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Actionable Marketing Podcast

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Now displaying: April, 2018
Apr 24, 2018

These days, you need to create both a great Website and great content to rank on Google. 

Today, we’re talking to Brian Dean, an SEO expert and founder of Backlinko, about how to fuel your 10x content using his research method called the Skyscraper technique. 

Some of the highlights of the show include: 

  • Black Hat SEO: Stuffing keywords and creating fake signals to rank in Google
  • Google penalized sites using this strategy
  • White Hat SEO: You don’t mind showing Google everything you did to optimize your site
  • Backlinko teaches people White Hat SEO strategies
  • SEO Elements: Keyword and topic research; create content around them
  • Two types of keywords: Information and commercial
  • Create and optimize content that gets the most searches around keywords/topics
  • Differences between well-researched and not researched content and topics
  • Provide one-stop shopping for all the information customers need
  • Skyscraper Technique is a form of research to figure out what content will perform well:
  1. Find a keyword
  2. Search for keyword in Google
  3. Create content better than what’s on first page of search results
  • Ways to improve content - go bigger and better, curate, storytelling, and more
  • Focus on quality over quantity; create less content, make it more valuable
  • Common missteps when implementing “less is more” strategy and ranking

Links: 

 

Apr 17, 2018

Where do your customers hang out? What kinds of things do they like? What publications do they read? Customer research involves a lot of leg work, so does this information even matter? How can you leverage such insight for SEO? 

Today, we’re talking to Rand Fishkin, founder of SparkToro and author of Lost and Founder. He is a powerhouse in the content marketing and SEO world. 

Some of the highlights of the show include: 

  • Background, origination, and purpose of SparkToro
  • Reaching/Researching Audiences: Slow, frustrating, and inaccurate process
  • Companies spend money contracting agencies for a list of top customers, blogs, podcasts, and events
  • Bones of Audience Intelligence: 1) Identify audiences across channels; 2) Know audience density; 3) Use trustworthy and valuable metrics
  • How to obtain, benchmark, filter, and analyze data
  • Data Points: Which to focus on and where to get them
  • Social Network Profiles: Report follower count and engagement
  • Biases generate unrepresentative data influenced by SEO
  • Significant sample sizes and diverse groups are needed for true coverage
  • Examples of missing specific audiences
  • SparkToro lets you find people who practice specific fields
  • Does current audience intelligence data represent the market as a whole?
  • Improve SEO by helping audience accomplish tasks, and identifying and broadening link sources

Links:

Rand Fishkin on Twitter

SparkToro

Lost and Founder

Project Event Safe

Moz

SurveyMonkey Audience

Nate Silver

SimilarWeb Pro

AMP on iTunes - leave a review and send screenshot to podcast@coschedule.com

 

Quotes by Rand: 

“If you’re looking at a social network profile, don’t just report on follower count, go look at the last 20 or 50 posts...report on how much engagement did each of those get.”

“Go out there, build a company, make mistakes, just don’t make exactly the same ones I did.”

“You get biased by your existing understanding of the field.”

 

Apr 10, 2018

Copywriting can happen anywhere - from blogs to cereal boxes. It includes the whole world of marketing words. Conversion copywriting helps businesses build their business. Conversion copywriting is about getting people to say “Yes” and generating more leads and buyers. It measures results to see if something converted or not.

Today, we’re talking to Joanna Wiebe, a conversion copywriter, creator of Copy Hackers, and co-founder of Airstory. She is an absolute authority on copywriting and conversions. 

Some of the highlights of the show include: 

  • What makes people say, “Yes?” Whether it is clicking or trying something. There are different formulas you can use for this goal.
  • Ask customers, “What was going on in your life that brought you to…” Then, you can identify their motivation.
  • If you put a button on a Web page, people will click it because it is there. Lots of things will move people to click, but rarely lead to conversions.
  • Stages of Awareness: Unaware, Pain Aware, Solution Aware, Product Aware, and Most Aware.
  • Persuasion techniques are typically triggers used at the late stages in hope that you will make people buy.
  • “Don’t put pressure on poor, little button.” It’s going to get clicked, but don’t put too many fancy marketing tricks within it.
  • Where does it go? What will it say? Push best people to the most highly optimized button.
  • There’s buttons for Calls to Value or Calls to Action. A Call to Action button is to tell the user exactly what you want them to do. For example, Download Ebook or Complete Purchase.
  • A Calls to Value button regards why a customer is performing an action and completes the phrase, “I want to…”
  • Change your button approach depending on the type of medium you are using. It depends on the context for an action or engagement.
  • Map out actions based on context and location - email, Website, blog, etc.
  • Map Calls to Action to move customers to the next stage of awareness.

Links: 

Quotes by Joanna Wiebe: 

“It wasn’t the digital atmosphere we have today in marketing where everything, everything gets measured.”

“The real thing is we want to convert. We want more leads and we want more buyers. That’s what conversion copywriting is about.”

“We can’t do a lot of motivating with copy, but you can take someone’s motivation and turn it into something.”

“People want to click things. Mostly because they just want to move through life and get their problems solved.”

Apr 3, 2018

Content marketing is easy, right?! You just find a keyword, write a list post, rank #1 on Google, get tons of traffic, and crush your goals. It should be that easy, but the future of successful content marketing is changing. Now, the goal is to influence profitable customer action.

Today, we’re talking to Jennifer Pepper, the marketing manager for content creation at Unbounce. She shares why it is more important than ever before to go beyond lifestyle or listicle content, to publish content that solves for intent, and to connect the dots for between your audience’s pain and your product offering.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

  • At Unbounce, Jennifer manages the production of content marketing initiatives and helps develop content strategy for the company’s marketing goals.
  • Unbounce started blogging as a company before it even had a product. It started blogging to validate whether the problem it was trying to solve for marketers actually existed. The problem: Do people need to find a way to build dedicated landing pages without a developer or IT? Yes!
  • Unbounce discovered that content and blogging was a great way to build a following by conveying authority and speaking in a way that resonated with marketers.
  • Years ago, you could write content that stood out and drove traffic. However, rather than simply focusing on lifestyle, you needed to have a correlation between a product and lifestyle or journey to convert to sales.
  • Many marketers realize that having so many channels, such as a blog, podcast, and ebooks, eventually do not produce results despite tons of effort. You need to create content that solves for intent and what the customer wants and needs.
  • Unbounce centers on problem focus first vs. bringing a solution right away. What is the problem marketers are trying to solve? How do you meet them on the other end with the best answer on the Internet?
  • By blogging first, Unbounce was able to help serve product development and validate assumptions through content.
  • The process of connecting lifestyle to a core product involves what’s going to be the next growth channel in terms of content and focusing on fundamental questions and core problems. Learn to optimize the content you create.
  • How do you know when it is time to pivot and change? At Unbounce, it reviewed net new traffic to a content channel and whether content attracted people and pushed them to a new trial start.   
  • There was content that was driving traffic, but it was old. And the traffic was dipping because it was not ranking anymore. Do you invest further in a channel that is flatlining? Or, how do you go back to that content and refresh it to attract traffic and rank again?
  • Keep cornerstone content fresh and relevant and at the top of search results. Does it still answer the core question? Would you click it from a search engine results page (SERP)? If not, make changes to the content. On the Web page, how quickly does it get to the core answer? If not fast enough, revise the content. Is the best experience on the Internet for this particular question best suited to a blog post or an online experience?
  • Conduct keyword research to discover the intent of what people are looking for and refresh the content. Also, find and use synonyms that relate to your product and business.
  • Unbounce uses a few tools that are handy to find relevant synonyms and conduct keyword research: Ahrefs and SEObook.
  • It is important to pivot from lifestyle content to optimize for product intent because of how people are interacting with the Internet. Reach the right customers in the right ways to save time and money.
  • Jennifer focuses on the customer journey through curriculums - marketing as a form of education and way to nurture prospects into customers. It is about creating content that ranks through keyword research and curriculum through grouping keywords by intent.
  • To put a curriculum together, ask yourself the following questions: What’s the best way to show this information online? What are customers hoping to find? Map out and determine calls to action for the customer’s journey.  
  • Mature content by analyzing traffic drops on posts that used to perform well. Go back to the content to identify its intent and whether the content needs to be refreshed or offer something new. Perform keyword research to cover fundamentals. Are they the best experience on the Internet?
  • CoSchedule’s CEO and Founder Garrett Moon just published a book titled, 10X Marketing Formula, which discusses the content core - what you do and what you talk about to create content that gains customers.  

Links:

Quotes by Jennifer:

“We started blogging as a company before we even had a product...as a way of validating early on if the problem we were trying to solve for marketers actually existed.”

“We were always creating more instead of looking to better merchandise messages and content that we’d already perfected and produced.”

“We’re trying to look at being more problem focus first vs. bringing a solution right away.”

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