What is Content Marketing?

What is content?

Keep it simple.Content consists of one of the following:

• Text: blog posts, ebooks, tweets• Multimedia: images, video or audio• Interactive: applications, quizes, games

What is content marketing?

Think of Sesame StreetGreat content marketing:

•Shares valuable, free content to attract and convert buyers

•Content is related to products: educates and builds trust of brand

•Goal = get “opt-in” permission to deliver content over time

How do you get started?

Step 1: Get to Know Your Tribe

What’s on their minds? What will persuade them?

What are their fears are frustrations?

“People will do anything for those who encourage their dreams, justify their

failures, confirm their suspicions, allay their fears, and give them rocks to

throw at their enemies.”

- Blair Warren, One-Sentence Persuasion

What do they hope and dream about?

What or who holds power over them?

What do they see as their limitations?

How do they see themselves in the world?

What keeps them up at night?

What conventional wisdom do they follow?

What prejudices do they have?

What will fascinate them? “Fascination Triggers” from Sally Hogshead’s book Fascinate

Lust Appeals to the sense

ViceCreates controversy and stimulates

argument

Alarm Scares and creates fear

Power Confers control and leadership

Prestige Accepts them into “the club”

Mystique Raises curiosity

Trust Inspires belief in something

Step 2: Set Up a Home Base

This will be the primary place you post content to attract customers and help them make decisions about your products.

There are many placesyou can choose as your

base of operations.

Design matters.

Step 3: Plan and create pillar content

Make Them M.A.D. About Your Pillar Content

• Magnetic headline pulls them in

• Address a problem the customer faces and propose workable solutions they can put into action today (your product will make it even easier to do so)

• Delight your audience by injecting some entertainment and color to your content

The Keys to Great Headlines

• Make use of the fascination triggers and persuasion factors you learned above

• Think about searchability: if someone were searching for this what would they ask Google for?

• What are they going to get out of your content? Make them aware of that in the headline

Content Calendars

Headline Content Summary Date to Launch

Olympic Gold Medal Marketing Strategies (Part 1): The Judo of Competition

Analysis

Post about how to analyze the competition

Aug 1

Olympic Gold Medal Marketing Strategies (Part 2): Hitting the

Target Market

Post about researching your

target marketAug 2

Olympic Gold Media Marketing Strategies (Part

3): Unique Selling Proposition Gymnastics

Post about creating a unique selling proposition

Aug 3

Step 4: Launch a campaign to attract new customers

Building and pitching an email list

• Use an email management system like Mail Chimp, Aweber or Constant Contact

• Power in numbers: use testimonials on your email sign up, show that people joining your list get exclusive stuff and use social media to show people’s satisfaction with being on your list

• Email subject lines need to be better than your best headlines (use A/B Split testing)

• Headings must break up content and keep them reading

• Call to Action: ask for what you want

Launching on Social Media• Go where the fish are: where are

your users online?

• Find the groups, pages and other social media places your users are - then get busy being helpful and connecting

• Be helpful on competitors pages and groups in social media to attract their users to your home base.

Step 5: Honing your calls to action

Be Specific

Excite the User

Start with key phrases