Welcome to today's member exclusive webinar how to create content that converts the first member exclusive webinar of 2020. Before we get started I'd like to go over a few items just so you know how to get the most out of your participation today. The presentation will last for approximately 45 minutes. You'll be able to send text questions to today's presenter by typing your questions into the chat box of the control panel. You may send in these questions at any time during the presentation and we'll collect and address as many as we can during the Q&A session at the end. Remember you can send these in at any time. Whilst we don't send slides of the presentation today, this is for your use. The webinar will be available to watch on demand via our content hub exchange at exchange.cim.co.uk within the next couple of working days. I would now like to hand over to our content marketing course director Chris Lee who will be today's presenter over to you Chris. Thanks so much and welcome everyone. So for the next 45 minutes we're going to run through a bit of a taster of what we're going to be talking about on the 12th February in London. Hopefully some of you will be joining us for the full event. Basically if you can't, hopefully we'll let you have time. We've got another one in April as well which we'll talk for at the end. So 45 minutes and then we'll get 15 minutes questions at the end and we can always expand that depending on how much other response we get. So in this webinar what we're going to be covering is establishing your business objectives, looking at the content armory, seeing what's at your disposal. Think about things like tone of voice which is really important because that really defines who you are as a business. And then I want to finish with a little bit, a bit of a hack really on how to write to the web and social media because there is a, there is a skill to that and those brands that do it really well are going to be smashing it on social media. And now the thing is though you can only really inform how you write on social media if you've gone through the previous steps that we're just going to mention. So on the day itself we'll be looking at things like AMEC which is the Association for Measurement and Evaluation in Communication. They've got this brilliant setup in terms of how you can measure your paid, earned, shared, owned media as we use that. And then by the end of the day the idea of objective is to come out with a bit of a plan, a skeleton plan of how you either going to start your content marketing if you haven't really, you know, got a structure in place or how you're going to edit it. So it starts with an audit for example if you've already got a lot of content online. So just moving on just a quick look at me. I've been in this industry 21 years and so work with a whole bunch of different firms agency side lead for Philips Mel Grooming, social and content years ago, work with other brands such as Ubisoft and these singles with influencers, written for city AM, Computing Magazine, various others. And I trained for a number of people including obviously CIM, PRCA, Brighton SCO and the London College of Communication. So that's that's that's me in a nutshell. So as well as I should mention I run a football culture blog called Outside Right. It's WRITE. So I'm on both sides of the influencer sense of really understand the whole inside gambit. I work with PR agencies and marketers to help them establish what they want to achieve with content. And so you'll find me two or three days a week in agencies at the whole face. And that's why I think it's really important for trainers to actually still be in the game and imparting the latest information. So that's why I'm running this event at CIM. It's fantastic. So first up, let's think about establishing your business objectives. You've all got these in mind. Most important question in any business context, any kind of marketing is why? Why are we doing this? Why would people care what we're saying, etc. And that's where these people come in the audience. They are the most important people in your industry in your business. Without them, you don't exist. Same with any publisher online. And we have to think of ourselves as publishers when it comes to the internet because that is pretty much our shop window for the rest of our business. So the audience, if we can understand what drives them, what they're interested in, who they're listening to, how they're sharing information, this is really important to to team up our strategy and make sure that we're answering their questions. And that comes down to everything from keyword research, so understanding what they're searching for online. And also when they're searching for our brand, what's the context around that as well. So there's various different things we need to understand about them and how they like presenting it and what technology they use. That's very important as well. Because obviously, as you can imagine, a lot of people are using mobile devices. They may be using tablets as part of their research. And that's often a second screen. So we have to think about how we present content that can be easily grazeable, I guess, or and then we can look at more deep dive content like podcasts where you really get kind of 30 minutes dedicated time talking to someone. So it's really interesting periods to be going through and to be involved and everything's changing. So the key thing for us then, audience, start with them. Who is our audience, where they live, they look like, how old are they, all those important things. And what are their pain points? How can we help? How does our product or service help them solve their everyday problems? They're bombarded by brands every day, hundreds of brands. Think about how many brands you've come across today already. How many of them you actually got any kind of affinity for and how many are actually just a means to an end. So you may think about a particular brand, your bike, if they're reliable, or you may actually really like a brand or aspire to wear their clothes, drive their cars, etc. But there's very few that actually we have an emotional affinity with. So we have to understand the context of how our product or service fits into their day. What interests them, of course, and how therefore can we create content that helps engage them because if they're going to be interested in that particular topic, then they're going to be more likely to invert and feel something for our brand. Who influences them? This is really important. When you think about the decision-making journey that we go on, we're going to have a look at that very shortly and one of the ways to model it anyway. Don't forget that people buy from people. So people are going to ask their friends what they think or their their contacts online or for advice, etc. And where they should stay on holiday, where what they should buy in terms of accountancy software could be anything really. So we need to understand who influences them, who are they listening to, and what are they searching for. So like I said, the one thing about Google search is what you understand the real mind of the individuals of what they're looking for. What they might ask you on social media, what they present about themselves in public is different from what they put in a search engine. Not as curated, it's more honest and actually truthful. So think of it like that. Second thing first, we know our audience. We have to think about linking back to objectives, how we get them to act. That's really important. What do we want them to do? There's nothing worse than ambivalence really. You see a lot of content out there, it's just like a cul-de-sac, essentially it's a dead-end street where they tell you something and then that's it. But where do I go next? What should I do next? It's a really clear call to action with any content we're putting out there. Also, why should they care about our content? Why is it relevant to them? That's where the whole research piece comes in. We know that we're resonating with them. We know that we're dealing with one of the pain points or a point of interest for them. Also, because we've got someone who presents it really well or can write really well or speaks really well on a podcast, they can actually engage with it. If you've got someone quite boring and monotone, it's not going to work the same way with writing. Bring it to life. Especially with B2C, business to consumer content. With B2B you've got a little bit more freedom to be a matter of fact about things. But with consumer-facing, it's a very different voice. We're going to make sure we get it absolutely right. This is nothing. How are we going to support our content on socials? It's not just about creating blog posts or videos or podcasts, even, or infographics. How are we actually going to then convey them into a social environment and make them spread as far as possible? We need to incentivize people to take action with our content. If so, how? Put here, download this report, get it on our email list. Give us permission to talk to you, of course, in the GDPR era. Of course, how are we going to track and measure? That's really important. We're not tracking and measuring what we do. We don't know if we're being successful. That's why it goes back to right at the beginning. What does success look like? One of the things we're going to talk about in the training session itself, and then understanding what we're going to measure and how, and that goes back to what I was talking about in terms of making sure that we understand what success looks like. We can pivot our strategies accordingly. If we look at the fun, or pretty much the sales fun in terms of the journey someone goes on from awareness of your product or service to completion, they may have heard of your brand, they may not know what you do. Content fits into that journey, likewise to social media. We have to think about the two prongs themselves. Awareness can come from anywhere, from PR pieces, opinion pieces, and further down the funnel. People have heard about these people and want to learn more. I go back to accountancy software, and I say that the reason I talk about that is because it's something I've just been doing recently. When I was buying one, I had to research and take some advice, and I may have heard of someone from some PR they've done, an opinion piece. I may then watch a video, see how it works, read a blog post. I'm getting further down that decision-maker journey. I'm getting to trust this company a little bit more, or anyone else I'm evaluating. Of course, in the consideration stage, you've got other things. I'm looking at case studies, for example. Everyone wants to see someone else up here, someone else in the same environment. It could be an IT merger, it could be another traveller, backpacker, anything like that. It could be someone in your situation that's just like you going through the same thing that you're about to go through and you're researching it, and you want to see cases of that particular situation working. You may want to think about podcasts, more inspiration, learn a bit more about the company, get to meet them in person. Things like videos are really important at this point as well. Then you're moving further on. Email newsletter used to be further to the left. It's going further to the right now because obviously it's down the funnel because you obviously have to give permission for GDPR to sign up for these things. You have to really be engaged with an organisation to sign up for their email, so that's further down. So become converted or into the company and then you're going to either buy the service or product or go on that trip, whatever it's to do. There you are. You have some loyalty towards the brand that you've bought from. Decision journey itself though is an interesting cycle. This is the McKinsey version of it, which some of you may have seen. It's always worth considering because it's all about identifying when opportunities arrive, the journey that someone goes through, and whether or not they buy from you again. That's the key thing because the journey that, when you're bought from someone, the journey isn't over. You've got to get some repeat customers. Imagine I'm at a hotel, there I'm going to Berlin. I have a budget in mind. I've got a location in mind. I put it out there because obviously it's social media, so everyone wants to say they're going on holiday and travelling. I'll say, look guys, I need some advice. People give you their advice and therefore you're going across this research, consideration, evaluation stage, a short list of maybe three to five places. Check out the website, check out their content, and then you buy, you have that experience and hopefully become part of someone else's decision-making journey. This is where content is critically persuasive, not just during the decision-making journey to conversion, but afterwards as well. So great. We've got a customer now. How do we keep them? And that's where the research and planning is really important. So if we look at the real, because it's obviously an iterative process, it goes round. You never finish, you don't say, yeah, great, we're number one on Google. Or yeah, we're doing better than ever. Right, if we sit on our laurels now, we can't do that. We have to actually make sure that we're continually improving, seeing what's working, seeing what isn't changing, what is working, anticipating where new threats will come from. So, you know, our competitors might stump up their SEO activity and knock a soft number on the Google. That costs us X thousand new visitors every month. So, you know, we or Google have changed the algorithms. We've got to think about all these different things. So you start research and planning, we'll go through this on the day. For those of you who are coming, we'll think about the audience. We're going to touch on that very shortly, in fact, here, some of the tactics we can go through. Excuse me. Then we'll talk about content and messaging, because that's obviously informed by what we find out about the audience. Then we'll talk about things like culture and skills and make sure that we've got the right people to deliver that content. This is an internal challenge. It's like, great, I need writers, I need videographers, I need graphic designers. This is what I need to put my team together. If I haven't got them in power, so I need to find freelancers, you know, that can help me out, et cetera. And that's where I fit enough to supply an arm of content, create it for various different organizations. Make sure we've got the right people to help me deliver on what we want to shoot. Then, next stage, we're putting that content out there, so that could be an outreach through PR, we're pitching a new study into this and that and the other, or we're trying to build links back to a website. Whatever objective is, we'll make sure that our outreach strategy matches those objectives. And then we'll analyze and check, see what works, see what didn't, most importantly, learn from the failings and we'll continually engage in this iterative process where we are continuing improving and assessing what we do and learning from it, because new social channels, new content offerings don't come along all the time. We just need to understand where we fit into it and engage with those new possibilities as they come. So keeping first, thinking about our objectives again, what do we want to achieve? That could be anything from raising brand awareness, obviously a key drive for a lot of people, increasing search ranking. I know I've realized I've spoken quite a bit about search recently, but that is really important to bear in mind that pretty much everyone starts some kind of search as part of Google Search as part of their decision-making journey. Is it to grow your social media community in which case you have to make sure you've got the right people to manage your social communities? Is it to drive sales? Probably in every case is to drive sales. It might be to inform opinion or change, improve perception, change behavior, depending if you're a public sector body, for example. If you're a non-governmental organization, it might be to raise funds, etc. So you've all got these different objectives and we need to understand how content can help us achieve those, how understanding audience and therefore inform the content we create, the messaging that we put out there as part of that and improve the chances of our content being effective. So that's kind of the overview of part of the planning that we'll go through. As I mentioned on the day, we'll be articulating this a little bit more outside, but both in attendance we'll be able to sort of put together a bit of a skeleton plan. Now I want to sort of move on just now to look at the type of content and formats that are open and available to us. One of the kind of oldest options I suppose when it comes to internet publishing is obviously long posts and written form content. So you think about what's good about long form hosted content, so that's content on your own site, that could be articles, blog posts, reports, etc. The benefits are it demonstrates thought leadership, positions you as someone who knows what you're talking about helps persuade people a bit more who are going to buy from you potentially that you do know what you're talking about. It shows cases to company and it's people. Remember I mentioned earlier with people buy from people. No one really wants to see an enormous organization able to see who's, charge who they're going to be dealing with, you know, who's the expert in this particular area that they should hear about and that, but feed into your PLR as well, that person should be promoted across various different channels as well as the expert, go-to expert. And of course then it helps you perform on search engine as well because Google loves new content and so that's really important part of content marketing is understanding that it's going to help us appear in search and add value and power to our websites as well. When we talk about off-site long form text, we're talking about 400 words plus content that sits as either LinkedIn Pulse, for example, an example of here, which is a LinkedIn's publishing suite. I haven't used it, I totally recommend it. Either for you personally as part of your personal online branding or for whichever company you represent. Also, it could be guest posts on you know, well, any of the sort of leading publications in your sphere or somewhere like Medium, which is a blogging suite as well. A benefit again, you're talking about thought leadership, but you're reaching different audience to the one that's already familiar with you because they're on your websites. Again, it showcases the company's people to that new audience, but it opens access to those new relevant audiences and it drives in bound links, which is really important for search as well. So you're getting new traffic, new places, and all the benefits that go with that. And also it's good for when people are just researching where they keep finding you, they're going to think more highly of you as well. Video is the possibly, well, if I say amongst the C-suite, one of the most impactful ways of marketing because basically you're spoon feeding someone and the internet era, that's really important because as I was mentioning earlier, a lot of people are just kind of like maybe scrolling through their mobile, no way to work or from work. Second screening on a tablet, they don't really want to read things in depth, but it's nice to just do spoon fed something. And remember again, we have an attention span then, so it should be less, yeah, not a very long piece of content unless you're a real deep dive and you're expecting people to settle in for a certain amount of time. But for business use, it's quite short. It's interactive, it showcases again the people and the products that can't emphasize how important that is to see and hear the person you're going to be buying from. It tells the story of what you should tell a story, I should say. There's nothing worth in the disjointed kind of video. It doesn't start, finish, and end in the right way. So we'll be talking about how to put together a decent video as well. Highly persuasive, of course, as I mentioned. And again, YouTube is the second leading search engine really, really good for things like how to content, if people want to be shown how to do something. So if your product or service helps someone in a practical manner, then you should be all over video. Alright, so infographics, and some of you may have recreated some of these already, but they are just a great way of summarizing really important information in a succinct user-friendly way. So the great thing about this is that again, interactive, they're embeddable. So if you source them out to media, then they can put them in. And media loves it, because as long as they're not too heavily branded, because they're always on the pressure to get new content. So if they can get as much from PR people and content creators as possible to put on their site, and then add some context around that that gives them something interactive as well. Access link bait, in terms of people linking to you going, oh gosh, have you seen this? It's amazing. Again, they can be newsworthy. So long as they're topical, they can really bring, sort of say, a report or something like that to life. And it tells that story really quickly. I've used these before. They're not expensive to put together. We're going to look at programs that you can create them free. Obviously, when you're doing that, it's not as intuitive. Take a little bit of creative mindset, visually creative mindset, I should say. But use the eared-out sources to a designer, and it wouldn't be too long. And one of the dangers with creating an infographic, though, is that the potential is there for a graphic designer to kind of show off. So you want to make sure that you tell the stories succinctly and actually add value rather than confuse people. So it seems really confusing infographics on my time. I'm sure you have as well. So keep it simple. Podcasts, one of my favorite formats. I've probably alluded to this ready. I've been podcasting for more than 10 years myself and various different guides. Guide is now, it seems to be the very thing, and everyone seems to have one. But why they're so important is obviously they're very portable. We all got lots of space on our mobile phones now to play MP3s, such as podcasts. And the really important thing is extremely personal. So when you're out running, you can listen to a podcast. You can watch YouTube and go running. You can try probably enough in a tree, tripping over, but you can't do that at the same time. You can't go driving and check out infographics. But what you can do is you can do other things and have a podcast going on all the time. It's a highly portable format. The great thing as well is that they are very intimate. So you've got a dialogue going on between two people, for example, one host, one guest, if they've got really good voice, then you've got that time with people to express what we're talking about before positioning yourself as a sort leader, giving them you sort of advice, all the stuff that you've accrued through your planning stage with. They're obviously, they can be very impactful. And that's, I think, an area still to be exploited fully by brands. I think a lot of our web publishers are doing very well on them. The great thing is they're also measurable, and they're great content to share as well. But you have to understand the context. People might not listen to them in real times. I think they might download this and listen to later in their own time. So you have to understand you're playing the long game with podcasts, when you're building up an audience, et cetera. All right. So that's the content format open to our disposal. Now I want to sort of think about when we're planning that content itself, how are we going to make sure that we're sounding the way we should to our different audiences? So what we're going to do in the training session is look at personas and how we understand who our audience is, how we can segment them, and then the different language that we're going to use to approach each one. And also the type of, not just content, but the tone of voice as well. The tone of voice is really important because that embodies your brand and your personality and values to find who you are and your relationship with the audience. It really builds trust and it's unique to you, but it's got to be consistent. So if I think of brands like Brew Dog, for example, which is a brewer, some of you might be familiar with, they've always been kind of had that rebellious tone of voice, was doing like stunts, et cetera, and their tone of voice hasn't, you can change even if they've got more successful. So you know exactly what you're going to get with that particular brand. I'm sure we could all think of other brands. Let's just run example. And so we're looking at personas. We're running an exercise on the day where I get to think about who they are and if they've done persona work already with this behavior and if they haven't, it'll force them to think a bit more about who they are, which is great. So when I say, you know, who are these people, where do they work? What do they do for a living, I guess? What interests them? Are they in sports? Are they into science? Are they into history documentaries? What are they into? And then we think about how they interact online, what social channels they're on, and then of course, what they read, what we can use, sites they're interested in most, what magazines, et cetera. So that way we get to build up a full picture of who they are, and then we can inform and use the right kind of language to them. What's not too confusing? It's not too high-brow. It's not too low-brow either. So we're going to look at some tools, some free tools on the day as well, the right great headlines, and to understand what level our content is aimed at from an educational level, an age level, et cetera, things like that. So that, we think about tone of voice then, we then look into the brand and go, okay, what's the character and persona of your brand? Again, tone of voice, which we've done in the previous slide, what language you're using, technical, mainstream, whatever it has to be, and then obviously, what's your brand purpose? You'll hear the word brand purpose quite a lot this year, especially with topics such as environments, plastic, recycling. There's a lot of emphasis on these things at the minute, so you have to think about what our brand purpose is. So we've got to think about the content of our purpose and the content of our brand, and we're going to look through that as we go. Excuse me. I can't just at the time, what, 15 minutes of kind of presentation and time left, which is great. This is enough time to think about writing for the web. Now, some of you might be publishers already of content. I imagine you are. Maybe you've got your own blog, maybe you like writing articles, news sites, whatever it happens to be. There is an art to the skill to it, and the key thing to remember is, again, going back to the audience, how are they consuming this information, what interests them, et cetera. Once you've done this research, of course, you can then set about following various different rules to make sure that we are being as impactful as possible with our content. So if we look at the basics of rule setting here, blog posts, let's have a look at the data, then see how people read online. If we look at the data, you can find that only 16% of people actually read word by word from the screen. Eight in 10, pretty much, are always scanning a new page. So context setting, if we put out a wall of words from our blog posts, whatever it has to be, no one's going to read it. They can find it really difficult. They can be put off straight away. We need to break this up. Excuse me, and I'm going to go through some great examples on the day of brands that have colored this. They've got publishing really well, magazine star with bullet points, with subheads, with nice pictures, interactive things you can play with. So we'll break it up and make sure that we're publishing. So if the title really matters, we're going to look at some techniques and to writing really great headlines. We're going to experiment. We're going to use an online tool that helps you write better headlines. Bear in mind that 1810 people read that only the headline and nothing else. That means that the headline is really, really important. They may well get the message they need from the headline, in which case great. But really, we want to get that message upfront and make sure that we increase the chance of sharing it, because you can see six in 10 people share the online content without actually reading it. So, I mean, maybe some of this has been there where you've tracked some content with a bit, you know, the link shortener where you can see how many people clicked on it. You'll find you've got more retweets than actual clicks, which is kind of weird because you thought people should be reading this. Anyway, there we are. So this does happen. We're going to increase the chances of our conversion. That's what we really want to do. And traffic can vary by up to 500%, according to the type of headline. So very, very important that we get this right. So what should structure look like? So I put this together here and we're going to experiment with this on the day. But you can see it starts with really impactful headline. So this article will change your life. You won't believe, you know, these 10 top, whatever, number seven will blow your mind. You've probably seen them all. We're going to go through those in a minute, a bit more about headlines. But the headlines are really important. They'll be compelling, drive clicks and make sure that the content that follows it delivers on that. Otherwise, it's just a bit of bait. And people will feel cheated. So you've got to make sure you deliver on the title if you're going to be impactful. Bear in mind, this has got a lot more freedom with business to consumer, excuse me, when it comes to the type of headlines you can write with business to business. Obviously, you've got a brand to reflect and it's going to have to be a little bit more matter of fact, I guess, but still get the message across in a mature way. Then you've got the stand fast because the stand first is very important. Paragraph sum everything up. But at the same time, not to the point where people feel they don't need to read on anymore. I've read everything, I've got the title and the thing and okay, I get the principle I'm off. You want to give them enough and tempt them in to read further on. And going back to the next bit, the meat of the content here, this is where it's really important to understand that people are consuming probably from mobile. You can go to your Google analytics, for example, which is another thing we're going to be doing on the day, by the way, Google analytics. But if you look into Google analytics, because you can see what devices people are using for when they access your website from my blog, it gets anywhere between seven and 10,000 hits a month, I know 60% of them are accessing it from a mobile. That means that they're going to be spending less time, short screen, probably grazing, and they need a lot of subtitle subhead bullets photos, things that can distract them, and they're very light on detail, unless they're going to really deep dive, and in which case, that links back to how I promote it on social. But you can see here in the main bit here, the big chunk, this is all about using images into graphics, it's breaking out with what we call H2 subheads, and they're great to search as well, and on the day I'll talk about how that's helped me write another one on Google for a couple of my blog posts. And then we've got to finish with a call for action. Like I said at the beginning, it's not about a cul-de-sac or a dead-end street, we've got them, it's very difficult to earn that person's clear commitment trust, and we've got them to reach the end, like what do we want them to do? We put calls to action throughout their content, of course, and that often helps. You should always have links to other articles that they can read, but also think about content, some calls to action, often without a pop-up, if you can resist a pop-up, fantastic, they're not very popular at all. So headlines, there's a sort of a formula that one should always follow, which is ADA, so it's all about attention, interest, desire, and action. So first up, again, you've got very few words to get this, remember, get the audience's attention, hey, screen, draw them in, I've got some examples coming up, desire, get some desire going, what am I going to read and why should I read on, and then obviously the call to action, you've got to think about what you're going to do at the end of it. So what works really well, let's have a look, here we are, what works? So make a promise, think about what's in it for the reader, figure out curiosity, so we've got one here, this organism that might save the planet, oh, what could it be? Use numbers, if numbers really work, we'll have a look at some headlines in the moment, how much they tend to make up of different types of headlines. Ask a question, that's always good, and thanks to people feeling involved and engaged, and obviously with social media as well, it's really important because then people can actually reply to you, and then of course you have to respond to that either with just a like, to acknowledge that you've read it, otherwise people feel ignored, and it's a bit, again, use impactful language, but not too shocking I hope, it depends on who you are again, keep it brief, that's the most important thing, just keep it to the point. You'll find some publications that write really, really long ones, and that may be an SEO tactical, just have style, but anyway, with headlines though, key things get emotional, there's a psychologist called Robert Flutchick who said there was eight key emotions that people would go through that would inspire an action. Now the key thing with any of your content is you do not want to, I guess it was, you don't want to bore people, ambivalence is the enemy of creativity, so there's these kind of eight emotions that one should try and aim for, and those that tend the actual session will receive a content template from me, which help you plan these sort of things, and one of the columns in it is emotion, so what are you trying to instill in people, and that helps you focus, helps the writer focus, or the videographer, whoever is that's creating that content to sort of focus on that, creating that experience. Now if you're an NGO, for example your Greenpeace, you want to talk about maybe anger and disgust, a bit of fear about the state of the planet, if you are a charity, you want to instill joy, your donation is really making a difference, etc. So think about the emotions that your audience really want, and it does come back to them because there's different types of audience, so there's according to some psychologists again, there's open conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism, we've all got these different kind of grades I guess, and one of the, if you think about say energetic extraversion here needs stimulation, you can see that in someone like Red Bull, it's always like really sort of high octane activities, people jumping off buildings with those sort of jet pack things, you know, so they're going for that sort of thing, whereas someone like Patagonia which is maybe more the upgrade outdoors, then you think about intellectual curiosity and adventure, you know, so if you understand your audience is made up of different types of people then you can serve all of these audiences around the same topic but in a different sort of manner. So let's look at those headlines again, so like I said we'll be using a headline writing tool when we get there, but we can see here numbers featuring just over a third of headlines, one that talks to the reader directly, as in the second person, you can do this, you can do that, you should do this, that's just one in five, 21%, 17% is just kind of like how-to content, 15% kind of has nothing particular about it, and then 11% asks a question, we want to make sure we mix those up, you might see that some, you know, mashables of this world and BuzzFeed, they often do 17 ways you can do this, number 10 will blow your mind, you don't want to do listicles all the time, listicles are good in context, but you know that's okay for them because they're kind of like a news site, but if you're a brand you want to sort of mix up the kind of type of content in headlines. So a little bit of best practice on copies, I'm conscious of time, a great headline analyser's career schedule, I really like using that, have a play around with it, basically what it does is tell us to give you a score, and we're going to play around with that on my day. Use the one paragraph, intro stand for us, covers everything, break up content regularly with bullets and subheads, that's really important in the era of mobile and tablet consumption. For blogs, I think other tools you can use like highlighting quotes and other stats, so LinkedIn Pulse for example, and on WordPress and I'm sure other publishing CMS content management systems, you can actually create a pullout where you can do a standalone kind of quote box and then you get a message across really clearly and it looks more like some magazine style. Use a made in visuals and preferably with people's faces on it, people's various numerous studies that show that people are more responsive to people who are kind of like them. If you have just buildings, say if you're trying to promote a particular Madrid, for example, there you are, you have a nice picture of the Ibelle's Palace with the fountain, but if you've got people in it in the same location enjoying it and having fun, then you kind of help that individual student self there and understand that the potential of visiting that particular part of the world could happen then. So the other thing we're going to cover in content is obviously you've written the content, great, great blog posts, we're in a great port, we've made a great video. How are we going to promote on social media? Because obviously EpiBrand has social channels depending which one depends very much on what type of organization you are and where your audience is active most importantly. So with social media, tweets with images for example and videos, they gain most attention. Very important to use hashtags but within, within reason. To Instagram I think we've got up to 28 for example but with tweets you don't use more than probably one or two. So they've got to be relevant, make sure they're not linked to someone else or associated with another brand or event and you know they're third more likely to be retweeted than those without. People are following these various different topics and think about marketing in the moment as well which we have to think about what's without promoting something that's inappropriate for the context of the news agenda but think about how you can sort of do something that's timely. In certain URL in the middle of the tweet increase of engagement by 26%. So think about how you can structure your tweet so that the link is right in the middle and maybe that means finishing with a following statement for example at the end or maybe a few hashtags keep them short, ask questions always of course and maybe a couple of polls you know keep people engaged, keep them interested and then don't forget that yes maybe you can post things once on Facebook, Instagram etc. LinkedIn but think about Twitter which far more turnover I guess more real time. You can share content more than once so experiment with the headline see what works see what's done more importantly. So example here is like from great headlines are these are the various forms that seem to work. The secret of X what we need to know about X certain ways to do numbers you know whatever it is you're trying to do not the sentence is incredible and that just piques people's curiosity you've seen that tactic so often as a way of getting people in and you may have felt for yourself so oh great you know what if you read one thing today you make sure it's on how to do something what do you think about and then of course the other thing about especially with B2B it's actually essential use emojis they're very playful for one for better word and people love them and even within business to business now as long as you're using the right one and they're relevant to what you're doing they can really bring a tweet to life and statistically they do actually improve the chances of a conversion of people actually converted. So just quickly on timing then we'll also talk about when is a good time to do these things this activity so LinkedIn if you're on a company page could be once or twice a day Monday to Friday most activities midweek if you look at your Google Analytics for your company and you run a B2B company you'll probably find that people it's like the Loch Ness Monster goes up and down up and down and it's down during Saturday Sunday and then go a little bit up on Monday then Tuesday big hump and then go down on Friday again because people aren't really thinking about work so think about that most people most active and receptive to things on Tuesday through Thursday so Monday they're probably just you know getting into the week Friday kind of winding down so think about you know the context of your audience where they're at when you're doing that activity. Twitter 4 to 6 posts during the week if you think we're doing a weekend if your data suggests that's a good thing we'll be looking at these analytics tools to find out on during the training then yeah fantastic Facebook again work out what time your audience is active YouTube if you can do one or two a month fantastic things with videos and podcasting is once you've started you have to think about making episodic or at least in a series so that people expect consistency that they subscribe for a reason they'll unsubscribe if they're not getting what they want what they need Instagram once or twice a day research suggests that around midday lunchtime and also in the evening local time is the most impactful and then if you're posting some of that media and wanting to pulse these trunk it once a month so we are training that would have been perfect timing had I not got kicked off my mobile network just then so apologies for that we're a little bit delayed but not by much here we are when are we training Wednesday 12th of February and Tuesday 28th so you can find out more details there and if I hand back to the guys do a bit of a wrap up in terms of I've got a few more things to say about the course before we open up the questions we do thank you very much Chris for the illuminating presentation I'm not too proud to say I'll be using some of the insights in my own role this afternoon it'll make me look a lot better so thank you for that I do apologize for the technical issues we had during the presentation but it looks like we have quite a few questions and some pretty tough ones Chris I'll be honest so I know it's going to start you with an easy one though I'd like to say we're now going to answer the questions that have been submitted as a reminder you can still submit your questions via the chat box in the attendee control panel we'll try and get through as many as we can our first question and I told you I'll give you an easy one because it does get harder a couple of people asking about the acronym ICYMI can you just tell us what it stands for please Chris oh sorry yeah so in case you missed it and that you'll see that quite a lot and it basically means you're acknowledging you've posted this already once but you're doing it again so in case you missed it excuse me first time we often find with content when you post it first time this is why it's really important it will register with your audience and they may or may not click and if they see it again uh the same thing it's almost like they if they didn't engage with the first time they might not next time so first time is very important um to make that really important first impression unless an influencer gives it new impetus it's very unlikely that you're going to get as much traction as you did the first time around um so when you do in case you missed it it just goes to your knowledge you've done this before um but you're just you know you're not trying not to be boring but yeah you know or too pushy but here's a new angle you know oh cool so sorry I thought I had a chance now that's all right maybe I have but with a few people have asked so just a second chance to make a good first impression I suppose I did say they will they do get harder and I'm going to have to mention GDPR here um with GDPR a couple of people have mentioned that they're more limited in their analytics uh for instance with with cookies and Google analytics for the demographic section how do they get more insights into their audience whilst respecting what are very strict GDPR requirements right well I'm here's the thing I'm not I've written probably about hundred thousand plus words on on GDPR during the last two or three years um and I still kind of confuses me as much as probably anyone else um but yeah they mean people cannot doubt obviously from cookies etc well when they go and various tracking sorry uh elements um I think it's I I often just go over what I can and I either assume that we can magnify those numbers so to speak for each demographic according to how many there are um it may be that certain some demographics especially younger people who are more savvy about the internet um and you know how to sort of manage their um presences a lot more will opt out of being tracked um and I think that's something that may become more of a thing because we're getting all these sort of uh trust issues thrown at us sort from all angles uh and especially I mean I don't know if you guys did this but I got my uh Facebook you know who's tracking who's tracking me or feeding information to Facebook from you know third party sites um and I was oh gosh I didn't realize that you know there's so many sites are doing it and obviously somewhere in the small brain it says we'll be you know feeding this information to third parties and you may just accept and move on and you give it all these sites to do it so um I'm not probably the the person to ask answer that question I don't want to sort of sell myself uh short in that regard I also wouldn't want to give misadvide anyone um GDPR I think something that we're all going to learn more about as we go um but demographically I think that's to work with what we have and what we know already from uh other sources so to speak other than just say good learnings definitely tread carefully I think we all have to be in that sort of zone um and what you were talking about earlier of in case you missed it um there's certainly been some debate on in the questions about sharing the same written content on a number of platforms on the company blog on LinkedIn on Facebook do you believe Google penalizes the least credible site uh as it well is majorizing yeah I mean excuse me the I wouldn't recommend putting exactly the same content out uh say exactly copy so imagine you did a blog post on your website and you copied and pasted exact same thing in LinkedIn pulse and then on medium I wouldn't recommend that at all because like you said it does look Google be going hang on I've read this before somewhere um and uh if it's going to be similar there's a single canonicals on web publishing we can if you're writing something similar you can designate which which one is the sort of the one that um Google should read and that you can't acknowledging that similar stroke same content but the uh that's on your own site I I would basically just treat each platform individually each content should be unique so if you're writing about the same topic um then just write different angles different types of arrangements of wordings um etc on that same topic mix up the order of the tips whatever happens to be change them around change the wording and then you know then you can hit multiple sources with effectively the same message but with different different content you do not want to do exactly the same clocking post job no absolutely not uh effect in on that note and a few people have asked is there such a thing as evergreen content stuff that just simply won't be pushed down the search return um evergreen content is very valuable and the only thing is there's different types of content we go into this on the day there's stuff that's around time you know say like oh we want to talk about you know uh canada or the place to live on the back of like harry and megan move to canada for example then that's primarily and off of now so you could have a hit around writing about moving to canada and what lifestyle in canada is like um but also that could have evergreen potential because if you're writing top tips and moving to canada um i'm just thinking off the top of my head here i've got no interest like personal in you know interest in this in the topic so the way that you present things uh is very important if you think about the long game uh i've been cashing in on a particular news agenda but it's got longer legs than that for a long time than yes definitely do now well as you know i run a i mentioned alluded to earlier i got a a blog called outside write double or it and i my biggest driver of traffic is a blog post i wrote three years ago and the reason it's still my biggest driver of traffic because it sat on google for that long um above articles by the guardian above articles um from other kind of more impactful sides than mine uh or have a stronger domain authority and the reason it's number one it's partly because of the way that at google rewards what we call snippets so it looks that thing by h2 head the headers that i like mentioned i've got um uh i have these heads subheads that you put in things and i made a listicle with these h2 as each head and google because of the way it's organizing things on search just pulled that um content together and um attributed sort badges to it at one point so it's effectively position zero and looks a lot more arty than it is to be google left-wing football clubs who probably see it uh and see my office and that's just fascinating i have no intention of doing that i have no idea i was just presenting it as i thought and then the way google changed things um pushed it up to number one it's getting loads of attention lots of shares etc it's getting shared a thousand times a night of one point on a forum and so yeah there is such a thing as ever green content um key thing is as we'll cover in the course as well is that you visit your content do regular audits to see what if whether your content is performing well uh it's still relevant to make sure that you know it's up to date and people are finding it they're not finding misinformation or information is out of date got to be relevant still so yeah i mean there is such a thing as ever green yeah sure it's evergreen but you do have to keep on top of it i'd also recommend anyone to check out chris's blog outside right if you're a football or non-football fan just another little plug for you there um a lot of people going on about the bt b2c and b2b sort of different um i'll go on the b2c issue first how do you measure improved perception or accept reputation in a b2c environment where maybe the audience is a more diverse and massive than in the b2b you know what that's quite that's currently quite difficult and that can often relate there's desktop research you can do such as um you know google trends and see what um different kind of people are searching for your brand for example alongside other say scandal words say if you've been involved with scandal and you see whether or not there's attention still on that particular topic um but there's also i guess things like running regular forums and focus groups with your audience to uh and surveys you know there are fairly cost effective online survey companies out there without naming any um that you can keep tabs on how people feel about your brand um and that's that's probably one of the best ways to understand how they feel about you and what you offer whether or not they understand what you offer and it's worth good practice to do anyway you have to so often to understand uh if people have a complete conception of what you actually offer and if they haven't that's a great example there's that informal content strategy because you know you right we need to educate people we sell this particular type of insurance and they have no idea we did life insurance we need to you know we need to sort of get this messaging across and content is probably a good or it's not the best way of doing that yeah um that's headline eight out of ten read only the headline uh is that b2c do you think it's a similar style for b2b audiences b2b audience is probably different i think that's more b2c where you've got less time to impress i think b2b when you go on to say a telecoms industry website or uh you know a legal industry website then i think you're going to be in a different mindset than if you're looking for say entertainment or just you know browsing so you're gone with a specific region but yes you still have to get that um that message across really significantly so it's very important but that headline has to match your tone of voice which is why we're doing tone of voice before we do headlines excellent i think we have time for a couple more questions uh so i shall sneak a few in if that's all right with you chris yeah um a lot of people asking how many personas is usually good to define is it a case that they have one main one and a few complimentary or is that too simple uh i'm going to do the hell sit on the fence thing okay it depends because obviously every brand is different if your main audience is say it managers i've spent a lot of my career right for it managers um then i kind of they're quite similar kind of objectives um in terms of and also uh there's probably more information around what we can find about them but if you're you're a store and you're selling uh children's clothes and adult's clothes and food as well then you've got lots of different types of personas coming into your store for different reasons so it's a question of um dividing those up and accordingly and making sure that you're catering to not just age but i don't want to sort of like stereotype here but what i would say is that don't think about too much about um age think about more about interest because you could be interested in um keep the topic at any age um you know just question of um getting people where they're interested rather than just about you know things such as age or gender and things like that so you could be a little bit more specialized these days with with how you target people rather than age and race religion more about what they're interested in as a whole group yeah i think that that i mean i yeah yeah a lot of people are asking um what your well one are there any equally impactful content forms that can be used aside from video infographics podcast a lot of people are asking what your favorite one is actually so maybe maybe you can answer that um and about infographics as a whole are they more of a b2b thing or do you think they can work in both b2c and b2b i reckon they can work in both and the thing is depends i mean the end of the day the story is the it's the key thing um and how you tell that in infographic form so if you've got something for any consumers you want what's taken action you want to educate them about how do you think so step one do this step two do this step three infographics perfect um yeah i can see why the people might think it's probably more useful for b2b but i think that wouldn't want to be limited by saying that um either is either more important or more valid because at the end of the day it's the story that matters and what you're trying to convey um and you want to talk about what what infographics in general i think we're kind of i'd say peaked but people are very interested in two or three years ago now people are very interested in podcasts which i'm delighted to hear it's podcasted myself but at the same time you've got to make sure that it's high quality and engaging people are going to stick with you and you're going to stick with it as well so that is my favorite format at the minute as i've mentioned because i do a lot running and commuting and walking so i can take it with me anywhere um but i will find out about that usually through social media uh rather than actually searching online so that goes to show how important it is to have a decent uh social media and influencer program up and running um what was the other part of the question sorry i think you've kind of answered it to be honest uh it was just about what your favorite one was or maybe maybe uh looking ahead you said infographics three years ago were your favorite right now you're a podcast guy is there another form of getting content across that maybe sneaking up that you'll be talking about in three years time um i mean well the thing is with videos i was going to have a present and i think that we need to the question now short form video uh is so important um if you see the sort of rise of a TikTok for example as a social channel amongst the younger demographic it's very selfie oriented um and i think we see this on LinkedIn amongst professionals as well a lot of people are doing uh selfie type videos they're just doing sort of like monologues to camera um and i companies need to make sure that they've got a video strategy it's almost like video if you haven't got it so i can speak your substance so i definitely say look how you can make short form video uh an integral part of your your marketing not just like from a brand point of view but also from people representing your brand so have your sales team use them uh if they want to stand for example like yeah we're it's you know this particular event in london today make sure you swing by stand 38 to you know see what we're up to all that sort of thing just short form video as well big big that's a big drive on that that's something we all have to think of uh i suppose um well i think that's all we have time for today i'd like to thank you again chris for presenting the webinar um thank you for all who attended today apologies for the technical details we have there i'd like to say once you leave today's webinar you'll receive a survey on the presentation we would appreciate it if you could provide any and all feedback so we can keep providing you with the content you want and require as a refer a further reminder today uh all of our member exclusive webinars are cpd eligible for chartered professional development by submitting your cpd record you not only keep your learning and development on track but you could also achieve our chartered marketer status uh you can find out more at my cim or get in touch with our membership team today on behalf of cim thank you for joining us today i'd also like to thank chris again for presenting the webinar and i hope you enjoy the rest of your day thanks everyone and i look forward to those of you who are coming on the 12th of it