Lessons

Lesson Info

Step Two: Develop Your Content

We've got a general goal in mind, we kinda know what we're looking to do. But social is all about content. Whether it's simply a quick comment about a random thought that you had or a pithy idea, or a picture of food, that's content. All of that is content. Everything that gets produced from the shortest tweet to the longest rant, or a video, it's all content. So how do you make sure that you're developing the right kind of content that's actually gonna, that people are gonna like? There's a couple of different content types that we're looking at. The first is to repurpose the proven. Repurpose the proven. What I mean by that is if something works really well in one channel, maybe it's your blog, maybe it's on Facebook, repurposing that exact same content to fit it into another channel. I'll show you some examples of that in just a minute. Number two is answer their questions. Some of the best content that we've ever produced came from just responding to somebody who had a really great...

question, and we answered it and other people went, oh that's helpful. Show you some examples of that. And I'll show you how to figure out what questions your people are asking, even if you don't have a lot of people to talk to yet. And then we call it in case you missed it. In case you missed it content. Re-shares of high performing content, whether it is yours or a related brand's content. Now you can't take somebody else's content and claim it as your own, that's called copyright and likely trademark infringement. I'm not suggesting that you just like, oh, that's brilliant, copy, paste, I said it. (audience laughing) That ain't it. But that's what social's about. Re-sharing other people's stuff and repurposing it. We're gonna talk about how to do that the right way, but it's also about re-sharing some of your best stuff. Let's be honest with one another. Some of us, we had some really good ideas like five years ago, we kinda peaked. We were like that band that had that one really good hit. We tried to go back for a second album, it's like, ah, it didn't work out. Right? We're gonna talk about how much really great, awesome, amazing content you need. It isn't as much as you might think. But you do need to go back and repurpose it. So let's talk about some examples of repurposing the proven, content type number one. This is a story that we ran in July of on the Digital Marketer Blog. So July 2017 we ran the story How to Make Your Next Sale Through Instagram (Even If You've Never Been on the Network Before). So kind of a simple, introductory post about how to leverage and generate sales from Instagram. And the post did really, really, really well. So we just did nothing with it. It just sat there and we were like yeah, high five. Great content, great piece, folks really loved it. We then brought in a new head of content, who was much stronger on the social side, and he went back and he reviewed what are the posts that have had the highest engagement, that has been shared a lot, that did get a lot of traffic. What were those? This was one of them. It was way up there. And he said we should post that on Facebook, and here's a crazy idea, Instagram, since it's about Instagram. So seven months later, seven months later, we posted up to Facebook and in a matter of days we had almost 10,000 people see this. No boosting, no thing. Just totally organic reach. And we don't have this giant, massive Facebook following. But it was good content. People saw it, they shared it, they engaged, it got, Facebook allowed it because it was good and it was getting all the right triggers for more people to see it. It didn't just go from a half a point, maybe they gave us like .7. But it got a little bit wider berth. Nothing new. Literally taking a seven month old piece of content and repurposing it. We probably should have done it the next day. But seven months is better than never. Some of you, some of your absolute best content is sitting on a shelf somewhere. A digital shelf somewhere. And the people you want today never saw it. Because they weren't on your list. Maybe you send out an email newsletter. People loved it. They think it's great. But because they weren't on your list four, five years ago, they never saw it, because they didn't subscribe to your blog four or five years ago, they never saw it, because they weren't following you on Facebook four or five years ago, they never saw it. So think right now, what is some of your best content? Log into your Google analytics account, what's the content still today that people are looking at that should be repurposed on some of these other channels? Still can't believe we got almost 10,000. This was another blog post that we ran that was specific to copyrighting. And there was this quote that the first time we posted, that we ran the blog, other people were retweeting this little quote in here, "One good idea, clearly and convincingly presented, "is better than a dozen so-so ideas strung together." We ran this and we started to see people tweeting out that. And we said people obviously like this, you know what we should do? We should create an image and put it, wait for it, on the blog. And that's the only place we put the stupid image. So we created this quote box after we ran the blog post, we found out that people really were digging on this post so we had our design team create an image, and the only place we put it was on the blog. Seven months later, we say, you know what, we should maybe put that on Instagram, where people post images and quotes all the time. You don't have to be that smart to be successful at this. We're super stupid, and the company is DigitalMarketer.com. How humiliating is that? But I want you to see, I'm sharing these with you, so that you can see you don't have to be perfect to get this, you can, in fact, mess it up for an extended period of time. But if the content was great then, it's still there waiting for you. Same deal, we posted this out there and it was one of the better pieces that we had. Content type number two, answer their questions. I love this kind of snarky article that the New York Times ran back in 2013. A Revolutionary Marketing Strategy: Answer Customer's Questions. I don't know if a more sarcastic headline has ever run in the New York Times. A Revolutionary Marketing Strategy: Answer Customers Questions. And it's worth going back and googling for the story, I'm obviously not posting the entire thing here, because again copyright infringement. But actually a buddy of mine, Marcus Sheridan was featured in this article. Marcus Sheridan is now speaker on all things social, but when this article was written about him, he owned a pool company. They created in ground pools. And his entire marketing strategy at the time was I'm gonna find out all the questions that people are asking, and I'm just gonna publish the questions and the answers to them. And his sales shot up. That was it, that was his entire marketing strategy. As opposed to saying you have questions, fill out this form and let me schedule a time to come out and I'll answer 'em while I'm standing in your backyard putting together a quote. He said, you've got questions, okay what are they. Let's talk about it. We forget sometimes the things that we do in the online world, if we were to do them in the offline world, it'd be super freaking weird. Imagine walking into a retail store, like a clothing store, and you walk in they're like hold up, (laughing) name and email address, please? Yeah, I just wanna look at some jerseys. Got ya, name and email address please. That'd be super freaking weird, right? You'd be like, I'll go somewhere else. And yet we gate our content all the time. We're like I'm not gonna answer that question until you fill out this form, alright let's schedule a time to talk, let's do a demo. He said, no, I'll just answer your questions. So what are the questions they're asking? Now if you need ideas, hopefully you're talking to your customers enough that you know generally the questions that are being asked. But if you have no idea what people are asking, maybe it's a new business that you're starting, you're going into a new market, maybe you're helping somebody, if you're an agency, and you wanna learn really, really fast. Maybe you're like me and again, you're terrified to talk to strangers. This is the answer to stranger danger. It's called Answer the Public, AnswerThePublic.com. You can come to this website and one, you're gonna have this awesome video of this man just staring at you awkwardly, I don't know why they picked that, but it's phenomenal. So you can type anything in. So let's say I was gonna go and help a chiropractor with their marketing to figure out what questions are people asking. I could type in chiropractic, and they'll give you all the questions that people are asking about this. Culled from Google and other online sources. So where, where do they study, do they work? Can, can chiropractors help with tailbone pain, can chiropractors fix hunchback, can chiropractor fix TMJ? Will, will chiropractors, what will chiropractors do, what won't they do? Why, why a chiropractor cracks your back, why does chiropractors crack necks? I've never been to a chiropractor because I've watched them go (cracking) and I'm like I don't wanna, they'll kill me. (audience laughing) If I was, why do they crack necks. Here's why we do it, it's totally safe. Okay, I'll call that person 'cause they answered my question. Your people are actively asking questions. They're asking it into the ether. They're asking it of Google. They want an answer from a human being. That's what being social's all about. What are the questions that they're asking. You don't have to know. It's good if you start with the ones you're already hearing but go back here and cross reference it with some of these. Concept type number three, in case you missed it. Much like repurposing, repurposing the proven is when you're taking content that worked on one channel and repurposing it for another channel. In case you missed it is pretty much the republishing of great content again on the same channel. So look out, what has been effective for you in the past, run it again. They don't remember. A lot of times, they're like, I don't wanna run it again, I'm gonna annoy my audience. They don't care. They have their own lives and their own hopes and their own dreams and their own aspirations. They're not, they don't memorize everything that you posted over the last 30 days. They don't remember what you did yesterday. They didn't see it. Now I'm not saying you should post the same thing if it's effective like every hour on the hour, but you could probably post the same thing every other day and nobody would notice. Again, I'm not suggesting that as a frequency, but at a minimum, maybe let it circle back around once a month. Right? People loved it, let's bring it back. Republish it in a new way. It also doesn't have to be yours. What has already been effective out there? Let's say I had a friend who was just really into schnauzers. This friend thought that schnauzers were the coolest. If I were to see an article about schnauzers and I were to tear it out of the magazine, I were to fold it up, and I were to send, drop it in the mail and send it to him. Be like, hey, saw this schnauzer article, thought of you, they would not, that friend would not thank the author of the article, the friend would thank you for sending it to them. So find great content that you're people care about. BuzzSumo is a really great tool to do that. So if I were in the paleo space, I could type in paleo, here's the top content people love in the paleo space. You don't have to invent this stuff. It's out there, go and share it. Go and share it. Now share it directly from the source, for sure. Don't copy and paste it, and mine now. Don't be like the kid that licks his thing, claimed it. (audience laughing) Can't claim it, that's somebody else's. Some best practices to keep in mind. Do repurpose across channels. Do answer questions that people ask. If all you did was produce content that answered questions, you would have all the content you could ever want, and it would only always be interesting. You don't have to be that creative. Just answer the questions people are asking. Repost great content even if it isn't yours. If it's a proven winner, do it. It's also good to go and look at some of the proven winners and be inspired by them. Now when I say inspired, I'm not throwing up air quotes, that's not code for stealing it, no like legitimately be inspired and create your own original content. Do maintain a healthy content mix. Social loves diversity. So not just text, not just image, not just video, mix it up. Also your audience loves diversity. They wanna see you and your brand in different ways. And this is a biggie, use the native tools. Instagram Stories, Facebook Stories, Live, especially when the new tools come out. Generally these platforms are gonna over index new tools in terms of distribution because they wanna get it out there, they wanna get the data. So when a new tool comes out, use it. Alright, use it. And use it natively, use it in app. Don't just upload video. I mean, you can, but also do Stories. And again, in some of the other classes, they're gonna get into specifics, just know if you see the native tool, use the native tool.