Our Marketing Assistant Jake Wharton, attended the first ever Mega Bite-sized Learning on how to ‘Build your Business with content.’ Here is what he learnt from the four industry experts who led the event.
The rules have changed. Content has (and is) the power to attract.
On Friday the 11th of March, a lot of questions were answered by 4 content experts. How do you know what content to put out there? Where do you get it from? Where should you put it and how do you know if it’s working?
Imogen Mergler, founder of SmallFish Marketing started of the day with a great introduction on content, explaining how to shape it and what form it should take. The rule she stressed is that if you are going to do it, do it right. You only want to be putting quality out there. You can discover this by first creating a content audit before you go into your content strategy. Ask yourself what makes people engage, purchase and be loyal to you? When you go into your content strategy, keep in mind your goals, what your competitors are saying and experiment with different styles and formats.
It’s understandable that some people might be fearful of keeping the flow of content going, but Miranda Birch, founder of Miranda Birch Media, is certainly not. Some of the tips she gave on where to get content from and how to keep it going includes:
- Get under your ideal target audiences skin. Find out what they have as a problem and solve it for them.
- Remember you are an expert in your industry, what you have to say matters and you should say it out loud.
- Keep content conversational, so that it can keep evolving and going. Miranda’s main rule was that Series and Sequels are more valued than a one-off content offer. This means for many more happy returns.
- Keep your customers coming back by creating visual imagery within your content. This makes for a much more memorable experience.
Sophie Turton, Digital Content Manager from Bozboz, opened some eyes with her points on where your content should go once it has been formed and created. She explained that thinking more logistically about your audience will allow you to be more targeted in your promotion and will help with expanding your reach. Determining the subsections of your overall audience is very important when it comes to this as some might use different platforms e.g. LinkedIn, where you can advertise on this. Don’t forget those call to actions.
How do you measure Content, and how do you know if it’s working? – was the main focus by Jon Hibbitt, Technical SEO analyst of SiteVisibility. He took us through tools such as the Google console and Google Analytics and recommended the use of them. A very valued point Jon made was that when it comes to SEO, google will rank for these 5 factors to determine where you show up on its search engine:
- Keywords
- Links
- Engagement
- Traffic
- Social signals
In summary it seemed that the most mentioned points between the 4 professionals is that you should know your target audience very well and that quality is key. You could say everyone was left feeling content…
Blog originally posted for Mega Bite Sized Learning