x versus 10 percent test. This is one of my favorites because I think it's so easy and so universal. Basically, what we're saying is that, which of these opportunities could potentially provide 10 times the growth to your audience size, to your company, to your email list size, to your social following? Which of these opportunities has an opportunity to make a 10x impact on your business? Then, which ones are just 10 percent? Those are those incremental improvements. There is a little things that you can do that improve it and make you better as a marketing team, but they're not necessarily going to make that earth shattering impact top to bottom in your funnel. Deciding which opportunities are 10x opportunities versus 10 percent opportunities can be a little bit tricky. But the basic thing you're looking for here is just a conversation. Is this a big impact? Why would it be a big impact? You may see things differently than somebody else on your team. So, the best 10x ideas are the ones where everybody in the room is going to see them as that opportunity right away. The next thing you want to do is separate all of your 10x projects from your 10 percent ones. Don't get rid of the 10 percent ideas, but split them up on the board. So, we have a single column of 10x. Now, start to rank them based on one, two, three. The best types of projects really are 10x projects that are one in difficulty. The way I think about it is are 10x projects that are only going to require 10 percent of the effort. If that opportunity exists, that's a gold mine and your team should take action on it right away. One thing that you might find is that 10x opportunities are frequently more complex than some of the 10 percent ones. That's okay. That's pretty natural. Big opportunities can take more time. So, if all of your 10x opportunities are higher in difficulty, that's okay. We just might need to be looking at kind of spreading them out, maybe taking on one per month or one per quarter, whatever's going to work in terms of that complexity and mixing in some of the other opportunities that we have available to us. So, your 10 percent ideas, it's important to keep in mind that they're not bad. Those could be things that you want to revisit later on. Like I mentioned before, you might want to sprinkle some of those in amongst your 10x projects and that's okay. What we're going to do with those 10 percent ideas is for the most part, we're going to put them aside into a draft's bin or an idea's bin where we can revisit them later, but not right now. So, at Coschedule, we don't do this very often. It's maybe once or twice a year and I think it's important to keep in mind that this isn't something you're going to do on a regular basis. This is something where you're going to schedule focus time to take a look at your strategy and how you're going to implement that strategy. Once you've outlined your opportunities, transferring them to the calendar is really going to help you turn it into action. This is where the part of the process we're able to turn that corner from thinking about what we're doing from a high level and starting to implement it into one step at a time type of plan. So here, we're looking at the blank Coschedule calendar. So, this is a brand new calendar. There's nothing on it and your team is ready to fill it with ideas. So, what you're going to do is just start taking some of those projects that you know you want to work on, you know you want to execute on, and start putting those in the calendar first. So, we just click, say it's going to be an article, and this is going to be a new content idea. Just for the purposes of this demo, I'm going to call this one a 10x idea. This is a good one. We can give it a color label, and you can categorize things as a team, and you can assign someone on your team that's going to get it done. So, I'll select myself and now, we're going to create that article. So now, on the calendar, we have our first big idea that we can build from. From there, you're going to want to probably create a few others. But this one, let's say, this is a new content idea. But this one is not as good, this one is going to be a 10 percent idea. So, we're going to get a different label and I'll go with yellow for 10 percent idea, and we're going to create that one as well. So now, you have two pieces of content on your calendar that you can work on. But because this one is a 10 percent idea, I might decide that this 10x idea is probably going to take me a little longer. If that's the only thing I do that week, that's probably better to focus on that. So, I want to take this 10 percent idea, and I'm going to put it into draft's bin, and I'm going to save it for later. Now, when I go in there, my 10 percent idea is available and I can actually reschedule it for later on if I need to fill a gap in my calendar. So, there are lots of ways to do this. Coschedule is one really great way because it's going to build in team workflow. We're going to build on social publishing. We're going to cover a lot of that throughout this class. But you could also do this in an Excel spreadsheet, you could do it on a Google Calendar, you can even do it on a paper calendar. What I really like is something that allows for a really easy drag and drop, and moving around. You don't want to be locked into a plan too tightly. You want to be able to give yourself some flexibility and room to make changes. So, one of the things that can be really tricky on your calendar is those 10x projects that are technically are three where they're very complex. So, I want to look at an example of how we converted that to actionable items on our calendar on Coschedule. So, one of our 10x opportunities that we identified was a social message optimizer. This is a free tool that we make available on our website that allows users to analyze their social messages, and make sure that it's something that's going to get shares, is going to get clicks, and it's going to get good engagement once it actually gets published on the web. Now, as a tool that helps people schedule their social messages, we had tons of internal data on what messages are good and what messages are less good. So, we decided a 10x opportunity would be to evaluate that, turn it into a free tool, and then an entire marketing campaign around it, so a very complicated project. It required research. It requires engineering and development time, but then it also requires a variety of marketing materials. So, as you can see from our calendar, this was a 10x project that had a lot of moving pieces. We had to be able to figure out how to fit that large project in with some of the other publishing that we wanted to do. You can see here that we had two or three other blog posts still going out that week. But it's really important when you think about those 10x projects to understand how they're going to impact your ability to schedule and execute on everything else. So, this marketing project really allows us to see it all together and understand how those 10x projects are going to impact our ability to do the everyday things like send emails, write blog posts over time because you don't want to get stuck in a 10x project that prevents you from following your regular publishing schedule. So, one thing to keep in mind with this entire process is that, it can also just help you understand what not to do. For example, the same planning meeting where we decided to make the social message optimizer, we also talked about two other projects that we ended up tabling. One was creating videos along with every single piece of blog content that we published. We knew that this could perform well on Google, it could help us stand out from the crowd, not a lot of people were doing it. But ultimately decided that it wasn't a really good fit for our team right now. So, we put it on the backburner. It's in our draft's bin. The second idea was a Podcast. It was another thing where we felt like that audio based content could help us reach our customers and our users in a new way, but we also just didn't really have the resources. It was a complex project. It was probably a three to get it off the ground. It just didn't make sense right now. It was a good idea, but just not right now. So, both of those projects were put into our draft's bin and later on, once we had the availability on our calendar as we added more people to our team, we felt that we had the resources to do them. So, the next phase of the process is actually going to be to take those things that you're scheduling on your calendar and bring them to life. That's going to take the whole team. So, we're going to look at team workflows and how to optimize them really well.
4. Step 3: Create Your Process: All the time, we hear from marketers that they just need help getting organized. When we look at the teams that really feel like they have their process and everything figured out from the ones that don't, the thing that we see that's different is, really understanding what done means and understanding what their process looks like. This gets down to task workflows. How is your team going to execute the individual pieces necessary to complete one of your marketing opportunities or pieces of content? So many teams put something on the calendar, and then, just hope that it gets done or expect that it gets done in time. But the reality is, you need a process and you need a workflow so that everybody knows what their role is and when they need to complete it so that you can create a predictable calendar, not just a process that eventually gets something done. So, a couple of the steps that you're going to need to think about as you create your workflows is, really understanding the core process. What are you looking to create? What is the end outcome that you're really hoping for here? Once you understand that, you need to just break it down into the simple nuts and bolt pieces that are going to be necessary to get to the finish line. From there, it really becomes about defining your execution. So, what we're going to actually be talking about is, how do you define what done means? You'd be surprised at how many teams leave that undefined and try to answer it later on the fly. What it does is, it creates an inconsistent process, and it can really slow them down. So, understanding what done means is really about defining what's going to be your standard for performance that you want your team to achieve every single time and making sure it's built directly into the workflow and the process you're creating. This is where we're going to connect your workflow back to that bigger strategy. That strategy is looking at what you're doing at a very broad level and a very strategic level. So, that's what should define done. Is this piece of content achieving that strategy? How do I know if it's achieving that strategy? For us, a good example of this is the 2,500 word mark. Blog posts are done at CoSchedule once we've hit that mark, or very close to it. Not overly dogmatic, but it's important to have that definition written down, and it actually makes sense to make that a task that you need to complete. Do we have a word count check on this? Is it as thorough and as complete as we can possibly make it? Another key aspect of creating great workflows is really understanding who's going to do what. So, that means that each task on our list, particularly if we're working in a team, has a name or a person associated with it so that everyone else on the team knows who is going to complete it. You'd be surprised at how many teams leave that blank or leave that open ended. It can work, you can make it work, but it's going to take a lot of that mental load, it's going to reduce your ability to execute at a high level, and it's going to require a lot more communication somewhere outside of the tools you're using, which is going to take more time and slow you down. So, CoSchedule, creating our individual task templates for different pieces of content has taken a lot of time, and it's something that we're always working on. But what I want to do is, just show you a really simple process that you can use to create that workflow. Here is just a really simple Evernote document, and what you want to do is, just quickly define the overall process. So, I'm just going to start with a blog post. So, we're going to write the post, we're going to edit the post, we're going to create graphics, we're going to schedule social media messages. Can't forget the last one, publish. So, there's some really simple processes right there already. Very familiar, everyone's done that. It seems easy. It seems like it's something that you wouldn't need to write down. But what you want to do is, start going into each one of these and really starting to think about who's going to be responsible and what done looks like. So, what you can do is, just create something like who, done, what's that look like, what's our standard, and now, begin to define those. So, who, this is writing the post. We have two or three different writers, but we'll just call it content writer. Some content writer on our team is going to complete that. What does done look like? Here, we might say something like 25 to 3,000 words. Our standard is, the best piece of content in the given category. One thing that can really slow down workflows are approvals. I've talked to many teams where they have multiple levels of approvals: compliance, legal, just managers within the team. That's something to think about as well. How does that work in your workflow? Can you start getting those approvals sooner and build them into your process? What's your timeline for approval? That's a really important factor. What you don't want is a done piece of content that's supposed to be publishing tomorrow, but you have to wait three extra days for approval, and it shifts off your whole schedule. So, better to actually have a template that takes into account a three to five day window in that approval process to make sure that you can actually hit your deadlines. So, at this point in your workflow, now's a really good time to bring in the team, everyone who's actually completing these individual tasks. Start asking them to break it down into individual pieces. What you'll see is that write post really isn't just writing a post. It might actually begin with creating an outline. So, you might want to create another task, outline the post. We're going to start there. At this point, we could see an opportunity to have an approval on the outline, and that might save us a step later on. Rather than wait until the content is complete, we might be able to get an approval on that outline from whatever manager is going to be involved and save ourselves some time. The other thing that's going to allow you to do is, the smaller pieces that you actually break this down into, the easier it gets to estimate how long it's going to take. Outlining the post, well, that only may take 30 minutes. So, give yourself just a quick note that this is going to take me 30 minutes. Approval, that one could get a little trickier, that might take two days. So, by breaking it down into smaller pieces, it gets easier to estimate how long every task is going to take. That means that at the end of the day, you're going to have a better task process to look at. There's a general feeling that fewer checkboxes is better, but what that does leave room for is a lot of misinformation or lack of clarity within your process. So, at this phase, you should be constantly probably adding and removing, rearranging your different tasks. Don't worry about creating too many or too few. Some of these tasks are just going to be simple check boxes, just to mentally remind yourself to make sure you did it. Did we use the headline analyzer, our CoSchedule, and make sure we had a really high score on this headline? If we are using the headline analyzer, what range of score are we shooting for? So, you want to be able to get very specific. You can always pair it down later. For every single task that's going to be built into your workflow, you want to develop a list of how long it's going to take, who's going to do it, what done is going to mean, and what's your standard of performance. Those three or four bullet points should be really good, and you should be able to do that in a really quick format like I showed you here. The next step is actually figuring out how to execute on that. Now, this could be as simple as just a checklist where you share the Google Doc or the Evernote note with everybody, and now, we're all working from a singular workflow from that document. Or you could actually transfer it to CoSchedule, where you could create a task template that's reusable with every piece of content that you create. So, in CoSchedule, we have this new content 10x idea that we created before on the calendar. What I can do is, go into this piece of content and actually start creating my tasks one at a time. But the reality is that this particular project, I've probably done it a dozen times. So, I don't need to create one task at a time. That would be slow and tedious and unnecessary. So, what you need to do is, develop a task template. So, I'm going to take a look at this blog post workflow that I made before, and in this workflow, we have something very similar to what I was looking at prior to this. We're going to write the post, we're going to edit the post, add graphics, and schedule social media. What you notice about each one of these tasks is, they're all scheduled in relation to when that piece of content is going to go live. So, 14 days before publish, two weeks before publish, we want the task of writing that post to be complete. Three days before publish, we want editing complete, two days more on graphics, and scheduling social media, we want one day. You can also see that these tasks are individually assigned to someone on our team. In some cases, it's very specific, like Gary, our designer. In other cases, it's the content owner that is going to change once you apply your template. We have lots of different people who write content. So, this is a really simple workflow that you can use and a place to start. All you need to do is simply click and apply that workflow, write your piece of content, and now, every single person on that list will have been notified of the task coming up, when it's due, and then, they'll also receive reminders as it's getting closer. So, on the calendar, I'm going to turn on team tasks. So, now, you're going to see the piece of content along with the tasks that are going to be associated with that piece of content. The really nice thing here is that you're going to be able to drag and drop it as needed. So, we can actually move that content back a couple days, and what you're going to do is, see all those tasks move on the calendar. So, as your content date shift, as things happen, you're always going to be able to drag and drop and automatically move it with you. You can do the same thing for task. If somebody is going to be out, you can move it ahead or back as needed. So, some flexibility in your process is really valuable and can really take into account some of those unknown and unexpected things that happen all the time. So, just so you can see how far you can take this, I want to show you a quick glimpse at one of CoSchedule's task templates that we use. So, this task template is used to publish an OverheardAtCoSchedule video, which is part of a video show that we do as part of our blog. As you can see, there are a lot of tasks associated with this, and believe it or not, but this is actually one of our smaller task templates. But some things to observe here. One, every single task has a due date and an assignee, so we know who's going to do it and when they're going to do it by. We also have pretty lengthy, good descriptions in our tasks. Some of them are very long and take up multiple lines and actually include information about what done is going to look like in this case. So, CoSchedule, we have dozens of these that will automatically get assigned to the team as we create different pieces of content, and every type of content that we create has a slightly different workflow. Great workflows and task templates can be very complicated, very detailed, and very specific, but they don't always have to start out that way. So, don't get overwhelmed right away. Start by just putting something on paper, adding a few notes, and then, start by putting it into practice. The sooner you're using a template, the more quickly you will refine it over time. CoSchedule didn't start with what you saw on the screen. We didn't start with dozens of tasks attached to each template. We've built that over time for many years, and that's what you'll need to do too. Also, keep in mind that you're probably going to make some changes to your workflows over time, and that's okay too. Process should change. You should get smarter. You should get better at what you're doing.
5. Final Thoughts: Everything about this course is about really defining a great strategy and learning how to execute it really well. So, these are the building blocks. Really learning how to find that competition-free content, where can your team thrive, then learning how to put it into place. So, there are a few key things to think about as you go forward. One, really keep an eye on that draughtsman, you should always have a big group of ideas that you can be moving to the calendar regularly. Take as much of the thinking out of the creation stage as possible. The next thing you need to do is really look at a process for revisiting your strategy over time. In three months, possibly take a break and sit down as a team and do a retro, just a retrospective and really take a look at, is this working and is it accomplishing what we needed? But don't do it too soon as well. You need to give your plan some time to work and your team to figure out how to do it really well, and that might take longer than you think. So, that's CoSchedule's process for creating a winning content strategy. So now, it's time to put it all together and create marketing that your competitors will be envious of. What does competition-free content look like for you? Share it in the gallery. I can't wait to see it and best of luck to you and your team.
6. What's Next?:
Garrett Moon, CoSchedule CEO & Co-Founder
