2022 Marketing MASTERCLASS for Startups and Leaders #5 | Content Strategy

1. Welcome to Session 5: Welcome to Session five, where we will look at building out your own content engagement strategy. Now, as you know, technology has made content creation and marketing in general, farm or complex. Plus, the added emphasis on data driven approaches has forced all of us to rethink that communications industry right. The keys to breaking through the immense marketing clutter today are quality content, compelling experiences and their effective distribution. As such, every piece of content should have a defined purpose that traces back to the belief framework that you built out in session, too. In today's modern marketing world, this is a table stakes requirement that you cannot afford to get wrong. Therefore, in this session, we will focus on helping you develop evergreen content that will shape, nurture and grow the beliefs of your target market. Based on the personas that you have developed earlier, I look forward to walking through this all important topic with you 2. Introduction to Content Engagement Plan: Welcome to session number five, developing your content strategy, otherwise known as developing your content engagement plan or whatever other term you want to use for it. Here we're going to call it content strategy because we referring to the strategy of developing appropriate content. Now as we begin this session, I want to underscore the necessity of this topic. First off, we're not going to give a lecture on how to create great content, right? There are too many good articles and books about such topics that you can easily find online. Rather, we're going to focus on the strategy of developing the right content, which by the way is more needed than ever. For instance, if you saw high school sports team that was seriously awful, you would say, they need a coach more than ever. Now in my world or in our world, as I look at the sheer volume of content being produced every year, experts are saying we need content strategy more than ever. To underscore this point, take a look at a few stats on this image. Now this is a great infographic from Domo. And as you look at this, I'm just gonna give you a few seconds to process this sheer amount of data that is being produced every single minute of the day. Now as you're looking through this, hopefully your mind is a little blown, right? Keep in mind, this is not how much data is generated every day. This is every 60 seconds. This is a staggering amount of information, not just information that is produced, but information that is consumed, like YouTube, over 4 million videos are watched every 60 seconds. What are people doing with their time? How are we supposed to compete in this massive ocean of content, right? But this should underscore a very important point for you. Old school foreign marketing just cannot work for you, your brand, your company anymore. Buyers like me and probably you as well, haven't become overwhelmed by the barrage of content aimed at us via websites and emails, blogs, social channels, display ads, whatever it may be. Speaking of old school, here are a few other old school strategies and miss that I hope during this session, we can finally laid to rest. First off is the spray and pray methodology. And as a side note, this is by far the most common content strategy. This is the strategy of almost every junior marketer I have ever met. And tragically, quite a few CMOs as well. All you have to do is write more content, right? We need a daily blog on anything. Let's post to social five tons of a day and on and on. Let me ask, how do you know it's the right content? And how are you measuring success, Right? The spray and pray methodologies simply says, we are going to produce as much content as possible and just hope that it works. Oh, by the way, we'll run metrics once a month for our team, pow-wow. And we'll applaud when one piece of content outperforms another. Worse yet is the old timer who comes in and says, content marketing is number two, just blogging. Now, this may have held a lot of weight in 1999, but we are no longer using dial-up to connect a static pages built in HTML. Can we not agree on that? We actually use today are to develop engaging content that meets real needs. Thirdly, you can always tell old-school content marketing by the fact it's not weighed down by analytics. Now I say that tongue in cheek, of course, the common methodology here is to post content and to move on to the next content without analyzing if anything worked or resonated with the audience. Now this goes hand-in-hand with that spray and pray methodology that simply says, hey, let's produce a bunch of content. But here, let's not even analyze it. Let's not even build out a funnel or a buyer's journey to see if anything worked or if our customers even liked it. Now fourthly, you can also tell if you're confronted with old school tactics, if you hear one of many questions, these questions can appear in your own mind or by someone else. Questions such as how many blog posts that I write as if there's a magic number, right? Have you ever asked yourself that question? Like, Ooh, I've got a team of people. How many blogs should I produce every week? That's kinda old school marketing again. Or along those same lines. How about this question? Do I really need to write in depth quality content like e-books or white papers or can get away with just kinda lighthearted thin content. Now, what you have to, here, there is the lack of desire to even invest. Helpful content, right? That's a company for its, that's brand centered marketing versus consumer centric. Or, or how about this question? How often should I be tweeting every day? Again, can I ask, are not markets, industries, and organizations unique? There shouldn't be a magic number right? Now we can learn from each other, but we have to understand our audience. Or I actually got this one recently. Is there a specific percentage of my budget that I should be spending on video? Yes. The answer is the right amount, right? There's no magic formula here. Content marketing question should always be centered on the user or founded in data. Otherwise, you're guessing. And we know that in a guessing game, hippo, highest paid person's opinion always wins. What many organizations fail to understand is that content creation, when done correctly, isn't about quantity or even a race against the competition. Rather, in a modern framework, every piece of content you create is an opportunity to satisfy leads and eventually bring a new lead closer to a sale or to inspire an existing customer to take action. Well as content Volume important, absolutely. But content synergy is far more important. In other words, there's no point in creating a 100 blog posts if that's just your end game. Or there's no point in developing those great paid ads. If you're just going to send all your readers to your homepage, right? You have to have a game plan, you have to have a content strategy. Thankfully, a shift has occurred in the marketing world because buyers and getting smarter and they have access to nearly limitless information and they're actively researching their own solutions. And that means a couple things. Number one, we have to face the fact that the buyer is in control of their own journey. The central statistic highlighting the shift is serious decisions, finding that over two-thirds of the buying process occurs before sales is even contacted. The buyer is in control of their own journey. Another step that underscores as truth is that 81% of shoppers conduct online research before purchasing. In other words, buyers are becoming much more savvy and far less dependent upon sales and organizations, right? That should both scare and excite marketers. But secondly, marketers own the tofu that is the top of the funnel. Marketers are no longer the sales support organization, but rather marketers are responsible for understanding the target audience and implementing the most effective strategies for reaching them. What this means is not a barrage of product messaging, but rather an elaborate digital funnel based upon persona beliefs that managed the buyer controlled purchase process, right? Does any of this sound familiar from session 1, the model and session to the belief framework, right? That's the heart of strategy. Rather than just going through motions. Content strategy as part of the belief framework and as part of the model, seeks to develop the right content for the right persona based upon identified beliefs at different stages of the funnel. In other words, today's market or seeks to research, understand, and develop helpful, tailored and necessary content based on anticipated customers questions, wants, needs, and pain points. Which makes this research that you see on your screen that much more sad, right? Only 38 percent of B2C marketers have a documented content strategy. Everyone else either doesn't have a strategy or the so-called do have a strategy, but it's not documented. Now, what I'm sharing with you is not something that most of you haven't heard or agree with. I believe we all can stand in agreement that having a document and content strategy is important because we don't want to be throwing away dollars writing that, we agree on that. But what's worse than that? This is something that most of us would agree with, but either don't know how to start or don't care to start. So my goal during this session is to rectify both of those challenges. That is not knowing how to build a content strategy or simply not carrying enough to change the way things are currently done and your organization. So to start this discussion in the next lesson, we will take a look again at the sales and marketing funnel. 3. Modern Marketing Funnel: Let's start this discussion with the sales and marketing funnel again. Now, this is a great example from Kano creative. I want to introduce other funnel images so you know that it's just not me who's telling you this. As you may remember from earlier sessions and most purchasing experiences, a product does not purchase upon scene up for the first time, right? In fact, according to the step from serious decisions, I just share with you, two thirds of the buying process occurs before sales is even contacted. That generally speaking, is the bottom third of the funnel, otherwise known as the Bo Fu, or bottom of the funnel or decision stage. Now if you employ a model like this, then you will realize that marketing is responsible for most of this buyer's journey, most of this process. Today's marketers are technologists that embrace marketing automation systems in order to nurture their leads through digital channels, right? It's a marketer's job to give them the fuel to move them along the funnel toward a purchase. Because according to HubSpot, 96% of website visitors aren't ready to buy. They're too far up the funnel there in the awareness or interest or consideration stage. They're not down at the evaluation and purchase stage. Now some have labeled the top part of the funnel as the content marketing funnel. The idea is the same, right? A content marketing funnel is a system that takes as many leads as possible, three step-by-step content flow, and then converts them into actual customers who pay for your products or services. It's common sense, right? Well, all of this need for context centered content may already be well-known in, in marketing circles and you may be familiar with it. Recent research still shows that 65% of professional markers do not understand what types of content are effective at each stage. That's why we have a dedicated this entire session in our course to content strategy. If you're just creating content to fill a void in your marketing strategy because it's what every marketer should do. Well, you're wasting your time, right? Quality content seeks to satisfy a specific and identified consumer belief need. Otherwise, Can I ask why create content in the first place? If you say it's terrain, well, then you need the session more than ever. The point being is this. And today's age of digital transformation, marketing plays a much larger role in the buyer's journey. And it's the smart marketer that will win this game. 4. Why Content Fails: Before we delve into the content engagement plan too far, I believe it's important to pause quickly and do a real quick reality check concerning your current content. As I mentioned earlier, we will not dive into how to create great content in this session because we're focused on the strategy of content from a leadership perspective. However, every great leader has to do a sanity check on their current content in order to see if it passes some basic tests, right? So what we're gonna do is we will do the same thing from a positive and negative perspective. First off, the negative, I wanted to take a look at why some content fails. So we can just avoid these topics and ideas altogether when creating content. Now, this is not going to be an exhaustive list by any means, but I do find that some of these topics come up regularly and therefore should be addressed. For instance, have you ever heard this? The foundation of great content marketing and SEO is good, unique content. What does that even mean? Right? It's just kind of a vague term that sounds really intellectual, but it's completely full of air. I love a UX or said about this topic, creating unique content isn't enough. Your brand has to create purposeful content and be intentional about reaching your customers in the communities that they're already a part of. That doesn't sound like good unique content, does it? Now at this point, every lazy marketer should cringe at words like purposeful and intentional, right? Because these type of words go well beyond good, unique content. Anyone can create unique content, right? Just make something up. But is it purposeful? And how do you identify that purpose by attaching it to a defined user belief or something else that we have already mentioned and that is content fatigue. Now as you're vetting content ideas during this session, please pause and remember that the Internet is increasingly flooded with generic content. According to World all matters. More than 2.5 million blog posts are published every day. Now this shouldn't be surprising since according to CMI, 93 percent of B2B marketers use content marketing. E marketer published another similar stat that said 60% of marketers create at least one piece of content each day. That's a staggering amount of content right? Now here, Here's why I mentioned this again. Your purposeful content idea is up against some pretty serious competition to get noticed. Because there's millions of posts every day. So don't let the possibility of content fatigue discouraged you, but do let it push you to create even better content because you have to stand out in the midst of all this noise. Because another reality that you have to remember is that online users don't read, right? They skim, deja, and marketing has put together some research on the reasons why read or skim your content instead of reading every word. Some of these, like impatience as you see on your screen, are obviously harder to fight than others. However, other reasons are a part of much of the content I find online and shameful he had been a part of my content that I generated in the past. Things like text is too long to bother. And yet I continue to hear that the best content is about 2000 words long. And then I find myself imitating this because 2000 words is the magic number. Evidently 2000 words is better for a blog post and having a good blog post. Or how about losing interest? But, but I'm hitting all the right keywords you may say exactly, you're writing for search engines, not humans, so they lose interests. Or how about this one? 38 percent say poor layout. Content is anything consumable, you have to remember that text, imagery, videos, layout, make it beautiful for the user. Otherwise, a poor layout with just stuff thrown on there and some sort of haphazard way is going to lose their interests. The point should be simple, right? If you're a content creation is becoming formulaic and chances are it's going to fail. Each content has to be dealt with individually, treating carefully, researched, thoroughly, developed, purposely, and so on, right? But if you're content creation can be likened to an industrial process, then I would take a hard look at why you are creating continent the first place and if your content hasn't been that successful. So here's the question. What makes great content? Well, content marketing, according to Lee Auden, isn't just about adding more content. It's about creating information for a target audience that has a particular purpose and intended outcome. Content drives awareness, but also social interaction, customer engagement and sales. Are you catching these words? Right? Particular purpose, intended, outcome? This is heavy, right? This adds a lot of way to our job of creating content. Meaning more isn't better. Better is better. So in this next lesson, that's exactly what we're going to start to take a look at. 5. What Makes Content Valuable?: In the last lesson, we took a look at some examples of why content fails. Well, in this lesson, I want to take a look at what makes content valuable. And I want to start with this checklist here. Now when I say checklists, I'm not attempting to industrialize the content creation process. Rather, this is more like a safety checklist just to make sure I'm developing valuable content that has a particular purpose and intended outcome. Now, first off, I know I am just dogged the word unique, but I put it on this list for another reason and another meaning. The word unique here refers to not copying someone else's work, right? The reason I put this course together is because I haven't found it any in-depth marketing course for leaders, period. Hence, I wanted to develop this course. It's unique in the sense of I can't find it anywhere else. Now when you are writing a content piece for a specific keyword, phrase or topic, don't find the top ranking organic result and duplicate it in your own words, write if you were in college, that would be plagiarism. Search engines two are becoming too smart for copycat and an original work, which is why I've placed uniquely valuable. Next, if you were copying someone else's work, then you are not providing unique value because that content in some form or another already exists. Uniquely valuable. According to ran Fishkin from AWS calls this Tenex content. That is content that is ten times better than the best result that can currently be found in the search results for a given keyword, phrase or topic. By the way, Tenex content is really hard to do, right? Not only is there a lot of really great content out there already, but Tenex content means you have painstakingly researched unmet consumer needs. And you're convinced that you have the ability and resources to uniquely satisfy that defined need. Which is why it has to be both relevant and helpful as you see here on this checklist. Relevant in the sense of, are you answering an actual question, concern, or need help by your target market? And helpful. Are you helping your target market? Are you just trying to send them a barrage of product-centric messaging because your VP of sales is directing marketing campaigns. Now remember, consumer centricity doesn't mean that consumer is everything, but it does mean that a happy, fulfilled consumer is more likely to trust you and purchase your product, which is why your content must offer number 5, great user experience. Ux designers like to remind us, you, good UX builds trust. Don't just think words on a screen is good UX, right? The modern consumers far more picky and savvy than that. Are you using the right font size, nonstop photos, engaging layout, header tags, bullet points, etc. It's all of it together. Everything on a website page, lens to user experience. Now you can do a final check if your content is really pleasing to consumer by asking this question, is it likely to spread or is it shareable? If someone read your content? Will they get bragging points, bragging rights for sharing the content with their friends or coworkers. I like what Jim Collins, the author of Good to Great, says about this motivation of mediocrity. Those who build them perpetuate mediocrity are motivated more by the fear of being left behind. And in reality you can, you can tack on to that quote, that they are motivated more by the fear of being left behind, then the resolute and insatiable desire of being great, right? There's no real desire of being a great brand or a great company, right? Any real investment is going to be risky. You may put your neck on the line by spending extra time and resources. But people and content are not remembered for their mediocrity, but their brilliance, their investment, their creativity and their disruption in the market. Now in the next lesson, we will take a look at the last two points of the checklist that underscores this point of being resolute and having an insatiable desire of being great. And that is content that is interactive. Number 1 and personal number two. 6. Interactive Content: Now in the last lesson, we took a look at a checklist of what makes content valuable. Now we didn't go over the last two items on the checklist because I wanted to devote an entire video to each one of those elements. In this lesson, we're going to take a look at interactive content, a topic by the way, that he's becoming much more valuable and important today, at least in my experience, right, because people love to engage with content. Now this can be anywhere, for instance, an interactive display in an airport, to an interactive map of a city, to an interactive store listing in a mall, right? People just love to engage. Really what I mean, engage, I mean play with content. And this is especially true on line. If you ever do Scroll Tracking using a tool like Crazy Egg or Hot Jar, you will find time. And again, at least in my experience, that a good piece of interactive content will stop the user every time. Can I just, can I just say this respectively? Most users are like little children when it comes to interactive content. Take a world map and watch what happens right? In my studies, people will stop at hover over country after country, state after state, just to see the little info box pop up, then of course they have to click the little box to see what happens, right? It's just like little children playing with toys. Well, what happened? If you have implemented something like this, then you've entertained your users. Clearly, you could have placed all the countries in the world in a long bulleted lists, which by the way, should still be available, right, for accessibility reasons. But with an interactive element, you went beyond just informing the user. You delighted the user. Now, this is a simple example, but hopefully you're getting the point. The days of just reading content online. Well, they never really happened. As I mentioned earlier, Jacob Nielsen pointed out that users don't read. They scan, and even then they don't scan very well. The point is this, when creating content, ask yourself if there's a way for users to interact with your content. Now I'm not necessarily talking about creating a game, but what about polls and surveys that rewards the users with statistics for interacting? Or what about a personality demographic tests so they can see how they compare to other users. I found this particularly useful because no one wants to be left behind, right. We love to compare ourselves with everyone else. Even a slideshow or slider or carousel. We'll add a classy touch of animation to your page that the user can control. Again, I am amazed at how we are like hamsters on a wheel when it comes to such things, we can't help ourselves right on we go clicking back and forth just to show, I guess that we're in control or something like that. Either way people just stop and they play with these little interactions. And of course, there's, there's many more examples that you can see here. Assessments, which again, can I say, these are stunning in their effectiveness. Most people in Oregon want to know how they assess compared to others. Calculators, knowledge test questions, interactive video. And again, you can use a program like Wistia for this. Galleries, contests, sweepstakes, brackets, interactive white papers, interactive infographics. The list goes on and on. Again. This has to be up to you based upon your market and industry. But the goal is the same. Try to be creative without being ridiculous. Because people love interactive content. And as the Internet continues to grow and maturity and as user and consumer expectations grow as well, you cannot simply serve up static boring content anymore. People want to swipe, they want to scroll, they want to click, they want to hover. They want pop-ups, they want, they want all this fun stuff where they can interact and engage with your content. 7. Personalize Content: As we looked at a couple lessons ago, we went through a quick checklist of what makes content valuable. Now we didn't go through the entire checklist because I wanted to reserve a couple lessons for two of the points. In particular, in the last lesson, we went over the importance of interactive content. In this lesson, I want to go over the aspect of making it personal, right? Because as we've gone over many times in this course, the number one challenge in marketing or with content or interactive content, whatever it may be, is creating the right content for the right people at the right time. And because content is always getting better and really every element of continents getting better, it is more important than ever to question what is the right content. And this brings us to that second element that I just mentioned. And that is make it personal because it is the right content for the right person or persona that you developed earlier. Now as a quick side note, I did not say personalization. This idea of personalization opens up a vast technical discussion on how to personalize content for your users based upon a myriad of data points. Now if you are interested in this discussion, I have no doubt you'll find plenty of books and articles ready to educate you. And software that people are willing to sell you that takes care of personalization. Rather here I want to focus on making your content personal. That is consumer centric rather than just product-centric. Now, as we have already seen, content is what ranks. Content is what people consume. Texts as content, images, video and media as content even designed can be content. Without content, we have nothing, right? We've, we've gone over this many times. But if content is king, then context is queen. That is, when making content valuable, we must understand the context of how and when and why this content is being consumed. And one of the primary elements of context is the necessity of understanding our audience. If we want to win this content game, then we must understand our audience better than anyone else. Because it is only then that we will have an idea of what type of content they specifically are looking for. Because when we don't have a complete understanding of our audience, then a disconnect is created between our business and our potential customers. Think of a marriage. How good is a marriage going to be when either or both spouse doesn't invest in learning the other person, It's a disaster, right? Worse yet, it's completely selfish. And that is what happens often in content marketing. Understanding your audience is an investment. It takes time and can be costly. And if we refuse to make this investment, it usually underscores that we are selfish with our time and frankly lazy. We must heed this warning. If content marketers are putting out content that your readers don't really relate with, then it holds no value, and hence, you by association hold no value. So as is the case in all marketing disciplines, it's important to understand your audience. Understand things like how they think. That is, what is their motivation, what are their passions, what are their pursuits, right? We talked about this in session two when we develop personas, or how about the answers that they seek? Write these hopefully should have been written down during the new framework session. If not, please take some time right now and start to brainstorm answers that they are actively and presently searching for. If you don't know, then ask them or as sales and support, they may know as well what their pain points. What keeps your customers up at night? What what could be frustrating or what are their concerns? What are their doubt? Your goal here in developing content is to make their life easier by answering their questions and solving their pain points. Fourthly, is the path. That is the path they tend to take the final solution. What is their unique buying process? Again, we went over this in session 2 when we develop personas. Now, knowing this not only helps you speak their language in a meaningful way, which is really important, but from that research, you can begin crafting a documented content strategy that maps your content to the various stages of the buyer's journey. You should obviously remember this from when we were building out persona's, that Azure point, this information together and answering these questions. We need to consider audience intent as part of your process because it's not enough to know that your audience is interested in a topic. You have to understand what they want from information about that topic. Are they researching? Are they shopping or they reselling? Because only then can you make your content marketing truly conversion worthy. Now some of the most successful campaigns in history, or when businesses knew exactly how to relate to their audience. Take for instance, Nike's find your greatness campaign. Now you may remember this from the London 2012 Olympics, but when those Olympics began, Nike launch this clever campaign encouraging everyone, no matter who they were, age, size, demographic, and it doesn't matter encouraging everyone to excel as athletes regardless of their ability. Now what Nike understood about their target audience is that it's not just the championship athlete or a record breaker that strives to push their own limits, right? A large portion of Nike's target audience, our everyday athletes, otherwise known as weekend warriors. Now this campaign set out to encourage them to achieve their own defining moment of greatness. You may not win the Olympics, but hey, that's fine. You have your own limits that you can push, you have your own greatness that you can achieve. Now the reason this campaign work is quite fascinating. While the message did have mass appeal, this campaign was developed with data-driven persona's in mind. Nike understood innately the motivations of their target consumers and appeal to those emotions. While at the same time challenging common perceptions of the brand. In this case, that it's not just for professional athletes. And it was a brilliant consumer centric campaign based on data that as you can imagine, ended up doing really well. Let's conclude this section on creating personal content with a quote from Jim stumbled, a brilliant marketing mind. What we really need is a mindset shift that will make us relevant to today's consumer. A mindset shift from telling and selling to building relationships. Note that word, relationship, it's becoming personal. They're not just a marketing ID in some sort of nurturing software, right? That's not the, that's not our target audience anymore. We have to know them. We have to steady them as real human beings because that is the cornerstone of effective content marketing today. 8. Full-Funnel Content Plan: We now come to the strategic part of building out a content engagement plan. Now at a generic high-level, an ice cold prospect will generally travel through three stages before they become a customer. Again, I'm oversimplifying this just for discussion sake. Now to satisfy or nurture that customer through this multi-stage buying journey, you will need a full funnel content plan or content that satisfies at each stage of their personal journey. Now as we have already looked at, let me ask our daily blog posts and only daily blog posts and good content strategy. Well, for nearly every one of you, the answer should be no, right? But it's creating top of funnel content like on a blog, important, we'll absolutely right, 70% of consumers learn about accompany through their blog rather than adds. 60 percent of consumers, according to i media connection, feel more positive about a brand after consuming content from an inner form of a blog. Now tofu content or this top of the funnel content like a blog, can be still a very effective part of a content strategy. But the operative word here is part of a content strategy. Because failing to build a full funnel content plan will leave many of your target consumers wanting more and your marketing results obviously less than stellar. This is why when we talk about content strategy, we want to be ascension of focused. Now, even though a funnel technically points down, for now, think of a buyer's journey is moving onward and upward to greener pastures. If we fail to provide an ascension path for every piece of content we create, that's not just bad marketing, it's a bad user experience, right? We've already taken a look at this in detail. Smart content marketers anticipate the next logical intent or step of their users, and remove as much friction as possible to create a clear path to conversion, which brings us back to the belief framework that you saw in Session 2. And hopefully you remember this chart, but more specifically the four columns under each persona. And hopefully each one of these four columns is mostly filled out. Well, let's walk through these quickly again just to refresh your memory. The idea here is that every persona has important needs related to your product that needs to be fulfilled at each stage of the buyer's journey, your goal, right, if you remember, is to identify and articulate those needs and this belief. Secondly, you start to draw a line from there needs to specific solutions that your product is able to solve. At this point, you can start to come up with specific content titles and topics that will potentially satisfied the defined need of the persona. You're making it personal for your product and your brand. An example would be if persona one doesn't think they have a need for your product or it hasn't been defined for them yet. Therefore, your solution should underscore the ramifications of not using a product like yours. Like what are the downsides, the risk, the dangerous, or what are the upsides, right? I mean, this is, this falls underneath that values-based versus fear-based marketing successes and failures, risks and rewards that we talked about during the belief framework. For instance, a fear-based, you could say, are you ready for an audit? Or five ways to avoid losing your business? For the values-based or the upside or the rewards, you can say things like ten unknown benefits for using product XYZ. Or it's a great time to use other companies to talk about the personal benefits that they have personally found, right? You can use case studies here, social proof, customer testimonials, what have you. Now obviously, these are cheesy examples that I just gave you. But you get the purpose of the exercise. Start filling in the blanks for content that will help solve these defined needs. Thirdly, you'll want to identify the content type. Now again, this is preliminary work, but you're starting to create a structure for your content strategy. Now Content-Type is what we'll be discussing at length in this session. I'll also provide you with loads of examples to get your creative juices flowing. And fourthly, as we just talked about, is the CTA or the call to action. Now, I cannot understate the importance of the CTA. The point of the CTA is for you to clarify for the visitor, your visitor that you know that based on the persona, the next logical step in the buying process. This is basically the ascension path that you clarify, measure, and optimize over time. Now chances are pretty good that you are not going to nail it perfectly the first time, right? No. Because you're you're kind of guessing at this point based upon your experience or the limited data that you have. So make sure you are iterating on this process optimizing over time. Now, as we have seen earlier in this course, this ascension path outlines the steps a consumer will take from the beginning to the end of their journey. Another disclaimer here, there's no clean journey for any specific persona, right? But we have to start becoming a little formulaic in our strategy and our content plan. So the reason we do this is for the benefit of our organization so that we can be sure that we have covered all of our bases to the best of our ability concerning the defined needs. Meaning we don't want to leave any need of the consumer an unsolved, alright, we don't, we want to make sure that we address every need, that we hear, every problem, every pain point, Every want should be addressed successfully. And using a spreadsheet like this example in your homework, you can start seeing where the vacancies are and what you should prioritize based upon the needs of different personas. Now let me illustrate why this is useful. I personally, in the middle of purchasing a car, it is a messy or deal and there is no easily defined path. And a number of you probably agree. However, as I personally go through the stages of this tumultuous buyer's journey. And I know I'm be dramatic, but it is a dramatic journey. I am looking for resources that will help me at each stage of the buying process. For instance, at the beginning, I was looking for the list of top cars in my price range, or at least in the style I like. These are very high level content pieces that I came across, right? And may not even be super accurate. But it gets me thinking about certain problems and solutions. Now some resources are very unhelpful and I can guarantee you they will not receive my business. I go to their website on my phone or on the desktop and and information and images are all jumbled. It's really difficult to navigate. Sorry. They've lost my trust. Now, whether it's a bad design of the website or they over-promise on content and then don't deliver whatever it is. I'm super disappointed in some content or whatever they've delivered. However, I have come across other resources that have really surprised or informed. Therefore, in my mind, these brands are now more trustworthy because they've understood my pain points. They've understood where I'm at in the journey. They have actually delivered on the promise of giving me really helpful, insightful, and timely solutions to my questions. So two for you, write your goal in your market and industry is to provide the right information for each target consumer at the different stages of the buying process. Unfortunately, research shows a shocking 68% of B2B organizations haven't even defined the stages in their marketing funnels. Now without defining these basic stages in your funnel, there's no way you can effectively nurture or even satisfied leads because there is little to no concerted effort to satisfy different problems with different solutions or to even move customers to the purchase stage. And the end result is that every consumer gets essentially the same content, which is you can imagine is not helpful at all. Now the common reason that far too many organizations give for simply creating this generic content is because, well, it's what they should do as a business, right? All good businesses create content. All good marketers or content mills and so too, we should do the same thing. However, since each person reacts differently in each stage of the funnel, content should be created for a personal funnel with a specific design and purpose in mind. Now, as we have seen before, the benefit of this conversation about a belief framework is that the content in a belief framework is typically evergreen. And that means two things. First off, the content is almost always relevant or not David content. Secondly, it is never finished or complete, which is probably why it is relevant. That is, you can always improve upon it, updated and more research, whatever it is. The point being, it is always evolving and growing over time. That is, for persona one, there may be one to three top of the funnel content pieces that address specific beliefs such as pain points, market problems, challenges, struggles, whatever it may be right, that this specific persona has. Also, when you take this scientific approach, you are able to analyze the online behavior of visitors. So you can identify which content was consumed at each stage of the sales funnel. And if the CTA that call to action effectively lead prospects from one stage to the other, right? And at the same time you can see what's not working. You'll see a low engagement on certain pieces of content or a low click-through rate on the CTAs. And you'll realize, wow, this isn't resonating. So you can switch it out for other pieces of content until you have an optimized funnel. Now if you have not filled out the belief framework, then you will need to do so before you can move on to the next stage of the content engagement plan. And that is starting to build out that content. Now, one of the reasons I love this model is that once all of the tofu, mofo and Bo Fu, that is top, middle and bottom funnel content is created, identified, segmented based on persona and belief. Then you can deploy a true multi-channel lead nurture and campaign where you're delivering the right content to the right person on the right channel at the right time. And the best part is you don't always have to create new content, right? If you see a low conversion rate on any piece of content or CTA, then you have the opportunity to test new content against your current baseline. But what you have is now a framework that you can measure and analyze and optimize. 9. Defining Content Type: As we just saw in the last lesson, there are several major elements of the belief framework. There's persona, there's the funnel stage. There's needs and beliefs, there's content and content type and CTA. But remember, the belief framework is the foundation of your content engagement plan. So once you have defined the persona's beliefs at each stage of the buying process and their needs, at least to the best of your ability. And a potential title for content that could help support that belief. Then as we just saw, you need to move on to the next stage of building your content engagement plan. And that's defining the content type. If you've ever sat down with any content strategists or marketing guru, then you will immediately recognize that there are a ton of different directions you can go at this stage. I love this image from Robin, good because it underscores this vast array of content types and categories that exist. Meaning, when you create content, do you ask a question like, is the content I create going to be informational, educational, illustrative, entertaining data analysis? Or do you have your blogs and webpages? And those are the only two pieces of content you create, right? If it's not a web page, well, it's going to be a blog. So again, the question we have to ask ourselves is, what type of content type should I create? Because different types of content fulfill different purposes. Well, to help you start this process, let's take a look at some information we briefly looked at in Session 2. And that is the different content types for each stage of the buyer's journey. Now we want to be very clear that this is just a guide for content types. There's no real scientific consensus on what types of content work best in each stage, because it does depend a lot on your sales cycle, your industry, and your audience. Also, there's a lot of overlap between content types and stages. However, that being said, this is the best we've figured out for now. And according to the research we seen and our own personal experience, it seems to hold true for the vast majority of companies we've worked with. For instance, when you're in the awareness stage, you're obviously not looking for trials and demos, right? Rather, you are learning about your wants and needs and pain points. This type of information is much more consumable and ungated content like a blog, social post, or tip sheet that is free and it requires almost no investment or risk on your part. This is why Forbes has become increasingly irritating. That is forbes.com. They're hiding their awareness stage content behind second ad. Now, no doubt you've, you've probably seen this stuff before. Now, I actually hit an entrepreneur.com blog post today that was hidden behind a 15 second ad. Her, You kidding. Just say, you know, I did not wait for the ad to complete before I bounced back. Why? Because I was looking for awareness stage content, top of the funnel. I wasn't looking for in-depth, detailed research. And I can guarantee you every time I go to the Forbes.com blog posts or articles, it's not super in depth. These are, this is just more like a content mother. They're sharing some, some nice high-level research, but it's nothing super a deep or research. So why do I have to commit to so much in order to read it? Now all of this content I'm talking about at Forbes.com and entrepreneur.com isn't really considered ungated content, right? I didn't actually have to enter in any of my information. E-mail, phone, what have you. This kind of content that requires more commitment or investment though, it's just much better further down the funnel, when you have already built rapport with your consumers. And your consumers are more dedicated in their search to the point that they are willing to give up their private information or valuable time in exchange for a demo or a trial or an e-book, or at least some valuable research. Now, I suppose I should have waited the full 15 seconds on entrepreneur.com so I can share with you what it was they considered that kind of time investment. But like most humans, I'm impatient, right? And they don't have any rapport with me so far because I know what I would have found would have been lighthearted at best. Well, let's take a quick look at the terms that work best for each stage of the funnel. Again, as you're looking at this list, there's, this isn't rocket science. But it still is important because as you're building out the belief framework in your content engagement plan, you'll want to take these terms into consideration. For instance, During the awareness stage, consumers will often, not always, but often use terms like issue or risks or improve. Now as you can see, these are vague questioning terms, right? Consumers don't have an idea of a solution yet. They're addressing pain points. And you would probably want to avoid words like comparison, where you're comparing brands or solution categories because that is simply not where the consumers yet in their buying process. However, during the consideration stage, now this search begins to narrow from a general solution to a more specific problem or maybe a provider or a service that can help. And finally, the decision stage on the right. Consumers are actively comparing and looking for social feedback and reviews. Why? Because they know they have identified their pain point. They think they have a general solution and now they're comparing specific brands and options and solutions. Now, these terms should be helpful in starting the discussion of not just what type of content could be created each stage of the buying process, but also content titles, right? Use something similar to this, or at least uses to get the creative juices flowing concerning the type of content and content titles for each stage of the buying process. Now also, what I want you to notice about this is how this information can be valuable to you when filling out this CTA column in the belief framework. For instance, when you create an awareness piece of content, do you know the next question, the next concern or answer that your prospect is seeking, right? This should be included in your CTA. If they have consumed an awareness piece of content, then be thinking in the back of your brain, what is the consideration piece of content going to be? And where can I lead them to next? 10. Consumer-Centric Content: Now I wanna take a few minutes out and underscore a really important point when creating content. And that is, when you create a piece of content, be like Walt Disney. Walt Disney is considered by many the first user experience designer because for him, it is always been about the experience. As such, he's had the guiding principle of attention to detail, focus on immersion, and the desire to constantly improve his product. So two, when we come to the belief framework, you should have the same view in mind. Have you, have you ever been to a Disney theme park? If you have, then you know, Disney's relentless pursuit of immersion. Immersion is the idea that everything is designed down to the exact detail and I mean everything, right, how cast members are to waive the fact that they are called cast members. Each plant display food items, signage, everything is exact. And you should take the same mindset when it comes to your content, right? You shouldn't just produce flipping content and expect users to figure it out and just buy your product. Note, everything should be detailed. Everything should be dialed in down to every last element. What is the content, the content type, the CTA, what needs you are addressing the beliefs that you are creating. Everything should have a purpose, which leads us to Mickey's Ten Commandments. Now, I don't know if you've ever seen these or not, but this is an amazing list of Walt Disney's wisdom concerning his attention to detail and is relentless pursuit to understand his visitors and their behavior. Now, there's a lot that each of us can learn from Disney's wisdom hearing and Mickey's Ten Commandments. Things like know your audience. Sound familiar, right? Disney, Disney's quoted for saying, Don't bore people or talk down to them, lose them by assuming that they know what you know. This is brilliant, right? We are product owners, their product consumers who are not necessarily familiar with our brand or product or mission statement or so on. So we have to not speak to them like they know what we know. We have to know our audience and what they know. Or how about this one? Organize the flow of people and ideas. Now that's what we're doing here with the belief framework and content engagement plan. In fact, that's the foundation of strategy, right? Being organized. Here's the one I wanted to point out most. Create a weaning or a visual magnet. Walt Disney said, You leave visitors from one area to another by creating visual magnets and giving visitors rewards for making the journey. Now. 11. STAGE 1: TOFU CONTENT: The first stage of content that marketers often identifies called the tofu, or top of the funnel stage content. Now as a side note, there is a another stage before this one that targets anonymous visitors. That's because website visitors aren't officially at the tofu stage until they opt in to consume content. Otherwise, the visitor is just an IP address and not an actual person. So tofu could be someone subscribing to your blog, a lead in your lead list, a visitor filling out a form to establish a free membership for a content access to watch a short video or to download a guide, white paper, chichi, whatever. Now, this type of content can be characterized by having a low barrier to consumption and is generally fairly quick and easy to consume with almost no risk for the user, if any, risk at all. Again, think of blog posts for instance. However, for the sake of this discussion on content, I'm going to categorize tofu content as having low to 0 barrier to consumption. Even though as we just went through the definition, the accurate definition may be slightly different. Meaning anonymous, suspicious, and legitimate tofu traffic will be addressed in this section on tofu content. So let's take a look at the type of content that would be meaningful and satisfying at this stage for these visitors. The top of the funnel, as you know by now, is also known as the awareness or attract stage in the buying process. Now at this point, a buyer is generally trying to solve problems and get an answer or meet a need, right? What tends to work well, here is top-level educational content that helps direct them to a solution like blog posts or website content or articles or social posts. So think of content that focuses on answers or maybe a list of resources or educational that is easy to consume but teaches a valuable lesson or addresses a real problem. Or you can also include in here research data. This is good because it's light and it's repeatable such as 85 percent of all consumers do this. Fill in the blank, right? Anything that's easy to consume, an easy to repeat is great research data at this stage. Also opinions and insights, especially from respectable resources, can be very helpful here. Now the top of the funnel stage is often where we see inbound marketing at its finest. Our goals might include nudging a few potential customers torque conversion. But the way we go about that is rarely by talking about ourselves, right? Instead, it's about figuring out what the audience wants and needs to learn about, and then teaching them those things. If you're doing that well, you're associated then with feelings of gratitude and respect with your brand. You write your brand awareness only gains rapport, not to mention authority. Now all the while you're raising the competence of your readers to a point where hopefully the products or services you have to offer start to become more useful to them, right? You're going for that double win. So as you begin to think of developing content for the TOEFL stage, here are the top three goals you should have in mind. Number one, indirect customer acquisition. Again, as we just talked about your non-specifically trying to get a new customer with this one piece of content. Otherwise, you're trying to answer to many questions and provide too many solutions. This is top of the funnel content. Otherwise is the analogy I've used several times is it's like proposing to a perfect stranger on public transportation. You got to develop a relationship. In fact, you just have to talk to them first. That's what this stage is for. Rather, in this first phase of content marketing, you're trying to generate awareness of an interest in your brand among potential customers and even the market at large. Because it's not enough for people to just be aware of your brand name. They also need to be curious and interested in enough about your brand to remember your name and start integrating it into their list of trusted brands, even if they only trust your content at this stage, again, That's the purpose. The overwhelming topic of your content must be to make potential customers problem and solution aware. Any prospect must first become aware that there is a problem or a need. Remember the belief framework. And then, and only then you or your organization have a solution for it. Addressing problems may be the first time of potential customer discovers your brand. And again, that's one of the great purposes of this content. Remember, in many cases when the use case for your product isn't immediately obvious, you have the added benefit of trying to educate the market that there's even a problem or a need to be solved in the first place. Social media is a great way to make people aware of problems that they didn't even know existed. Remember the example of the heated steering wheel that I shared with you several sessions ago. Now, I personally didn't know I had this problem until I heard about heated steering wheels. Now, every time I hop in my car when it's freezing outside, I think about how I need a heated steering wheel. I did or this brand didn't create that need for me. They simply exposed and need. I became aware of a problem that I wasn't aware of before. Now, ridiculous analogy, I know, but you get the same idea. That's the purpose of the content at this stage sometimes make people, your prospects problem aware before making them constantly solution where, remember, at this stage, a visitor's value as Aleve is low, right? Because there's no guarantee that they're going to buy from you or even a product in your product category. But those who find your content helpful and interesting may journey on to the middle of a funnel if they find your content trustworthy and helpful, and they are gently guided onto more helpful content. Nevertheless, the biggest goal at the top of the funnel to make a prospect problem aware and solution aware. Now, you may have seen or heard all of the research that underscores the value of tofu top of the funnel content. For instance, according to Adweek, I read recently, 81% of shoppers conduct online research before making a purchase, right? The operative word is research. They're not looking online for a demo or Free Trial button research. It's how humans in every industry operate today. Think about if you're going to buy a new software or a new pair of running shoes, or a new car, whatever it may be. Do you just go out and buy it? No. You research it? We all research it. And what we come across is a lot of top of the funnel content first in our buyers journey. Now one of the most powerful ways to capture tofu attention is to optimize high-value written content, like blog posts, guides, checklists, white papers and reports with original research. Don't feel limited to written content though, right? Amazing. Top of the funnel content can also include videos, social media content, courses and certifications, and other forms of educational or even interactive content. Now, do you need all of these types of content at the top of the funnel? Know that this is quite a lot of work, right? Most businesses will post content to a blog and to a social media channel or two, and that's about it. However, once you've mastered these two types of content, your website, your blog, or social media, whatever it may be. Then you'll want to strategically add more top of funnel content to the mix, like maybe some guides or checklists or white papers or maybe even a video. Remember, the biggest goal at the top of the funnel is to make prospects problem aware and solution aware. So it could be through the use of ads. Maybe landing pages are videos, infographics, handy checklists. Just don't lose sight of the purpose of this content during your ideation sessions, I've seen organizations get crazy loss down rabbit trails during this stage. So repeat to yourself, problem aware, solution aware. You're trying to expose them to problems or needs that they have based upon your research. And then get them ready for a solution. 12. TOFU Spotlight: Social Media: Now in the last lesson, I mentioned social media as an opportunity for tofu content. So I want to take a quick minute or two to underscore that this is a very viable channel for tofu content. In recent research, 92% of marketers stated that a social media strategy was vital for their business because it creates a sense of community engagement. The key here though, is you have to foster community engagement. Now what you see on your screen are some stats from YouTube, which I find very interesting. Notice there is a huge difference between those who post to social and those who engage on social. Meaning. Having a social channel doesn't mean you are social. You have to be engaged, fostering strong ties, as it says here, with fans in your community in order to be social and reap the benefits of social. How? Well, by creating regularly updated content channels on the social platforms where your target audience regularly hangs out. You provide your prospects with easy access to your advice, right? You also give them a chance to see what other prospects and customers are saying. A prospect will also be able to instantly scan through dozens of engaging pigs, announcements, satisfied customer comments, whatever it may be, but it's all surrounding your brand, which is obviously great for you and your brand. But they'll also be able to respond to comments, right? Think of it as a relationship. How do you foster strong ties with anybody? Well, by being there, being gauged, communicating, and being responsive. And social media allows for this to happen. Today. Social media is the quickest, shortest way of getting prospects and customers to engage and eventually become brand evangelists. Aqua self-concept and he said build it and they will come. Works in the movies. Social media is a build it, nurture it, engage them, and they may come and stay. Now in the next lesson, we're going to take a look at some great examples of tofu content on different channels. Just to give you a better idea of what is working today. 13. TOFU Content Examples: Now as we discussed the different stages of the buyer's journey and relevant content associated with that stage. I find it is helpful to look at examples of companies that are doing this well. So let's take a look at a few organizations and brands that are doing tofu content. Well. Now a great example of this is Farmers Insurance. They launched what they called their 15 seconds of smart campaign. You may remember this. Basically it's short 15-second videos educating their audiences on insurance opportunities. Now if you've had the pleasure of seeing these videos, they were educational while obviously also being entertaining. Maybe they were ripping off a little bit of Geico's. Well, that kinda did the same thing. Now, this is just a great example of snackable bits of tofu content that are delightful. They're shareable, and their educational and informational all at once. Now, while not demanding information or action from the consumer, they are building brand awareness and report in the minds of their target audience. The result is simply greater brand awareness along with a healthy dose of respect and trust for this brand. Here's another good example where a grand, in this case, mind-body, created an inspirational blog. What I want you to note is that mind-body is a software company providing cloud-based business management software for the wellness services industry. Well, since their target audience includes those who offer wellness services, their blog ingeniously targets and speaks to their target audience. But note this, it's not about their software right there, talking about what matters to their target audience without loading down their content with brand and product messaging about all our Cloud-based business management or software, whatever it may be. The result is at their target market gains, trust and respect for this brand. Because they have shown that they are not only knowledgeable about their products and services, that they actually care about the topics and the needs and the pain points of their target audience in a personal, intimate, and authentic way, right? It's a powerful case of community relationship-building. One of my favorite examples of speaking the target markets language is Wistia. Wistia is a video hosting platform like Vimeo and YouTube. With the addition of loads of video analytics, right? It's a super valuable tool that I've used personally extensively in the past. Now think about this as it consumer hoping to get into video production, you may have an obvious need or problem. That is, you like many may realize you aren't that good at shooting or editing video. Or really any of the important factors that go into good video, including audio, lighting, software editing, and all the other topics that go into shooting actual good video. So like a normal human nowadays, you begin your search, your research online, and you begin to come across these helpful instructional videos from Wistia. Now, I encourage you to watch some of them there. They're both educational and entertaining. Some are quite funny, but they're also very informational. And as a result, Wistia has become one of the foremost respected leaders online when it comes to quick educational tutorials on everything concerning the topic of video. Now, this is what I want you to catch Wistia, rather than just talking about hosting or analytics, which are their primary products, they could have gone way down some rabbit trails about their features and their speeds and some really cool tech numbers. What they chose to do is position themselves as the authoritative, trustworthy experts concerning video recording and editing. Therefore, when their target market wonders, which platform is should I host my high-quality videos on? Who do you think is the trusted brand that comes to mind, right? This is what we've been talking about. People go there to learn about video production, aware of their need, where their problem, and at the same time discover a brand that host the videos that consumers hoping to publish aware of their solution. Remember, tofu stage, your goal is to make your target market both problem aware and solution aware. Wistia has absolutely nailed it. Another industry that has done a great job with this, or the upscale supermarket. So this is, this is almost a no-brainer. Maybe you've seen many examples of this. That is, you as a upscale supermarket, would want more people to buy more products in your store. So what do you do? You give them examples of how they can use your products, thus enticing them to purchase more. Now in this simple example, notice how Whole Foods, using their whole story blog, raises awareness for sea scallops. And a sea scallops offer while providing valuable content like recipes and cooking instructions. Now keep this in mind. This can go for most products that you wear out over time. If you sell car tires, then give examples of where people can go on long journeys and trips. Why? Because as they do, they'll wear out their tires than they need more. But you're not hurting them with that advice, right? You're helping them, you're giving them really good opportunities for them to engage in nature or see different sites or be a family or whatever the case may be. While at the same time, you are giving them an opportunity to wear out their tires and come back and purchase from you. That's what, that's what supermarkets are doing. Just talking about how they got the biggest sea scallops or see scalps tastes better than the other competitors. Know there's simply giving you opportunities in the store. You've probably seen a little recipe cards of how you can use the products all around you to make these yummy meals. Now if you've ever had to create a meal before, you realize that sometimes there are many ingredients. And so you have to naturally go to the store. So you may already have sea sculpts in your freezer at home. While you might not have a lot of the seasonings or some of the side dishes, right? This is, this is just brilliant TOEFL marketing. You're building trust and rapport and expertise in the mines of the consumer, right? You're making them problem aware, but you're also giving them real solutions, practical solutions that they can use and that are helpful to them personally. Just make sure when you're creating tofu content that you don't lose sight of the school. Some organizations are fantastic at the hard call to actions, making their prospects solution aware. But they forgot to introduce problem awareness at the same time. And without problem or need awareness, what can happen often is that your product or your service just seems unnecessary, right? It seems like an extra expense or an extra frill. So you have to make sure that you make them problem aware then solution aware. Now, in the next lesson we will take a look at how Mo Fu content will go beyond just making your visitors aware of problems and solutions, to actually evaluating the various solution categories that exist. 14. STAGE 2: MOFU CONTENT: Now we come to the topic of Mo Fu or middle of the funnel content. As you may remember, tofu stage was the awareness stage during the buyers journey. Now, during the Mahfouz stage of the middle of the funnel stage, we now move into the evaluation or consideration stage. Now as a quick reminder, there are not clean cut stages for buyers, right? I think we can all agree on this. But this model helps organizations tailor their content creation based on a different set of user requirements. In fact, this stage is often viewed as the most complicated funnel stage because of the broad diversity of interested leads who haven't been fully qualified yet. Nevertheless, if a visitor moves from the top of the funnel to the middle of the funnel, it means you have captured their attention. Blogs, for instance, are a great way to attract attention to your website and brand. But they often lack personal engagement. That is, it requires very little of any commitment or risk from the visitor at all. Now, once you have impressed and engaged visitor, now is the opportunity for you to begin to talk about solution categories. This is also the time that your brand can start making a more central appearance in your marketing material. Remember though, that they may not yet trust you. So don't put on your sales hat yet. In fact, research that I shared before from Google and CEB in their digital evolution of B2B marketing research report, showed that people get up to 60 percent of the way through a buying process before they're ready to talk to anyone about making a purchase. Therefore, at this stage, you don't want to make the hard sell of a demo or trial or contacts sales. Rather, this is the time when you want to supply them with content that helps them evaluate you and your products as a potential solution. So as you think about content creation during this stage, just remember some basic characteristics of your audience. At this 0.1 off. You have to understand that you've already captured their attention. Therefore, you can make the most of it, right? They've committed to pursuing a solution. So this is your opportunity to expand on your content and wow them at least a bit with your knowledge and expertise and helpfulness. Remember, you are not at the selling stage yet, so use that to your advantage. For instance, if you were a car salesmen, how helpful would you be if you knew you are paid whether or not you actually sold the car. That's the idea here. At this point, you're just trying to be helpful. Share your knowledge and your expertise. You're not trying to sell them yet. You're not trying to get their dollars. And so they need to know that they need to see you as being helpful. Secondly, your visitors also know that they have a problem. Now hopefully it is you that is made them aware of their problem and need, but also a potential solution, but also uses to your advantage, right, as you go through the belief framework, this is an opportunity for you to anticipate the primary problems, articulate those problems and needs clearly, and then create content addressing the problem from a solution perspective. Now as an example, let's say you have written a book. Now hopefully you already understand the primary pain points and needs that your book will solve or does solve, right? That's why you hopefully wrote a book in the first place. Well, your marketing materials should address those very wants, needs, and pain points from a solution perspective. Rather than focusing on how great you are, you'll be focusing on the wants and needs and pain points of the user by providing a clearly spelled out solutions for each identified need. Thirdly, users and prospects at this point are conducting heavy research into discovering the best solution and whether or not your product or services a good fit for them. Now generally, at this point of the buyer's journey, the visitor is committed to finding a solution. Therefore, they are usually willing to input their private information. Think of email, phone, address, whatever it is. In your instance, they're willing to input their private information into online forums in order to receive valuable research. So two things you should know at this stage. Don't be afraid number 1, to gate this valuable information that chances are costs you both time and resources to create, right? You can actually put this information behind a form. And secondly, make sure you impress them, right? Nothing is worse than giving my information over to have an underwhelming experience, either have to wait five to ten minutes to receive an e-mail with the content I wanted in the first place or the content just isn't that great? It's either too thin, too wordy, too salesy, not well design, whatever it is, you get the point, right? This is your opportunity to impress them and wow them. If they're going to be putting in their information, make sure it is a good experience, right? Because you're building brand rapport and awareness. Well, number 4, remember at this point that the visitor is taking no action to solve the actual problem. Although they may be considered a lead at this point because they are filling out forms. They are not at the point where they are requesting demos or trials or sending you their credit card information. So just like any good relationship, you will need to nurture it by showing you are the most helpful, the most courteous and knowledgeable expert in the industry. Now, for smaller purchases, this can take a short amount of time. The research and investment that gets put into a purchase is much shorter. Phrase smaller purchase. Then for a larger purchase which can take weeks if not months. So think of this stage as a point of extended engagement where you're nurturing a lead, you're building a relationship and establishing trust between the audience and your brand. 15. MOFU Goals and Tactics: Now before we take a look at some Mo Fu content examples, I want to take some time and go over the goals and tactics of middle of the funnel content. Again, it's important to note that this content usually doesn't focus directly on what you're selling. It uses though what you're selling as a means to some other end. Whether that NB, higher search engine rankings, relationship building or problem-solving. Now the reason I want to spend some time on this section is because this evaluation stage, the middle of the funnel content, is arguably the most critical point in the buyer's journey because this is where prospective customers start eliminating solutions that simply aren't a good fit for them. Now, while the top of the funnel is designed to educate a prospect, this is the stage where you want to show why your solutions in particular are the best fit. Now as a quick word of wisdom, you also want to help people determine if they're not a good fit. Which will be very important later for healthy customer retention. Because if you convince customers to buy who aren't a good fit for your business in the long run, you can be shooting yourself in the foot in the form of high churn rate later on or bad reviews. So at this point, generally speaking, one of the first things a prospect will want to know while deciding that a product or service might be useful as whether they can trust the brand behind it. Now the best way to build that trust is by establishing domain expertise as a helpful thought leader. And helpful leaders usually offer free advice. That is why the primary goal during the middle of the funnel stage is direct customer acquisition. Your goal here is to convince him that no-one can be trusted as much as you and that they would be foolish to go anywhere else. Therefore, since people in the middle of the funnel are likely to be looking to you for content, showing that you're the experts in your industry. You'll want to produce content in effective content types that underscore this point, right? It's difficult to build a tremendous amount of trust if you only offer blog posts. Because that's generally tofu content has generally light reading. It's generally not going to show how much you know as an expert in your industry. So during the middle of the funnel stage, your content should continue to educate like a blog post, but also start the process of positioning your company as the solution to the leads, problems, needs, and challenges. Things like advanced e-books are a great form of continent stage. But so too are webinar's case studies, white papers, quizzes, and videos. They'll also do wonders with beginning to build your credibility. Remember your goal is nurturing, engagement and relationship development. That shows you are the experts in your industry without forcing them yet to make a decision for your product over others. So at this point, you'll want to make sure you have clear FAQs page on your website to answer the most relevant and common questions they're likely to have before committing to your product or service. Again, the purpose of this stage is to wow them. To really show your expertise, not just in the content that you have, but in the way you present your content. So make sure you take a hard look at the content you're creating. The goal of your content and the tactics. That is, how are you presenting it? Is it going to be interactive content? Does it show that you know what you're talking about? Are the people going to be happy that they actually gave you their private information in order to download this quality content. 16. MOFU Content Examples: Now just like we did with the tofu content, I want to take a look at some Mo Fu content examples. But before we do, let's answer a quick question again. Is middle of the funnel content really that necessary? Well, let's have the numbers speak for themselves. Recent research shows that companies with refined middle of the funnel engagement and lead management strategy CA, four to ten times higher response rate compared to a generic email blast and outreach that's from HubSpot. Now, there's a good reason for this. Middle of the funnel is usually the easiest group to target. Think about. During the tofu stage, there is often a lot of work for very little return. As you are making your target audience aware of problems and solutions and even your brand. Well, at the bottom of the funnel, consumers are often fairly convinced which solution, or at least solution category is best for them. That leaves the middle of the funnel. The middle of the funnel is prime grounded, convinced, active researchers that your solutions are logically and emotionally the best fit. But secondly, nurtured leads produce, on average, a 20 percent lift in sales opportunities. That's not something good marketers take lightly, right? 20% is a huge number. Now the reason is that you have already done a lot of the sales work by answering questions, building trust, and providing some clear solutions. So let's take a look at a few examples of organizations that have done Mo Fu content really well. First off is Zendesk. Zendesk is a great example of an organization that puts out a wealth of in-depth educational content like this gated e-book, for example, on how to build and manage a virtual team. Now, this piece of content targets people who manage remote teams, and it goes a step further than just a typical top of the funnel blog posts. By diving much deeper into the subject, meaning. They reward you for reading or filling out the form for this gated piece of content. Now middle of the funnel content like this, helps point their audience to a specific solution. Addressing identified common pain point while simultaneously building a relationship between business and consumer. Can you see why someone who is actively looking for a solution to their problem could potentially be very impressed by Zendesk. Think about it. At Zendesk, knows this problem and solution so intimately and expertly, then chances are there software provides the same level of expertise and solutions that you see here in this research. In other words, they have presented themselves as a trustworthy brand. Here's another example of Mo Fu content, but this is a little more technical. This is MailChimp product guide. Now, I understand that this is super detailed, but remember, product guides like this that outline the aspects involved in a specific solution can demonstrate further benefits and features. Helping buyers understand what to expect should they purchase your product. In other words, if someone is really considering your solution, well, a well-timed to guide may provide the detail they need to make a decision. That is to be confident in making that decision. These guides provided by Mailchimp are displayed in a very appealing way. So all the points and instructions are mentioned very clearly. The point being is this. If you are looking for a service like male chimps, you're able to find a solution to your problem quite quickly, even if you don't have a specific problem as yet. This article, this page, this section of their site shows the detail and effort Mailchimp puts forth to providing the easy to understand solutions. Now obviously this is ungraded, but it does show and it does reinforce. Mailchimp has their dogs all lined up in a row. These guys are technological experts. They've got how twos and they've got instructional manuals and guides on nearly every topic that is important to me. And if they're willing to invest that much into this amount of detailed content, well then I can trust that for software is going to match that detail as well. Here's another incredible example from HubSpot. This is their customer testimonials page. Now, as you can see, there are a ton of case studies listed here that you can filter through by a number of categories. The point is this, you can find someone or several someones who was just like you and you can see what they have to say or at least the benefits that they have experienced by using HubSpot. Mo Fu content is designed to provide prospects. With the information that will put your company and its products ahead of all others being considered. And case studies are a great way to acknowledge the prospects, specific pain points and the consequences of those pain points while presenting your organization's products as a practical way to address them. Alright, Case Studies affords you this opportunity because once you have a real life examples of how you improved a customer's situation, made their life better, such as reduced their overhead or improve their productivity or eliminated their bottlenecks, etc. And these are meaningful the prospects because they showcase what you did for someone just like them. In fact, as a side note, if you want to do some comparisons, but don't want to look to critical or harsh. That is, you want to compare your product to a competitors, will let a user do it for you. For instance, a user may be willing to share why they chose you over a competitor. Well, consolidate this testimony of theirs into a clean case study and then entitle it. You can say something like your product versus the competitors. Products such as QuickBooks versus Excel, right? That's, that's a huge search term on the Internet. Or why QuickBooks isn't better than Excel. You get the idea. You want to offer evidence of your product superiority using side-by-side comparisons, study results, customer case studies, demonstrations, customer testimonials, whatever it is. But you want your customers to speak for you. Write it if you're saying your product is better than competitors, well, that it's not really that trustworthy, right? It's not that meaningful. But if you allow your customers to show why your product is better than customers by using numbers or research or percent growth or whatever it is. While that speaks volumes, right? That's what you can sell internally. And that's honestly why I'm sold on many software products. I see people just like me who uses certain product and they're convinced it's a better solution than maybe their competitors. The point being is this, HubSpot has absolutely nailed this mofo content. Remember, mofo content should not be too salesy, right? You will lose credibility because you don't appear to be helpful. Rather you appear to be just trying to make a buck. A prospect should be encouraged to reach his her home, her own conclusion, based upon what you've presented. And that's what HubSpot does here. And that's why webinars can be so helpful. Marketo, a leading marketing automation platform. They have a wealth knowledge about latest research and best practices all the while positioning themselves as thought leaders in their industry. Now thought leaders are almost always more trustworthy because if they are a thought leader than they must have implemented their knowledge and research into their product right? Now on top of that, Marketo host these live webinars that include interactive commentary, user submitted questions, and episodes that often feature expert contributors. Now, this interactive content targets those already tuned into the brand who are likely looking for a solution to their marketing automation needs. What Marketo has done, along with many other great organizations is demonstrate their healthfulness and expertise. Without strings. As such, a prospect is going to be far more comfortable with and serious about their brand. So no matter what type of Mo Fu content or content type you create. Before we close this section, I just want to reiterate one main point. Make your UX content shareable, right? Make it something that people want to pass along and allow them to be able to pass it. All right, ensure that those you target will share your content with others. The decision pool, by keeping them all in mind as you're creating content. Above all else, make sure all of your mofo content leaves the prospect with a strong sense of your expertise and attitude. Be confident, but not arrogant, helpful, but not timid and eager, but not pushy, right? Because there are still a few more steps that must take place before they commit to making a purchase. For one. You have to convince them that bind from you is the smart thing to do. This usually means providing more qualifying that information to call many fears that they may have. But this information can't just be an infographic. All right, these, these prospects aren't leaves anymore and they're going to start scrutinizing everything a little more closely. In other words, now's the time to offer a long form in-depth content like white papers, e-books, and even informative webinars. But as you do so, make sure again that it's sharable that they can share it with their coworkers or their boss or their social networks. Because you want this investment that you've made into Mo Fu content to be viewed not just by one person, but by everyone that person knows or people within their organization. So make it in such a way that people can't help but sharing it. Because at this point what you are doing is setting them up to make a decision. But not yet making a decision. But they're getting there, they're getting ready to make a decision. And so that's what we're going to take a look at in our next lesson. 17. STAGE 3: BOFU CONTENT: So at this point, you've hopefully attracted a healthy collection of leads with your tofu content and continue to engage and warm them up with your most UGC content. Well now what? Well, incomes and Bo Fu stage, which is obviously the most critical stage messenger and going for the sale at this point, right? Bottom of the funnel stages, also known as the decision or purchase stage. The bottom of the funnel is where someone is making the actual purchase decision. So remember at this point, they're ready to buy, but that still doesn't guarantee that they're going to buy from you. As I mentioned earlier, I'm in the buying a car stage of my life again. And frankly, I really disliked buying a car for a number of reasons. I know number 1, they are expensive and I know there are hungry wolves, aka salesmen who simply want to written me off, not all of them, but that's just at least my mindset. So although I am ready to purchase a car, I have identified that as the make and model and year I want. I still have to weigh where am I going to purchase it from based on who I think will hurt me less, which dealership is going to rip me off the least amount. It's sad. I know, but it underscores an important point during this funnel stage. The last choice the lead has to make is where do they get the solution they're seeking and who's going to provide it. Now this is especially important in the car industry where I can purchase the exact same expensive car from multiple dealers all within my near vicinity. So in most cases, leads at the bottom of your funnel just need that final nudge and that compelling call to action or reason to get them to make a purchase decision from you. That is the right offer and content at this stage can have a dramatic impact on lifting your conversions. If you're in the B2C realm, you can leverage a discount or promo code to use during the checkout process in order to establish maybe some urgency around making the purchase. If you're in the car industry, attractive lease and warranty options may be the deciding factor of one dealership over the other. So as you think about content creation during this stage, remember some basic characteristics of your audience at this point. Remember this, again, this is not an exhaustive list, but it should help direct your creative juices. First off, the purchase decision or closed stages where people are figuring out exactly what it would take to be a customer. That is, what are the hurdles? What are the hidden costs? What are the contracts like? How long does it take to onboard, right? This is where freemium or free trials are so powerful because you can immediately show the customer hopefully how quick and easy it is to get started using your product. And then to become a customer, all they need to do is add a credit card. There's a bunch of organizations and softwares that I use that do exactly this. And in the process, I can quickly see, oh wow, it took only three minutes or five minutes to get on board. Or the software really isn't that difficult to use. But secondly, sometimes they need that final nudge and that compelling called the action to get them to make a purchase decision. This is the point in the marketing funnel that you can be bold and direct and you should be bold and direct. If you remember the belief Framework session, tell them exactly what you want them to do and make a promise, right? Such as requested demo, purchased product, Start free 14 day trial, subscribe, whatever your primary goal may be. Make sure that there is a promised attached to the call to action and then obviously deliver on that promise. Think more like a salesperson at this point of the game. Be very direct, very specific on what's going to happen if they fill out the form or click the button, whatever it may be. Thirdly, at this point, a prospect will be gathering the last bit of information they need before purchasing. Now some may be looking for that final assurance or statistic that confirms to them that they are making the right decision. For instance, if you're familiar with the adoption life cycle, then for innovators or early adopters and maybe messaging like be the first or lead the crowd or the latest technology or whatever it is, right? You want to speak to their desire to be the most innovative or trendsetters. However, if your audience falls into the late majority and laggards, well that makes sure you underscore this safety and security and popularity of your product. Something like join 1500 organizations just like you, or we have a 98% customer retention rate, right? You're, you're speaking their language. Now this is a great time to use an online survey. Question your visitors in the stage about what they're looking for. You may find some trends here. But the point is, no matter who you were speaking to, you wanna make sure you're speaking their language that resonates with them, that makes them say, Yep, this is the product, this is service, this is the brand I want to be associated with because they get it. They understand me. Fourthly. And lastly, a cold prospect cannot evaluate your solution until they are first aware of the problem and your solution. And conversion, is that impossible until the prospect first evaluated the possible courses of action. So be crystal clear with your prospects, what you have to offer, and exactly what they can expect to receive, right? This is, again, coming back to the belief framework. This is that values-based and fear-based marketing. What is their life going to look like? How are you going to make their life better if they use your product? What exact need are you solving? Are you providing a solution for it? But also you can throw on some of that fear-based marketing and saying, Well, this is what your life will be like if you don't go with our product. Again, clarity and simplicity at this stage is paramount. 18. BOFU Goals and Tactics: So before we take a look at some Bo Fu content examples, I want to go through some goals and tactics of bottom of the funnel content. Remember, your primary goal at this stage is not just customers, but happy and satisfied customers who will become loyal promoters. So make sure you delight your customers. All right, We live in a day and age where reviews are social, their immediate, and they're powerful. So despite how you try to convince your target market, otherwise, if you fail to deliver on your promises that you make during this stage, people will know about it because people talk. For instance, recent research from search engine watch it points out 90% of consumers read reviews before visiting a business. So it's your job to delight your customers so that those reviews are any your favor. 31 percent of customers are likely to spend more on a business with excellent reviews. And the last that I want to share with you, 72% of customers will take action only after reading a positive review. Now, this is obviously more towards like a B to C retail store, but at the same time, we know that humans are humans. People loved to hear what other people have to say, which is why we go through the research stage, right? We're not only learning more information, but we want to find out, what do people just like us have to say about this product, this product category or this brand. Which is why a, another primary goal at this stage is repeat purchases. Now savvy brands understand that all marketing is in service of the decision or close stage. And whenever possible, closing should be a repeat stage. That is, once a customer pays for their first product, the goal is to make them pay for another product or service and become a recurring customer, right? You're upset and you're constantly up selling your customers. The golden number one, goal number 1, even though I haven't listed here as number three, is transactions with customers. As I've said before, there may be a lot of KPIs that you are measuring are being measured for. It could be anything from organic traffic all the way through demos requested. But only one metric puts food on the table. And that is conversions, right? So above all else, make sure the content you created this stage clarifies any remaining barriers are hurdles for your interested and engaged leads. Now my experience, the absolute easiest way to close a prospect is through ratings, reviews, testimonials, and case studies. In fact, research shows that 88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. Now by itself, a bottom of the funnel offer isn't likely to close a lot of leads into customers is basically a hard sell, right? However, when you have it mapped appropriately to the buyer journey, you're combining the compelling nature of that final offer with all the engagement you've created leading up to that point. That is why when you create a content engagement plan, based on your belief framework, you're more likely to nail the closed deals and see that lift and conversions. So at this point, your content tactically should be much more straightforward. It can involve things like clear descriptions of your products that they outline the unique value they provide to customers. It can include charts that compared your various products to one another or to those of other companies. Think of the bottom funnel content as the sales material of content marketing. In fact, your sales team may often use this type of content more than any other in order to close leads and make sales. Now, I want you to take special note of this last point. Since this is bottom of the funnel content, make your sales process as streamlined, comprehensible, and trustworthy as possible. In other words, don't use two steps. If you can do one and don't hide behind your content, right? You wanna make it easy for your prospects to understand what the purchase process expectations are. Now in the B2C world, they've, they've done it a lot better. Write a five checkout page can become two or three and there's clear indications on the top of the page which step I am presently, you no doubt have seen this whether you use Amazon or any real B2C experience, B2B should do the same when it comes to defining what the purchase process looks like. So up next, we're gonna take a look at a few examples of great Bo Fu content from today's leading. 19. BOFU Content Examples: Now as we have gone over a little bit already, and Bo Fu bottom of the funnel, content can be tricky. Many organizations I've worked with believe both who content should be a single CTA that is placed in as many positions as possible across their website, social channels, email, what have you. Now, I am all for making the purchase process streamlined. But there are ways to be more tactical when it comes to this final stage of the buyer's journey. Take Kissmetrics for example. Kissmetrics is a rock start using customer stories and data in an educational and entertaining way. This is a simple, pleasing, easy to consume infographic. Now, whereas most companies will list out their product features and a text-heavy format, what Kissmetrics did is they chose to use this infographic and other attractive visual content to help close the deal. This is the kinda compelling both who content that will help sway a person's decision. Notice, it's not overloaded with too much copy because it's bottom of the funnel content. And therefore it doesn't feel the pressure of trying to speak to every persona at every stage of the buyer's journey. Rather, it shows me in clear detail the numbers I may be interested in before making a purchase. It's showing me based upon their experience, their knowledge of the customers wants and needs and pain points. Exactly what they need to say in order to close a deal, right? It's not super-complicated. It's very specific, and it's very clear. Another great example is Zapier. Now if you're not familiar with Zapier, It's just a great tool that integrates multiple application for aggregation purposes. Now Zapier has taken the demo route to the extreme, offering a free forever pricing plan to help onboard their audience. Now this is brilliant because now I am able to jump right in, actually see the product as it would be without having to go through a heavy onboarding process. Now, as with these free options, it is a clever way to warm people up to the paid services by showing them what it would look and feel like using the product. And in the process, many of your final questions are answered. I'm using hot jar right now with an organization and they do this same thing. They allow the full experience, but only up to three hot maps or a few polls, right? They give you the full experience, but only in a very limited sense. So when you sign up for a full offer, then there's going to be no surprise. You know that the limit on three heatmaps as simply removed. And therefore you can measure all of your pages, right? It's kinda like buying a car. Do you purchase a new car online Simply because the statistics look better? Or do you test drive multiple cars to get the feel for which car will satisfy you most. Now what's brilliant about Zapier example is that once you sign up for the free option, Zapier cycles you back to the middle of the funnel and continues to strategically build the relationship by reinforcing the effectiveness of their platform and steering free or demo subscribers to their premium plans right there nurturing you. They're building this relationship because something has kept us user from purchasing outright. And so they need some more information, research, and confidence before they go with Zapier. So that's exactly what Zapier is doing. They're sending you just enough information in order to hopefully answer the questions or concerns that you still have before jumping in with both feet. And this is exactly what Amazon does with their free trial offer. And this is no ordinary free trial. Right there bottom of the funnel offer is a completely open trial of the entire prime service, including everything from live streaming to free digital book downloads and f3 prime, the two-day shipping. Now, as you can imagine, once the trial is over, it's hard for subscribers to let go because they have become accustomed to superior service, experiencing all that goes along with Amazon Prime. And now they can't imagine doing it without it. Think of someone like Apple giving you a free phone for 30 days. Now if it's your first phone. Well, at the end of the 30 day free trial, you may ask the question, how can I survive without it? And that's what Amazon has done to my earlier 0.1 of Amazon's bottom of the funnel tactics to create a streamlined, comprehensible, and trustworthy sales process with one-click ordering. There's not a lot of content in the course of ordering, but that's the whole point. They've taken concision of both words and process to a whole new level and their sales obviously reflexes. Now as you may be aware, Amazon's Marketplace, say dels and one-click ordering have propelled this online giant to receive nearly 44% of US e-commerce sales, and that number is only growing, right? These are really impressive stats. And there's a lot we can learn from Amazon with her bottom of the funnel content tactics. Now these are just a few examples of what some of the biggest players are doing effectively and no doubt with a little research and with a little experience, you can see what a bunch of other companies are doing effectively and bottom of the funnel content. Now hopefully what you have seen is that there is no one size fits all when it comes to marketing content. If you do take that approach, than your content will be bloated and ineffective because you simply cannot reach every prospect with the same material, right? It must be tailored for each persona. At each stage of the funnel. If you're trying to speak to everyone, top of the funnel, middle of the funnel and bottom of funnel all at the same time, your content's going to be really long. It's going to be confusing. People aren't going to be satisfied with what you're saying because it doesn't apply to them anymore. And so too, when you start to get more refined, like this, saying, I'm going to create targeted content for this persona at this stage of the funnel, will then you find your content is a lot lighter. It's a lot more focus, it's a lot clearer. And frankly, it's a lot more fun to produce because you're not trying to speak to everyone at the same time. You know exactly what need and what pain point, what problem you're addressing. And you can do so with the best possible research and solution. 20. STAGE 4: RETENTION CONTENT: Finally, I want to quickly discuss this bonus final states that really shouldn't be neglected in this conversation of content. And that is the retention stage. Now for the sake of discussion, let's combine all post conversion actions into this final stage. Content in the retention stage, concerns any process that encourages a customer who has made at least a single sale to either make additional purchases or to begin referring you. Now the question is, how beneficial is retention marketing? Well, the benefits of improving customer satisfaction and retention speak for themselves. As you can see here, profits can increase by up to 90% after only a 5% increase in customer retention. It's because about 80% of your revenue usually comes from about 20 percent of your customers. Plus Secondly, there is a 60 to 70 percent chance that you can convert an existing customer. However, with new customers, there's generally only a five to 20 percent chance. So convert the people who are already customers by upselling them. Thirdly, loyal customers are 70 percent more likely to refer your business to friends. So men equipped them, give them the content that they need in order to share or to like or to comment on or to print out and pass out to family and friends and coworkers in such. Fourthly, your current customers are 50 percent more likely to try your new products and spend 31% more on average when compared to new customers. Why? Because they've already trusted you enough to become your customer. There's already that rapport there. They already have this respect of your brand and your products. So if they're satisfied with the current product that they're using, well, that's why they're 50 percent more likely to try your new products. Number 5, it costs. And this is such an important statistic. You need to understand this difference per industry and brand. But on average, it costs five times as much to attract a new customer than to keep an existing one. Now this is amazing considering 44% of COP, Benny's have a greater focus on customer acquisition versus 18 percent that focus on retention. Right now, the point should be clear. Businesses that ignore this crucial step are missing out on the most important part of their marketing campaign. Retention marketing. They're happy customers. Make sure you keep them happy and make sure you equip them to tell other people how happy they are. Which is why in larger companies you'll see entire teams dedicated to customer success, satisfaction, loyalty, word of mouth, and other similar subsets, but all share the broader goal of keeping an upselling current customers. During this retention stage. 21. Retention Goals and Content Types: Now the primary goals of this retention stage are number 1, retention of existing customers, right? Meaning repeat or recurring revenue. That is, any revenue that comes in after the first sale or up-sell, that is, increases in services above the initial purchase level. Secondly, is advocacy in the forms of number one referrals. That is word-of-mouth marketing at its best, right? Let your customers brag for you. So what you wanna do is equip your customers to do this well. And then secondly, reviews. That is public reviews of your business. It's not as powerful as referrals, but it's definitely used as valuable research by many prospects during the buying process, specifically during the Mo Fu and Bo Fu stage of the buyer's journey. So to build your customer retention and advocacy here, just a few types of content that I have found works well during the retention stage. Remember, at this stage you are equipping, supporting, and helping your current customers to be successful, happy, and proud that they chose you. So number one, something like customer support and help documentation is extremely valuable, especially the more technical your product, right? You want them to not be confused. You want to reduce any sort of barriers to understanding your product and especially being happy with it. Secondly, special offers, right? You wanna give them kinda that inside track of, Hey, you're a customer, we want to reward you for certain upgrades, occasional discounts that can garner that extra bit of good faith that confirms, yes, they did make a good purchase by going with you. Thirdly, are inside her how to use. These are great because it makes your customers feel special, right? Because no one else has this backstage pass to expert information. In essence, it's their leg up over the competition and let them know no one else has access to this information. Fourthly, is email, outreach and follow up. That gives that personal touch, especially if it comes from a real human with a first and last name and shows that you care about their well-being. In other words, at this point, you want to be reaching out to them on a regular basis, letting them know you care about them and if they have any needs or any struggles or if there's any confusion. You are ready and waiting and willing to help them. Faithfully. Effective Product UX and regular updates to your product underscore for your customer base that your product is only getting better. Therefore, they can trust that you have the best product for them. And also that are for empowers them to share your product with others. So constantly remind them of when your product is updating. Do you do to expereince four-week sprints? If you have a software, are you constantly improving your product? Let your current customers know, let them know they, they, they've got an upgraded software or that you're updating your service or you're using better products, whatever is, communicate this to them, lets them know again and confirms to them, This is great. I am using the best product possible. Now what I want you to notice is that most of this is automated content for most of your customers. Meaning, spend the time to build out your content engagement plan with evergreen, helpful and beneficial content based upon your experience with your customers. And you will find that 90 percent of the customers are taken care of. Now in the next lesson, we're gonna go through a few examples of great retention content that you've probably seen, but didn't realize what it was exactly. 22. Retention Content Examples: Now as we go through these retention content examples, it is important to remember that retention stage content takes on a different tone and voice than content higher up the funnel, where your goal is to woo prospects to making the commitment of purchasing a product. Retention content, on the other hand, seeks to reward your customer because they have chosen a form of relationship with you. Now, your job is to build their socks off with how awesome you are. Take Starbucks, for example. A study by Mintel that surveyed customers from coffee shops in the US found that 40% of the 2000 respondents in this research survey said they had purchased a drink at Starbucks, 40 percent plus another 21% who did so either at a smaller chain or independent stores. And think about those numbers. Nearly two-thirds of respondents have purchased from Starbucks. That is not just series brand recognition, but it is brand appreciation because they were willing to spend their money at Starbucks. Now the reason Starbucks success shouldn't be surprising, right? They have done an outstanding job at creating a brand and experience that is more than just coffee. Much a Starbucks can be contributed to their customer loyalty program called My Starbucks rewards and loyalty mobile apps that has helped them achieve such success. For instance, Starbucks receives millions of payment transactions per week through the mobile app, accounting for up to 30 percent of their income, right? These are loyal customers who repeat purchase through the mobile app, but it doesn't end there. Take a look at the other benefits of being a loyal customer using the app and you get free birthday reward. You can order ahead, free in-store refills and special exclusive member events and offers. All right, a huge aspect of retention content should center around this idea of exclusivity because it's also a huge selling point earlier in the buying process. Remember, what Starbucks is doing is they are rewarding their customers for purchasing from them. And hey, if you use our app, we're going to reward you that much more because we don't just want customers. We want happy, satisfied, returning customers. Now one brand that plays the exclusivity card well is REI. Now I don't know if you are part of the REI Co-op, but their rewards for customers are outstanding, right? They are a retailer. And as a retailer, they offer loads of benefits for becoming a member and hopefully a repeat purchaser. In fact, REI has something called the REI Co-op dividend. Now according to REI, your dividend is your share of the cost, annual profit. So the more you spend, the more you're contributing to the everyone wins mentality. But when you go to the members section of the website, I don't know if you've been there or not. You'll find that you get a ton of member only special offers you get access to REI is epic garage sales. If you don't know what this is, you are missing out. Kind of depends on your state. I've been some really good ones and some really good ones, but just Google REI is garage sales. You save on our AI Adventures, outdoor classes and events. Plus you get outdoor travel protection plan and similar to like insurance. And all of this is only for 20 bucks. Well, why is it so expensive? Because they're earning your loyalty, right? They want happy, satisfied, repeat customers and customer advocates who love REI. As such, they had built up an impressive community of customers who swap advice, go on adventures together, and share in this annual co-op dividend. Now, as you may anticipate, or you may see, I am a happy, satisfied REI, customer. I have experienced the benefits. Not only do I think their stores really cool, I love outdoors, I love camping and hiking, all that fun stuff. But I love the benefits from REI. So I'm not just a customer. I am a Customer Advocate. Takes to for for instance, right? So for if you're not familiar with it is just a large makeup store and I know they sell a bunch of other stuff. So I apologize if you work for support. But the point is some force a, another example of a B2C store that crushes it with our customer retention. Not only do they have a great tiered loyalty program that you see here on the right with their three levels of insider BID and robe. But their communication and unending promotions to their customers, their current customers underscores the need to spend more. For instance, check out this email on the left from C4s Beauty Insider rewards program. Now, this is a VIP level welcome email and it highlights the levels rewards, including 10 percent off the next purchase, free shipping, a free makeover highlights the benefit of using the mobile app to stay connected for even more rewards. Write this email also shows your loyalty points status just in case you're wondering how much more you had to spend to get to the next level, right? This is brilliant because they are rewarding you with exclusive, privileged VIP or in their case, BI, BI status for spending more. And therefore it makes you want to spend more because you want to get up to the next level and get even more benefits. Again, underscoring that when you create retention content, you should always be thinking retention and advocacy through exclusivity. How do you reward your customers for being customers? How do you make them feel special? Well, also encouraging them that they could be more special. And along moral words, if they just spent more, even if you are selling widgets, you are still able to support and help your customer base in such a way that they become loyal brand advocates. Remember, gaining the customer in the first place is the hard part. Once you have them, you should do all that you can to keep them happy and satisfied and really excited about using your product. Your bottom line at the end result of all of this will thank you. 23. Measuring Success: Now as you may remember, the backbone of any marketing campaign is content, right? Without content, you have nothing to mark it because content includes anything that a buyer will consume. But your content is only as good as consumers say it is. That is when you create content, it is imperative that your users confirm if it is what they're looking for or not. Which brings up two very important points at this stage of the content discussion. Number 1. As you are going through this content strategy session. And you're thinking about the different stages and the different persona's and the different needs and solutions that you have. Just remember, number one, you're not going to nail it first time around, right? In other words, you're gonna create content that you thought would succeed, but it doesn't, right? Some of it might, others may flop, may fail and it needs to be reworked or just pulled entirely. That's okay, right? We often learn more from our failures than our successes. Try to figure out what went wrong with the content. You can use a survey tool on that page that asks a question like, did you find what you're looking for or how can we help you? Or do you have a question? Right? I've been surprised by the amount of valuable information that I've been able to glean from these types of simple questions. The end result is at the visitor has helped shape the content that I delivered to them so that it's more valuable, targeted, and beneficial. My last question concerning this point is to think that you will succeed every time you create content, right? You have to have realistic expectations. You won't, as you're going through the belief framework and you're thinking about persona's in different stages in the content that you want to develop based upon the users define needs and the solutions you're providing. Just not going to hit a home run every single time, your first time around. All right, so don't beat yourself up or, or others for that matter, as you start to tailor your content engagement plan, learn from your mistakes and your successes. Look through the KPIs that we've talked about at length, measure them. Every piece of content you create first time around, we'll probably need to be revamped a little bit, right? We'll probably need to be optimized. Some, as I mentioned earlier, may need to be pulled entirely, while others just may need a little bit more research or a little bit more content, or maybe some more imagery or in different format. Just keep that in mind. Don't put these major expectations on yourself that you have to make it perfect first time around. Something of high-quality out there that is better than anything else you see on the market. And then optimize, optimize, optimize. But in order to optimize, that brings up the second I want to go over. And that is measure everything that you can. Otherwise you can't optimize for greater conversions. Right now is we've already looked at in previous sessions, one of the greatest mistakes organizations make is not setting up a process for measuring success. Specifically, there are two stages. Number 1, determine your KPIs or key performance indicators are the metrics that you want to measure. And secondly, how do you define success? What is success going to be, or what does success look like? Is there a certain metric, a certain number of downloads, a certain conversion rate? For instance, if you develop a downloadable piece of gated content, your success metrics may be number of views, bounce rate, or downloads. Right? Now based on the current metrics of your site, you should probably determine what a successful metric looks like. More important, you should determine what a successful conversion rate is. And remember, there may be a couple of conversion rates. Conversion rates from the initial click through to your good landing page, then the conversion on that page alone. Now, if you have full funnel metrics, then you can actually say how many people converted who downloaded that piece of content to actual paying customers. That's the real number that you want to be chasing after. Which again brings me to the most important point. This piece of content has a defined purpose in your conversion funnel. Meaning it should find its place in your belief framework and content engagement plan. If it doesn't fit in either, then you have to ask yourself the question, why am I creating it? What purpose does it serve, or what solution does it provide? If you can't answer those questions accurately and state exactly where it's going to fit within the framework. Then maybe this is the time to put that piece of content on hold and focus on elements and interactions and content that will actually fit within the belief framework. Now, if you notice, there is not a linear path with marketing, right? As we've just been talking about, it's cyclical. You continue to come back to the basics of defining purpose, measuring success, and optimizing campaigns. Now the benefit of this approach is that in a linear marketing strategy, the goal is quantity, right? The more content, the more blogs, more effort, more internal activity, the better. I'm going to make my numbers, I'm gonna get my bonus. My bosses going to be happy. Because in many organizations that's the generic sign of success, more is better. However, in this more modern cyclical marketing strategy of optimization that we've gone through again and again. The goal is not quantity per se, it's quality first and foremost, which means less content. But targeted content that fulfills a distinct defined purpose. That is less noise and activity and internal politics and more pursuit of understanding your target markets, wants, needs and pain points, and also less waste, right? You're not developing stuff with no purpose. Rather, your content fills defined needs and your engagement plan and addresses specific purposes and beliefs. It targets the user's needs. It provides real solutions. It may be a new way of looking at content, but it is what every consumer wants, right? I have questions and I am looking for answers concerning certain products or certain industries. It doesn't matter to me as a consumer how much a company knows about random topics in the industry. What matters to me is if they are able and willing to answer my most important questions at my exact stage during the buyers journey. Now, if you will take the time to do this, well, everything that we've talked about, you will find that you will begin to dominate your competition because you have earned the trust and respect of your target market by answering their needs and providing solutions to their specific problems. 24. Homework: Content Engagement Plan: In this homework session, we are going to look at the content engagement plan. Now the content engagement plan is simply one step beyond the bleed framework, right? In the belief framework, you had this great overview. It's really a high level overview of defining the persona, the funnel stages. And then some of these columns that you actually see here, things like the need, the solution, that content type and then the CTA, right? Those are the four columns underneath each persona. In the belief framework. However, when you take a look at the belief framework, it is a great way to organize your evergreen content, but it is not getting you set up necessarily, actually go and create content. It's simply organizing the content and the content types in and titles and such. The content engagement plan is the next step. So again, I'm trying to break this down as simple as possible so you aren't overwhelmed by the content creation process. You go through their belief framework and then you can start to copy and paste some of these columns right in here into the content engagement plan. But as you do so you'll quickly recognize you will need more information before you go and create full-blown content. The last thing you want to do is to sit down in front of your laptop with a word processor open and you start to type, right? You wanna go back to your old school days where you created outlines and you did, you're researching, you formulated your plan of attack. That's what the content engagement plan is all about. This is your plan of attack. And so what you have here is one row per Content-Type. Your belief framework is the matrix. This is simply you breaking it down for either yourself, when you write it down the road, a team member or a content writer. Now I have down here a Tools tab where I've included a number of links to different content writing communities. I've used writer axis religiously hundreds of times. They are fantastic. I will give a content writer something just like this that we're going to go through. And they come back two to three days later with a ten hundred and fifteen hundred word article, well-written, well-researched, because they had a lot of good stuff to go off of. And so there are about 10 cents a word for the top-notch content writers. Now as you can imagine, you do the math, 1500 word article is going to cost you only a $150. That's money well spent in my books. You can also go to something like Upwork or freelancer. There's another side I have in there called Boost content. They do a lot of global content and translating. Find one that works for you if you're not going to do it. But in order for you to give a content writer something, you have to organize your thoughts, you have to organize the content. And that's what this is for. So let's walk through this really quickly. Content title is simply that catchy title that will engage your prospects. It's what's going to answer the question, deal with their pain point, whatever it may be. Now, this is a spreadsheet, so feel free to use as many rows as possible in here you can, in this one cell give 345 different content, title ideas and let a content writer figure it out right there. The content experts Let them all over it and figure out something that would work. We've already talked about type. Is it an e-book or is it a white paper, is a blog post. The need is the specific need of your prospect and the solutions, how you specifically with your product or service can provide a solution to that name. Ctas, the action you want them to take once they consume your content. What do you want them to do next? Where should they go next? Remember people like direction, they need direction. And again, this is mostly copy just from the belief framework you can expound on a little bit more here, maybe give more ideas for a content writer. But most of it's just copy and paste. Again, these two columns are from the belief framework. You have the funnel stages at top, middle, bottom of the funnel, and persona. Which persona are you targeting? In these last two areas, the green and the orange, this is when we get into the details, the details of the content being written. So when I talk about details is how many words do you want it? What kind of tone and voice is this for? Where's this going to live on your website? How is it going to be used? This is the details of the content that may help a content writer. You can even get into a long description about where it's going to be used, how it's going to be used, and the overall theme of the content, that type of thing. Target topics and keywords. Remember, you are writing content to satisfy a specific need or search for this user. And so that's where this comes in. You want some clarity around this content. You don't want to be bounced around from five to ten different keywords you want to target. One specific keyword. Remember, each keyword should have one URL and vice versa. And so this content piece, this content URL should have a defined a set of topics or keywords all related around the same thing. Identify those here and remember it for it to be consumer-centric. These are things that should matter to the consumer. This is where you can start to break out the outline, and this helps content writers or even yourself down the road. You may have a brainstorming session and say, Okay, I'm going to write out the three to five primary points. And I'm going to write out some sub-points or maybe some paragraphs underneath that. Feel free to use as much space as you want right inside of this cell in the Google sheets. In order for you to clarify the concept, the high-level overview of this piece of content. Lastly, our image, assets and then references and sources. Images and assets are, are the things that you're going to include on the content piece that make it more valuable. And I underscore the word more valuable. You don't want to include content or video or a download if it doesn't add value, just because everyone else is doing it doesn't mean it's right. You don't have to have an image halfway down your blog post if it's just not going to add value, right? If it's just a stock photo that you found online that's cheap and it looks cheap. It's actually going to devalue your content. So in this section, you want to include exactly what is going to provide value and add value and benefit your users. The references and sources also adds value to your piece of content and benefits to users, right? If you're quoting lots of research but you're not referencing any one. How did they believe you? How do you exhibit you're trustworthy authority. If you're just kind of randomly spouting out this information. So here you will want to include those high value references and URLs and websites, government websites.edu, who's maybe some industry leaders in here. And again, this is going to be very valuable for content writers or yourself down the road. When you start to build out this content, you know exactly where to go, right? This, this should remind you of your old school days when your teacher taught you how to build an outline for your content and you had some structure, so you just didn't sit down to your word processor and start typing. This is the step between the belief framework and the actual content creation itself. So for every piece of content you've identified in the belief framework, you should have a corresponding row here that details what this content is about.