Sabelline Chicot

Click and Connect | Connecting Through Content

Click and ConnectConnecting through Content

Strategic Digital Marketing further.co.uk

Click and Connect | Connecting through Content

Hello!

Sabelline @sabellinechicot

Senior Strategist at Further

Winner of the Digital Strategy and Content Strategy categories at the 2014 RAR UK Digital Awards

I lead digital strategy across flagship clients and consult for smaller businesses

Norwich is my home

I have seen the challenges faced by small businesses first hand

Connecting Through Content

• I don't have the time

• I don't have the money

• I'm not a creative type

• I can't write

• I don't know where to start

• I don't really see the point

But if you don’t…

…your competitors will

What does this actually mean? Why should I invest in content production?

“If you sell something, you make a customer today. But if you genuinely help someone, you create a customer for life.” Jay Baer - marketing consultant, speaker and New York Times Best-Selling author

Good, engaging content is about

• helping customers make a decision

• thinking laterally about information that you have at hand to solve your customers’ problems

Thinking laterally to help customers

OFFLINE…

Cestr in Prague

Taxi Mike in Banff, Canada

Thinking laterally to help customers

…AND ONLINE

River Pools in Virginia/Maryland, USA

Simply Business, UK

Effective Content

• Doesn’t have to be complicated, comprehensive or polished

• Doesn't have to be a blog or a newsletter

• But it has to have your customers' needs at its heart

• When done well, it allows you to reach people in channels you would have otherwise missed

• And will help with your business visibility online

Where do I start?

What problems can you help solve? What answers do you provide to your customers?

Who are your customers?

Where can you find them?What are they interested in?

Where do I start?

Audit your sales and customer services teams

Build customer personas

• Who are they?

• What are their problems?

• What do they want?

• Why do they come to you and not your competitors?

• What do successful conversations look like?

Effective content isn’t about you

It’s about your customers

• Benefits versus features

• Conversation versus transaction

• Long-term reward versus immediate satisfaction

• Branding versus sales

• Common talking points

Think about it like speed dating

But you only have a few seconds

• Scannability

• Strong headline

• Imagery

• Clear layout

• Prominent call to action

Develop key messages

Content matrix

• Educational

• Inspirational

• Entertaining

Price Intelligently, USA

Find your voice

• In-line with your customers personas

• Consistent with your brand and customer service style

• Passion

• Personality

• Better to lose a few people along the way and engage a vast majority than not being listened to by anyone

• But be mindful of boundaries

Good and bad exemples across sectors.

Find a format that works for you

• blog posts

• infographics

• Q&As

• explainer videos

• eBooks

• photography

• tutorials

LDC Driving School

Ezra + Eli

The Presentation Designer

Nail down your channels

Owned – website, social channels, collaterals

Earned – public and media relations opportunities

Partnered – channels available for leverage with corporate and strategic partners

Paid – advertising channels on and offline

Plan resources and workflows

• Don’t rush to start developing your content yet

• Establish an editorial calendar

• Patterns for publication – not quantity but regularity

• Resource and delegate – who does what? when?

Optimise for search engines

• Ensure your content can be read by users and search engines alike – PDFs are a no-go!

• Keyword research – what search terms and themes do you want to dominate?

• Optimise your metadata and title tags

• Link to and from your content on relevant places within your site

Disseminate your content

Offline

YOUR CONTENT

Online

Newsletter

Social media

Paid promotion

Word of mouth and sales teams

Guest blogging

Printed material

Partnerships

Effective content is as good as it gets seen, digested and remembered

Listen and respond

It’s about starting a conversation

• Who in your business will respond to customers comments?

• Give them the tools to listen

• Give them the time to engage

• Define the process for responding – what stays online/ what goes offline? Customer service or marketing?

Measure impact

1. Objectives – what do you want to achieve?

• Sales?

• New enquiries?

• Renewed business?

• Customer engagement?

• Timescales?

Measure impact

2. KPIs – how are you going to measure success?

• Consumption metrics – views, downloads, time on page

• Share metrics – likes, tweets, shares

• Lead generation metrics – email and phone enquiries, brochure downloads, newsletter sign-ups

• Sales metrics – revenue, attribution modeling in the sales funnel

Measure impact

3. Benchmark – what is an acceptable level of response?

• Before and after

• Seasonality and macro-trends

• Google Analytics - https://analyticsacademy.withgoogle.com/explorer

• Social Communities – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn

• Sales and customer relationship management

Take aways

Five points to take away

1. Always start with your audience

2. Plan, plan, plan

3. Don’t stop after publication – push and repurpose

4. Set yourself objectives, benchmarks and measure

5. Don’t be afraid to fail – learn through experiment

Questions?

Thank you

@sabellinechicotsabelline@further.co.uk

Sabelline Chicot

strategic digital marketing

content good

content effective content

engaging content

content think

content cestr

content price

content hello

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