Content Strategy
What would you define as content marketing? Quite often clients think of it as their blog, or their product descriptions and landing pages. But your content is everything. Everything from your homepage banners to your delivery message and call to actions. Content should help your users navigate through your entire path to purchase, whilst also telling a story and illustrating your brand tone of voice.
The content on your site should do all the work for you. It should meet the needs of your users, and help them through the whole buying process. Our content audits tell you if it does. We analyse your entire site, highlighting stumbling blocks, suggesting improvements on calls to action, and making sure your message is clear. User intent is essential too. We check your content matches the needs of your audience and answers their questions. And we anticipate their searches to help you create future content
Content Audit
A content audit helps you determine whether the content on your site should kept, deleted, updated, consolidated or redirected.
Deleting content? Sounds ridiculous, right? However Ahrefs, in their post “How to do a Content Audit and Boost your Organic Traffic” provides solid evidence and data, to support why deleting a THIRD of their content, actually boosted their organic traffic by 7.57%. Far from ridiculous. (Disclaimer: do not delete pages without a 301 redirect, if you’re uncertain of what to do, check out the Ahrefs blog or get in touch, we’ll be more than happy to point you in the right direction. Please never delete published content without a 301 redirect).
During a content audit, we’ll be looking at the following:
BIG issues, we’ll identify the bugs, infrastructure, indexation, site speed issues that might be blocking you from success
Low hanging fruit, we’ll work to uncover any quick fixes that are causing long-term problems, including areas such as basic on page SEO checks, html tags, meta data, thin or duplicate content, site speed and structured data analysis.
Organic search traffic, working to identify any trends or anomalies in your current organic traffic, ensuring that they’re heading in the right direction. We’ll also identify the high ranking keywords that could generate significant traffic increases, just from a step up the SERPS.
Backlink Analysis, and highlighting any standout issues. We’ll discover whether your backlinks are rising (great work!) flattening (need to put in extra resource) or sliding (need immediate action). We’ll also find and fix your broken links. Broken links are a waste of “link equity” So its important that these are fixed as soon as possible. Backlinks are still a critical part of your SEO strategy so this is an area of real importance.
Content audit AND “content gap” analysis, a content gap is a keyword that your competitor is currently ranking for that you aren’t. Who you define as your competitors vs who your competitors are on Search can be slightly different. We can help you identify who is ranking for similar keywords to you, and the keywords that they’re ranking for that you aren’t.
Content Strategy
A content strategy is the management of all tangible media on your website. Blog posts, Ebooks, Case Studies, Templates, Infographics, Video, Podcasts and Social Media are all forms or media that, managed correctly, makes up a strong content marketing strategy.
Identifying what content your audience is interested in, what they’re likely to like, comment or share with their friends is a critical part of a content strategy and for that, we will use social listening tools to identify what content your audience is most likely to engage in.
When crafting a content strategy for our clients, we consider each of the following areas:
1. Target audience
2. How the information will benefit the audience
3. Do your competitors have similar content? How can yours stand out?
4. What form of media will we utilise?
5. Where will it be published?
6. Who is responsible for creating your content?
7. When will it go live?
When we’ve answered all of the above questions, we’ll begin crafting your content strategy.
An outstanding content strategy cuts through the noise and gets your brand in front of the right audience, ahead of your competitors.
Creative Campaigns
Our creative campaigns make a big impact.
We build several mood-boards and present these back to you and your team. Working as strategic partners, we define clear objectives, craft a communications strategy and create content that truly resonates with your audience.
But that’s just the beginning. In today’s omni-channel world, where you are presenting your brand to your customers at several different channel touch points throughout their journey, it’s critical that you tailor your creative content to communicate correctly to your customer at precisely the right moment.
A brief example of this is as follows: During the Awareness stage of your customer journey, you are looking to inspire and capture the customer’s attention. This can be through a bold campaign image, or video. The customer may interact with this ad, through a view or a click. As she demonstrates interest, encouraging her to engage with your brand through interesting, non sales related content, such as a poll, celebrity gossip or “how to” video will help her to resonate and form an emotional bond with your brand. The engagement stage requires some clever, on brand content. During this step in the user journey, the brand’s tone of voice is equally as critical as the image or video content. Content must be engaging enough to capture the user’s attention whilst still reminding the customer of who the brand is. The final stage in the journey is conversion, where we are looking to encourage the customer to make a purchase. Typically this is through more product focused content, where we move away from the fanfare of a campaign and the drama of celebrity gossip. We’re cutting through the noise with some attention grabbing product, creating a sense of urgency through a limited time only offer and reminding her how popular the product is through social iconography.
I must state, whilst I have described this journey in a linear format, it is far from this straight-forward.
Hopefully, however, I have demonstrated how important it is to tailor your content to your customer’s journey. This tailored approach comes in the early planning stages of any Creative Campaign and is a crucial part of the end product which is often powerful and emotive, when the thought process is this detailed.
Influencer Research and Outreach
Well this is a whooooooooole topic that probably deserves an entire chapter to itself. I’ve grouped it into Content Marketing mainly to stop myself from waffling on.
Two out of three millennials are now blocking traditional ads from their devices (Business of Fashion, How to Maximise your Influencer Strategy, 2019). As a result, clever brands have adopted powerful, authentic relationships with influencers who deliver a strong brand message to their audience, through emotive, engaging content. There is a fine line between the brands who are reaching their audience through true Influencer relationships and those who are simply wasting their time and their marketing budget on false relationships that the customer is seeing straight through.
Influencers are a whole marketing channel of their own. Millennials have catapulted the influencer economy, completely reshaping the way in which Influencers fit into the marketing mix.
Like all of the other channels, the intricacies when working with influencers must be optimised efficiently in order to gain maximum exposure and maximum return. It’s not uncommon for businesses to group influencers under one umbrella, but depending on the size of their audience and engagement stats, the results they deliver can really differ.
Influencers should be categorised into several categories:
1. Mega Influencer (approx. 1 million+ followers). Typically yield a lower engagement / reaches a wider audience / entire audience is unlikely to resonate with your brand but a portion will / likely to have more than 1 million followers / oh, and they’ll probably take up a large proportion of your marketing spend depending on who or how many you choose to work with.
Each category of influencer serves a different purpose. It may come as a surprise that a mega influencers doesn’t necessarily result in sales. More likely, a mega influencer will bring awareness of your brand to their extremely large follower base (think Kim Kardashian / Taylor Swift etc).
2. Macro Influencer (approx. 500k followers). These guys are great at story-telling. They capture the attention of their audience through authentic and honest opinions and as a result they have gained the trust of their followers. Their engagement is likely to be high, if they’re promoting your product their audience is likely to research more into your brand and build an emotional connection off of the back of this Influencer’s recommendations. They’re a fantastic opportunity for your brand if you’re looking to build a loyal following who are likely to become advocates of your brand and a good proportion will go on to make a purchase.
3. Micro Influencer (10k - 100k followers). Work with these bunch of super sellers if you’re looking for direct sales, but not so much exposure. Whilst they won’t win you a great deal of new followers or drive much in the form of brand awareness, a great team of micro influencers can really help you to drum up sales. Their followers don’t just want to keep up with their active social lives, they want to become carbon copies: whatever they’re seen wearing or doing, their loyal fan base will go out and buy/do exactly what these guys are doing. Sell, sell, sell!
4. Nano Influencer (less than 10k followers) if you have the resources, invest in these guys. they might have less than 10k followers now, but with a little mentoring on how to grow their following, they’ll no doubt bloom into big blousy bloggers and guess who they’ll never forget ... those who helped them on their journey! Even in these early stages, the 10k mark is impressive, and like their Micro Influencer counterparts, it’s likely that they have loyal followers who want to be just like them, so it’s a great opportunity to get your brand in front of an audience who is likely to be highly engaged and open to purchase based on their favourite bloggers recommendation.
Link Acquisition
Welcome to one of the many chapters in the wonderful world of SEO. Whilst there are a lot of areas that make up the topic of Link Acquisition, we’ll be focusing mainly on using content to build those links, rather than any black hat paid techniques.
Creating unique, high quality content. Not easy, but it’s the most sure fire way of driving good quality links. This content must be creative, it can come in the form of an info graphic, a compelling blog, an interesting video review or even hosting an event. It can come in a range of different formats, but regardless of the content, the most successful pieces usually have the following qualities:
Be unique, or approaches a topic in a unique way or voicing an interesting opinion
Elicits strong emotions
Visually appealing
Fulfils a need or answers a question in a timely manner
Specific to a certain location
Newsworthy content is always great at generating links. For companies whose product appeals to the masses, this can be something as simple as giving away free gifts. For those brands who can’t easily give away their product for free (free Mac Book? Anyone?), business stats, releasing a new product or stating something a little controversial can also be a fantastic way of generating links from some excellent authoritative news and press sites.
When we create content for link building purposes, we always keep the audience at the front and centre of our minds, so if you’re looking for a great place to start, you can’t go wrong when you’re creating for your consumer.