Transcripts
1. Introduction: [MUSIC] The most satisfying
thing I find about creating content for a sales funnel is there is a reward
at the end of it, which is your sales conversions. In today's class, it's all about mapping and crafting
your content with your sales funnel using a time-tested four-step
content marketing formula. This formula will
help you to create magnetic content that converts leads into paying customers. Good day. I'm Liz, and I'm a digital engagement
expert and CEO of a creative digital
transformation agency based in London called
Digital Matchbox. We work with clients from all
backgrounds and industries. It's from small businesses,
governments, charities, and Fortune 500 companies, to map and craft to their
content to sell sales funnels. In this class, you will discover the easy and time-saving
content marketing formula you need to create content
that gets leads and sales, you will learn how to use
all the tools and resources you need to construct
the ultimate content for your sales funnel, and lastly, you'll
understand what AIDA is and how it can help create meaningful and
conversion-focused content. Because I'm naturally
a curious person, I like to dive deep into the sales funnel and
discover what makes someone take or how we can cleverly use a tool to make this
process more efficient. In my experience, lots
of companies don't know how content
marketing comes together. They ask questions like, how many blog posts
should I write? What should I be writing about? Will my audience
find this useful? Or do I really need to write
white papers and e-books? The one major change
that you'll notice once you've taken
this class is you will no longer be
second-guessing yourself or getting overwhelmed when you start mapping out your content. I hope by the end of
this class that you'll have a clearer outlook on your customer's journey
and be able to meet their needs with
relevant content when and where they need it. In the class project,
you'll be creating the mapping your
content, my-map. At the end of this class, don't forget to
share your my-map in the project gallery so I can provide you with some
useful feedback. I'll also be available to answer any questions you might have
in the discussion section. Don't be shy. I'll be waiting
to see all your questions. If you're ready,
let's get started.
2. Understanding the Formula: Did you know that 87
percent of shoppers now begin their search
on digital channels; so having the right content is really key to getting
their attention. No matter what it is you're
trying to sell on the web, creating the perfectly
timed and purposeful pieces of content which customers considered
high-value is key to creating a
lot of conversions. Research also tells
us that it takes about five touches
to sell to someone. A content marketing funnel
creates a series of escalating steps with each
one increasing engagement and building your
fan base further. This makes content perfectly
positioned in sales funnels. The Number 1 way to trade
conversion friendly content is to deliver it through a
series of escalating steps. This is the most systematic
way to build trust, to build a relationship, and to encourage people to want your product before making a sale and it is incredibly
powerful when done well. The content marketing
formula that I will teach you today
is enough to take someone from being
completely unaware of your brand to
being familiar enough with you that they
are willing to put their money and their
trust into your products. Now it's time to take action. Write down your next
product to be launched. Remember that this could be a service or an actual
item that you're selling. This product or service
will be the focus for the rest of your learning
activities in this class.
3. Using the AIDA Model: The A-I-D-A or AIDA model, which is also known as the conversion funnel is
a customer journey that takes them through
the buying process from awareness to purchase. It's a cognitive model that
breaks down the process of buying into four
different stages. The first one is awareness, followed by interests,
desire, and action. Why is something like
AIDA even needed? In a perfect world, every salesman will
like to have a DMC, a deep meaningful conversation
with the prospect. That way all the
relevant information could be communicated
simultaneously. But in the real world, that's not really possible. I mean, there has
to be a sequence. AIDA is a time tested
method in structuring all this information is being used since the
late 19th century. It has been reviewed and modified multiple
times over the years, both in marketing and
in public relations. In theory, you're supposed
to sell the benefits. But if the prospect doesn't know anything about the
product or service, then you also need
to describe it. It's also important
to differentiate between your products
from what your competitor is offering and then you want to create some urgency around finding out more or even
better buying it today, so what happens in
each AIDA stage? The first stage is awareness. This is where you create content that gets your
prospects attention because they won't
hear anything else if they're not listening
in the first place. The next stage is interest. Once people are aware, then you can deepen their interests with
relevant content. This often involves placing of person in your ad
or marketing copy, who has a need or problem your prospects will
identify with. The next stage is desire. This third step is to generate content that sparks desire. You can arouse
desire by explaining the benefits in an
aspirational way. For example, for
health products, it can say, do you
want to feel better? Our products has three
clinically proven ingredients or for a financial products, you can say, need money fast? We approve your credit of the
application in six seconds. Finally, in this last stage, there's the call to action. This can vary from an
exclusive offer to craving an urgency that
prospects need to hurry because
supplies are limited. What matters is that
you make it explicit and tell your prospects exactly
what you want them to do. Here's a case study
showing how an award winning hair
dressing company, Francesco Group use the model
to launch their new salon. The first bit is the
awareness stage, and this is all about
getting attention. What they did was they ran a PR campaign for about four
months prior to the launch, and they promoted award stylus
qualifications and so on. This reinforced with
digital marketing campaign to targeted customer groups. The next stage is all
about getting interests. What they did was they executed a direct mail campaign to offer a free consultation on
haircut and finish. They use research to support
this because they found that females are loyal if the
offer is compelling. Once they've gotten
people's interests, these wanted to intrigue
and arouse desire. Close to the opening
of the new salon, they ran exclusive
local launch events, which were advertised through local press and social media. This created that local buzz for people wanting an invite, and they were excited
to see the new salon. The last step was action. The way they encouraged
action was they had clear call to actions where they positioned it on
their Facebook page with the call to reserve and their website with
the call to book. They also used local
advertising to get people to call in to receive
a discount or the offer. As you can see here
that all those steps nicely came together to create this escalating
steps where people first get aware and then
you get people interested, and then you spark their
desire and last but not least, you encourage them
to take action. Next, I want to share with you a simple example of
how a company selling an automation app for
small businesses can run a simple AIDA campaign
using Facebook advertising. In this campaign as
you can see here, we have the awareness stage. On this stage it's very simple the way you
can start this, is you just run a
page like campaign. Basically you just get say
people who you want to target. You get them to like your page so that you can start
sending messages to them. The next stage is
getting interest. Now, what you want to do is you want to write blog
posts and then promote it on your website and on
your Facebook page and add a free relevant download within
or below the blog posts. You can also add
an exit pop up of the download if they did not download the freebie
before leaving. There's many ways
that you can generate that interest by simply
first getting attention, by getting them
to like the page, and then possibly running a boosted post campaign for the blog posts itself and then getting them to your website. Next, you want to spark desires. What you do here is you
retarget the people who visit your article or downloaded your freebie to another article that engages their desires. For example, you could have the best automation apps for small business, that's article. Then you add a link to your pricing page in the
blog posts when you make that recommendation
that you are one of the best automation
app as well. Once you've gotten people intrigued and then
sparking their desire, and you get them to
the pricing page, this is where you start generating and
encouraging the action. What you do in a
Facebook campaign is you retarget those
people who visited your pricing page with an enticing introduction offer to your special
offer learning page. Do you see how all
of that came round? You took them from not
knowing who you are, and then you generate the interests and they
use spark some desire, and then you
encourage the action. It's a very easy way, just using Facebook ads
to run an AIDA campaign. Now that you're familiar
with all the AIDA stages, I want you to ask yourself some key questions and
start taking action. How do we make our bias more aware of our products
and services? How are you going to
get them interested? Then once you've done that, you want to then make
your product desirable. You want to ask yourself, what makes our products
or service desirable? If you don't know
the answer to this, then maybe you want to do some surveys or ask
your current clients on what they think
about what makes your products or
service desirable. Last but not least, you really want to ask yourself, what are the costs for actions and where
should we place them?
4. Mapping Your Content to AIDA: Now that you know what AIDA is, let's start mapping
your content to AIDA, to its vehicle and intention. Go to the project and
resources section of this class and open your
mapping your content mind-map, and list what content you
can create for each stage of your AIDA sales funnel from the examples I will
share in this lesson. But just before we start, I want to add that
this step is to help you identify the content format, whilst the next lesson will
help you craft your content. Don't worry if you don't have a fully formed content
idea at this stage. This will be covered
in the next lesson. If you're ready,
let's get started. For the awareness stage, this is the problem or
needs recognition stage. Customers are experiencing
pain points but haven't quite recognized
the specific problem. You create content to draw
attention to the need. Remember at this point you're
probably asking how do we make buyers aware of
our products or services? Whereas in this stage the
consumer is asking, what is it? At this stage, the buyer is
doing research to clearly understand and identify
the problem themselves. General educational content
is important at this stage. You want to ask, what problem are they likely
trying to solve and what are the symptoms that are alerting
them of this problem? Then you could also ask what information will
help them to identify the problem they have that our product or service
is designed to solve? Some of the content
format examples for this awareness stage
can be articles, advertisements, webinars,
podcasts, paid search, or even landing pages. Some specific examples
that you could refer to, is like if you
sell a SAS product and paying for ads on a
podcast with a SAS audience. That's one example. Here's another example for you. You sell beauty products and partner with an influencer
to post about it. Another example of
this is you sell plastic surgery services
and you pay for radio ads to promote it to
people in your geography. As you can see, all these
contents is to bring awareness to people of your
products and services. Start thinking about how you can create awareness
with your audience. The next stage is interest. This is the stage at which
your customers are actively seeking or interested in information to help them
solve their problem. As they move through the sales funnels from recognizing or drawing attention to the problem their interest is
sparked by solution. They need the information to
move into the next phase. The question you need
to be asking here is, how can our content help our target audience to
narrow down their options? Some of the content
format examples for the interest stage
is web content, newsletters, social media,
blogs, and email campaigns. A specific example of the
interest stage content could be creating content for broader top of the funnel keyword
type of content. This could be like if you create a YouTube channel
that focuses on general how-to or what is and
other educational topics. You could also produce
social media content that informs users of basic pain points around
your products or services. Now I really want you to
think about how you can implement this into your
services or your products. How can you generate content
that generates interest? Have to think about it and write it down on your mind-map. Now let's move on to
the desire stage. Here, customers have moved
from attention or recognition of the problem through information gathering
and interest. Now they have the
desire for a solution. They have to evaluate
alternatives and your job through content creation is to spark
a desire for your solution. You must convince them as they examine various solutions
to their problem, that your solution is
the right one for them. The question that you need to ask at this stage is how does your product or service
features and benefits fulfill the prospect's needs
and make their lives better. Some of the content format
examples for this stage is you could possibly write white papers, create brochures, write eBooks, or
create microsites that are writing a solution
for a specific problem. Let's do an example here
where you pretend that maybe you're doing marketing
for the company FreshBooks. If you don't know, FreshBooks, FreshBooks is an
accounting software. In this case, you might be able to create content for keywords that demonstrate
purchase intent, like best accounting software
for small businesses. Then next you can bid for branded competitor
keywords like QuickBooks, which is obviously
FreshBooks' competitor. Next, you can create
retargeting ads for people who already
visited the pricing page. Is this starting to
sound familiar to you? This is the same pattern
that we used when we created the simple Facebook
advertising campaign. The next stage is
to then optimize the pricing page
by building links to it and internal linking. Then you could send out service
to current customers and ask all happy and loyal
customers to leave reviews. As you know,
testimonials are really powerful and if people
see good testimonials, positive testimonials,
they're more likely to then get to the next stage
which is take action. In the action stage is time for your customers to make
the purchase decision. Make it easy for them to
say yes to your solution, have a strong call to
action in your copy, and a simple path to follow
to complete the sale. The easier you make it for
people to take action, the more sales you'll generate
through your sales funnel. Some of the content
for my examples here at the action stage
could be case studies, datasheets, testimonials,
and e-learning. Some specific examples
that you could really add to strengthen
your position here, is adding a 30-day
money-back guarantee. You could also add some
urgency by offering a free trial or $1
trial to prove intent, or you could also offer a pay-by-performance
pricing model. Another idea is to add customer support chat for last-minute objections,
better yet, add an FAQ section made up of last-minute objections
and add reviews around your purchase page now it's time to go back to your
mapping your content mind-map and complete the list
of what content you can create for each stage of
your AIDA sales funnel. Feel free to share it
in the project gallery. I will provide feedback and answer any questions
if you have any.
5. Crafting Your Content for Success: When crafting your content for all the stages of
the sales funnel, you should always
qualify your content to ensure it's fit for purpose. To achieve this, I will share the tips and tricks
of the industry to craft the best possible
content for your sales funnel. Tip number 1 is, what topics should you choose? The hardest thing when facing a blank sheet is
knowing where to start. For most marketers this is where some can already
hit a brick wall. Unless you have a pretty
good idea based around past data or you have sent out a survey to your
target audience, you're going to have to do some secondary research
to get started. Let's jump into my
laptop and I'll show you exactly how
you can do that. For the purpose of this lesson, I'm going to use the
example that you're a physical therapist and you know that the most common people that come to see you
are runners who have plantar fasciitis
or first responders with work-related back injuries. Let's go with this
knowledge and start doing some research on what
topics you should choose. The first website I'm
going to show you here is called soovle.com or soovle.com. As you already know
the type of people that usually come to
get your service, all you have to
do now is put in, say, back pain
into this website. As you see here, there is so many options available to you. These are all the
search results from Wikipedia, Google, Amazon, Yahoo, Bing, YouTube,
and answers.com, all on one page. You see here there is back pain relief
exercises on YouTube. Back pain COVID keyword. You might not have
thought of that. Some people experience back
pain because of COVID. You can see here immediately
just from this website, you're picking up on a
lot of different keywords that you could potentially use
later on in your research. What we're going to
do is we're going to just copy and paste some of these keywords into a sticky
note or just write it down. I think just from
this page here, I can see that back
pain during pregnancy, it's probably one that
will be really popular. That's the back pain issue. Now we want to do a search
on plantar fasciitis. Let's just copy that and
then put it into the search, and immediately you see there are so many different
search results. Then you could jot
down the keywords here for your research. I'm thinking somebody at
this stage is probably in real pain and they're also looking for
surgery options. Let's put that down to the
plantar fasciitis surgery. What I'm thinking is
potentially because you're a physical therapist
you might be able to offer some advice
on actually not opting for the surgery and then instead offering
your services. That could potentially
be an option too. Now that we've done
research on this website, let's go to the next stage. We take the keywords
that we just found and go to another website
called AnswerThePublic. On this website,
all you have to do is put in all those keywords
that you have found. Let's say back pain relief. I'm just going to copy and paste that from my sticky note before, and now I'm just
going to do a search. As you can see
here, immediately, there is a ton of questions
around back pain relief. What is the best back pain
relief for lower back? That's getting more specific around the area of
the back that hurts. That could be interesting. What to put on your
back for back pain. That's another one, another question that might
be coming helpful. As you can see here,
as you're doing this, you're beginning to understand
the state of mind of your potential
clients here and you can already see what content
you can create to help them. Another website that's
really useful in this research process is a
website called Buzzsumo. This actually lists out the number of shares
an article gets. As you put in the keyword, you'll see all the
popular articles and then you'll see how popular it is on social media by the number
of shares they get. What I'm going to do
is I'm just going to put back pain during pregnancy in the search
here in Buzzsumo. Let's see what we come up with. Immediately you can already
see a ton of articles like 541 shares on this
chiropractic care for low back and pelvic
pain during pregnancy. Already you're drilling
down on the content. Here is another one that
it could spark some ideas. Core strength training during pregnancy for female
with low back pain. As you could see here,
the more research you do using these tools that give you that extra information on the popularity and what
people are asking, you can start getting some ideas of what you can write
for your content. This is especially useful
for the awareness stage, because you want people to
find you when they're in this stage of where
they are trying to find a solution
to their problem. All these contents
that research is helping you to get
into their mindset. I see it as a little bit
like being a mind reader and you get to tap into
what they're thinking, what questions they're asking, and what solutions
that are looking for. That's where Buzzsumo
is really powerful. The next tool that you can
also use is to check for podcasts in your industry on a website called
Listen Notes. Listen Notes lists
all the podcasts in the world that you can find. All you have to do is
basically put in the keyword. Here because it's podcast, is a little bit more
broader usually, I'm just going to
put the keyword back pain and see what comes up. As you can see here there is a ton of podcasts on back pain. There is understanding
low back pain diagnosis. People want to understand what
are the symptoms possibly. Here is another one saying, returning to work
with back pain. You wouldn't have
thought of that. But this possibly relates to
one of our target audience, which was first responders
who have back pain injury. This might be something
that's relevant to them. But this is a really great idea for a content that you probably
didn't even think about. As you can see here, what
is quite shocking to me is meditation for back pain relief. You would've never thought
that it would be a thing. But this is what happens
when you do research. You realize all the
options people are looking for and you could also try to see if you do have any insight into that
area of content, then you could also
provide a solution and some content around this area to help your target audience. If you wanted to take
this research further, I would also recommend that you start checking online
communities like Reddit and Quora because they could also come up with a ton of ideas and a ton of things that you would have never thought of, especially Quora. I love Quora because
of what it does is it lists all the
questions people have. This is of course if you have time to do
a lot of research. But if you don't, I
think with the websites that I provided to you before, that is sufficient enough
to get you started. Now it's time for tip number 2, how to easily find
keywords for your SEO. This part is really
important and it's where most
marketers stumble. Let's jump into my laptop
here and then we'll start looking at how you
can find keywords for SEO. First, all you have to do
is just go into Google and then write the keywords that you have
written down before. We're going to try and keep on the back pain during
pregnancy topic. Let's see what comes up there. If you put that in, what I want you to pay attention to is the
suggestions that come up. Don't press "Enter"
at this moment. Just look at this
list here right now. It says back pain during
pregnancy, third trimester, back pain during pregnancy, first trimester, back pain during pregnancy,
second trimester. As you can see, it could be
a good keyword to target specific trimesters because
people are searching based on where they
are on their journey. That could be less competition
for you when you are more specific on the timeline
of the pregnancy itself. What I'm going to do now
is I'm going to open my sticky note and then I'm going to just
note that down, so we could use it later. It's important
that you list them down in the order that
you found them because then you'll know
the importance of which trimester comes first
in terms of popularity. Now what I want
you to do is press "Enter" and then let's
look at the results. Instead of looking at
the results on the top, I want you to scroll
all the way down now. On the bottom of
the Google results, there is a section
called Related Searches. As you can see here, there is long tale keywords, and these are really
useful for us because long-tail keywords
are a lot easier to rank than just, say, back pain. I mean, something like that
is going to be really hard and more expensive
to run ads on. For long tail keywords
like this you see, how to release back
pain during pregnancy. That's a long tail keyword. Upper back pain
during pregnancy. That's another
long tail keyword. When should I worry about
back pain in pregnancy? I guess this is
because somebody had heard that they're going
to experience back pain, so therefore, they want to know when they
should expect it. This are all interesting
insights to take on. What you should do
is just, again, just take note of it and then copy it into
your documents. I'm just going to do
that myself here. Once you have it all, then your research for
this section will be done. Repeat the same process on other search engines
like YouTube, Bing, and Amazon, and then just go through the
same process and then jot the keywords down that is suggested by the
search engines. Now that we have a good idea
of what topic you want to create and what are
the keywords for SEO, now it's time to
see whether or not these are viable topics
to pursue by scoring those ideas to see
if they qualify as good content to
generate leads and sales. This is Ahrefs website and
this is the keyword explorer. What I want you to do
now is just put in the main keyword that we
were using for the back pain during pregnancy here and then add one more keyword
that will support it. Let's say back pain
during third trimester, because that was one
of the popular ones suggested by Google. You choose the country
you are in or the country that you want to target
or rank for this keyword, and then click the
"Search" button. There is not a lot
of options here. Maybe we've narrowed
it down to the niche. Now let's just try and go back and just put in back pain
and let's see what comes up. Then click "Search" and then
click "Matching Terms". In this section, you want to
click a phrase match here. Now, you can see a ton
of options come up. Now you're overwhelmed. What I want you to
do here is you go here to the key word difficulty, then you put in a maximum of 15. This is the difficulty
of the keyword, how difficult it is to rank, and just click "Apply". We don't want it to be
too difficult because we want to be able
to rank for it. The next thing you see is, now you have about
10,000 keywords, that's still quite
a lot of volume. What you want to do
is you want to narrow down even further so click on "Volume" here and then put the minimum requirements as 400, and then click "Apply". Now, you have a more
manageable amount of keywords here that's 351 keywords and now you can really start to see some useful options
for you to target. Here's a great one,
this one says, "Best mattress topper
for back pain, " this could apply for people who are pregnant and people who aren't
pregnant as well. Let's just have a look
at the SERP here. The keyword difficulty is 15, that's not that bad. What you want to
do is when you're looking at the search results, you want to go through that score contents idea that
I was talking about, you want to score them. The first thing you want to ask yourself when you're
doing this is, will someone searching
for this keyword be interested in my
product or service? In order to score them, you assign the score of three if your product is an irreplaceable solution
for the problem. If your product
helps quite a bit, but it's not
essential to solving the problem you give
them a score of two. If your product can only
be mentioned fleetingly, more like a brand
awareness sort of thing, then you just assign them one. For everything else,
you just assign them 0. That means that it doesn't meet the requirements for
you and your products, so that means that's not
a good topic for you to cover or it's probably a bit too competitive
for you to cover. What you want to do next is basically ask
that question again, the one that I just mentioned, will someone searching
for this keyword be interested in my
product or service? Then based on the scoring
that I mentioned earlier, give it a score. If you go back here, a lot of these articles
say things like, 11 best mattress
toppers for back pain, best mattress topper
for back pain, 2022, and you can already see,
they are list articles. People who are searching
for this will indeed be interested in your product because they have
that problem of their back pain and they
want to be more comfortable. Having them seeing you as a physical therapist could be the irreplaceable
solution for the problem. I immediately see
this as content that could be scored as
three for that product. It's an irreplaceable
solution for the problems. That's a good option here. We're just going
to note that down, that this is a content idea that you could potentially use. The next scoring question that you should ask yourself is, what would the searcher be looking for when
searching for this query? What is their search intent? Obviously, they just want
to be more comfortable. That is definitely something
that matches the scoring. Then we could make sure that
we give the score and again, if it fits our
products as well or gets the same irreplaceable
solution for the problem, we give them a three,
it's still a good choice. Now, we've come to the last scoring that we
want for this content. What is the traffic potential? How much traffic can I get if I rank for the top three
in this keyword? If we go back here, we look at all the traffic, the traffic for this
keyword gets above 11,000. That's a really good volume to get if we're able
to rank for this. That I would say, encapsulates the whole
scoring process and says, you've got three on all counts, so that's really a good option for you to move forward with. Now that we've run through
all the checks and balances, we know for sure that these topics and keywords will definitely generate the
traffic that we need. We're going to move
on to tip number 4, which is using a really
cool tool called Frase.io to create your
SEO optimized content. If I create a new document, I'm just going to put in
one of the keywords here. We decided that the, best mattress topper, was a good article to go for, so we'll go best mattress topper for back pain and that is
our long-tail keyword. For Frase.io, long tail
keywords do work better than those big keywords like back pain that's
harder to rank for. Once you put that in the
target search query, you just click "Create Document" and This is where
the magic happens guys. All you have to do is once the
document is opened, click, "Let's Go" and then
it will start loading all the top articles for best mattress
toppers for back pain. What we're going to do
from there is we're going to automate a brief that you can give to your writer to write a high-ranking article that will get you rank
really high on Google, just based on this
artificial intelligence the tool uses to find all the keywords that you
need for this article. It even tells you how many words you need to
write for the article, that's how amazing it is
and how helpful it is. All you need to do to get
to this stage is click "Brief" and then click
"Automate Brief" right here. Click "Select All" and
insert brief into editor. You're going to be wondering
what you did before you discovered this tool once
you've started using it. It also lists down
all the top questions around the world that people
ask around this topic, so these questions
could easily become one of the headers
in this article. You could also see
all the top 20 topics related to this
particular keyword and you could get the
topic clusters as well, and look here, I
think this is one of the coolest things because
people always ask me, how long should this article be? This tells you the exact
word count, 2983 words. You can't get any more
specific than that. Obviously, you don't have to stick with this exact number, but roughly, it's
about 3,000 words. That's what's needed
if you want to rank for this
particular keyword. As you can see, guys, once you score
all the content, and you know that the
content will work, all you need to do is
to actually create it. In order to create it, you need to create
a brief that lists down all those keywords that
you've pulled together. You could even add
onto this based on all the keywords that you
found through your research, you can add it here as well. They even give you
the top headers from all the top articles that was found on the
first page of Google, how amazing is that? You get to see what
other headers are used by all the top articles
that rank on the first page of Google and you could easily
use the same ones and just rewrite it to make sure that
it's not exactly the same, but it has the same content that lives within those headers. If you follow this
method and then you just follow through
all the same steps, this is going to become
really easy once you do it two or three times and it becomes something
that you could keep in your arsenal and then you
can share with your team. You won't be second
guessing yourself the next time you're
crafting your contents, you know that this
content will work, people will find you, and there is demand for
that content as well, and you'll be getting a good amount of traffic
from it as well. This is all organic traffic, guys, who doesn't want
free organic traffic? It's the thing that
every marketer aspires to do or every content
creator wants to achieve, they want to get
organic traffic, they don't want to pay for it. This is the best way
that I can show you that you can narrow
down the topic, then get the right
keywords for your SEO, and then craft that content quite easily and
quickly as well. Now it's time to take action, in the project resources, you will find a
template to list down all the scores for all
your content ideas, feel free to add your
content score ideas here.
6. Promoting Your Content: Most times marketers
will put a lot of effort into making
amazing content, but then they stumble
at the last hurdle, which is where they forget to stop promoting their content. The first idea for
you to promote your content is to
create content roundups. Here's you see an example
where it's an article about 16 cycling bloggers tell you why you should
start to ride your bike. Now, what they do is they get a quote from
all these bloggers, and then they put all
into one article. That is what a
content roundup is. You can even add
your own article to this particular article
yourself or you could reach out to other companies and add your article
to their roundup. Another way is to promote your content in
your newsletters. As you can see here, here's a newsletter, and this is just promoting the latest content that
you have just published. Another idea is to use boosted Facebook posts to people who already
visited your website. You're re-targeting people who have visited your
website and then letting them know in a way that you have a new article that they
might be interested in. As you can see here, this is how you boost a post, you just click the boost here. Once you're in your ad
manager of your page, and then you just literally
send it to your audience. The next thing is to use
push notifications on your website using tools like Subscribers as you can see here. What happens is when people
come to your website, if you have this push
notification tool installed on your website, it will pop up and say, "Hey, there's a new article
that you might be interested" in and you could design this
any way you like. What you can do is to be
really intentional with this, is you only have
the pop-up come up when somebody is reading
about an article, say it's an old article that's related to the content
of your new article. Therefore, they're not
like being promoted with content that's irrelevant, but instead being given
another piece of content that's relevant to the one
they're currently reading. Another way is to use
influencer marketing. This way you just reach
out to people who have influence over your market
and your target audience. Then you ask them to share your article with
their audience. Obviously, you can't
just reach out randomly cold to an influencer, they're obviously
always bombarded with e-mails almost every day asking people to
do the same thing. It's important that
you've already built a relationship
with the influencer. It's not awkward
and it's more of a reciprocal relationship where they might ask you to
promote their content, but you could also ask them
to promote their contents. Just make sure that there is that reciprocity there
and that you're not just annoying people by
asking random people in random incidences to
promote your content. Another way to promote your content is
podcast interviews. This could go two ways. You can either be a
podcaster yourself and you promote your new content
on your own podcasts, or you can become a guest on
someone else's podcast and promote your content
when you've been interviewed by
another podcaster. That's another idea
if you're into the whole podcasting
world yourself. This one is not a lot
of people would do, but I would say if you've
been creating content, and you create a lot of
content in terms of volume, this is something worth doing. You should start
translating your content. Translating your content
means that you'll have further reach beyond just
the English language, say you could translate to Spanish or you could
translate to Chinese, or you could translate
to any other language. That will encourage people who speak a different language
to discover your content. You just tap into a
whole different market when using a different language, but with the same content. If it's something that you can do and you have the
resources to do that, I definitely recommend this. Another way to promote it
is to use social videos. As you know, social media
is a really powerful tool. All you have to do
is really easy, you just create a snippet which is like a summary
of your content, could be 15-30 seconds, the highlights of your content. Then post that social video to your social media accounts. That's just another way to get people to
discover your content. I know a lot of YouTubers
do this as well, they create a YouTube video, and then what they
do is they create a really short snippet or a teaser of their video and put it on Instagram
or on TikTok. Then they put a link
inside their reels or their Instagram
stories and then that will take people to the
actual YouTube video, which is the
longer-form content. That is another idea where you could promote your content. Another way is the paid ways
called direct marketing. You could use things like
Reddit, Taboola, and Pinterest. Another one that's actually becoming more popular is TikTok. TikTok actually has
an advertising arm to the business and is becoming
more and more popular. If you're into doing those
type of really snappy, cool, attention-grabbing videos, they are short and fun to watch, then this could be a way for
you to promote your content. Another way to promote content
is using niche or niche, depending on where you are. Community promotions, places
like Discord or Reddit. You could either post the links to the
article inside one of the Reddit's Subreddit
or usually I would say get someone else to post it because that's always
more powerful. If you post it, it is a
little bit too promoting, people might not be interested because they know you're promoting your business, but what's great is if
you have a network of people that support
you and your brand, then encourage them
to share it instead. That's a much more
powerful way to promote your content on these niche community type
of websites or platforms. The last one that I want to share with
you is something as well that I feel a lot of
marketers don't actually do, which is promote
on Slack groups. There's a lot of private
professional communities on Slack groups and they're really popular and they have a
really engaged community. If you manage to
find one that fits your brand and somewhere where you have actually become
part of that community. You've been adding your own
thoughts and your own kind of helping other people in the community and not just
promoting your content, that's a good place to
go when you've already become part of the
community itself. That's just some of the ideas I have on
promoting your content. I'm sure there's a ton more. Now, what I want you to do is to choose one of these
ideas and then apply it to how you're
promoting your content.
7. Final Thoughts: Now is a great time to reflect on everything you wrote
in your mind map. Do any of these surprise you? Do you now have more clarity in your
content marketing funnel? To recap, here are the steps of the time-tested content
marketing formula for your sales funnel. Step 1, is to use
the AIDA model. Step 2 is to map your content
to your sales funnel. Step 3, is to craft your
content for success. Lastly, Step 4,
promote your contents. I hope this content marketing
formula will help you simplify and generate
real results for you. Share your mind map in the project gallery so
I can provide feedback. If you have any questions, feel free to ask me in
the discussion section. Thank you again for
taking my class.
Liz Azyan, Digital Consultant
