Presented to the Seattle Search Network - July 2014. Walks through a couple of key tactics and ideas related to driving awareness for your content to earn links/coverage: 1. set a foundation for social sharing of your content 2. do a better job of using your "owned media" to promote content 3. leveraging paid media to promote content You can see a walk-through of these basic concepts in our Moz Whiteboard Friday on the topic. http://www.add3.com/insights/add3-moz-whiteboard-friday/

1. ContentMarketingw/FlavorFlav
Ben Lloyd – Add3 - @blizzle

2. Today’sTheme
“Winning at SEO is all
about execution”
-Ben Lloyd
“Yeah Boyee!”
-Flava Flav

3. Assumption
You’ve Put In the Work
! Content
strategy
! Based on target
audiences
! All stages of
buying journey
! Incorporating
SEO Best
Practices

4. …YouProbablyStillNeedtoPromoteIt
IfYouBuildIt…

5. ! You Don’t Have a Content Marketing
Process
! You Don’t Spend $$ To Market Content
! Nobody is Excited About the Results
! Your Program Will Fizzle and Die
Getting It Wrong

6. Social/Content Lifespan
3 Hours
18 Minutes
http://blog.bitly.com/post/9887686919/you-just-shared-a-link-how-long-will-people-pay http://moz.com/blog/when-is-my-tweets-prime-of-life
Studies show that the lifespan of a social
link is SHORT! You have to work hard to
make sure your followers see your content

7. Actual Results
Meh
If all you do to promote your content is make it go live and do some one-off social
promotion, this is what your results will usually look like.

8. Better Outcome
This looks a little better!
The chart above shows what happens when you apply different tactics in your content marketing strategy.
We did this over time, which makes it easy to see the impact of individual tactics. Now - we roll these out in
a more condensed fashion. :)
The rest of this presentation walks through content marketing tactics.

9. Planning Your Attack

10. PLAN YOUR ATTACK
• Social Media Presence
• eMail list
• Blog
Owned Media
• Paid social ads align with target audiences
Paid Media - Nothing markets itself*
• Social amplification (RTs, shares, etc)
• Editorial/blogger coverage
Earned Media (ie – the “new” links!)
http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2012/07/19/altimeter-report-paid-owned-earned-converged-media/
Think about your strategy as having three major tactical categories.
I like to think of earned media being the result of doing a good job at building awareness and trust through
owned and paid media.
If you’ve got good content - owned & paid can help your content EARN media

11. Owned Media Pt 1
Give Your Content Marketing a Chance

12. Test Your Social Buttons
Remove barriers to EARNED shares of your content
If you’re lucky enough to have a visitor decide that they want to share your content - make sure it looks right.
Do your descriptions and images look right? If not - fix them.
I don’t want to share
content if it doesn’t look
right

13. <-
This
Becomes This
->
Optimize Your Open Graph
That content looks
GOOD - I don’t
mind sharing that!
A little work with Open Graph will keep your content looking right when it gets shared
If it looks good on a social network, it’ll draw more attention, and draw in more visits and shares

14. Twitter Cards
https://dev.twitter.com/cards
This is your standard ol’ boring looking tweet…

15. Twitter Cards
Summary Card Product Card Player Card
https://dev.twitter.com/cards
Implement Twitter Cards for your content, and Tweets of your content will look good!
There are a lot of different types of Twitter Cards > find the right kinds for your content.

16. Twitter Cards Results
Increased Twitter
Visits
Higher RT Rates
Relative to Others
Overall Increase in
RTs
By simply implementing Twitter Cards, we’ve experienced better results from Twitter.

17. “I like having a selection, I just don't
like making a choice”
-Carrie Renee Mathews
Jam Study:
“The presence of choice might be
appealing in theory… in reality, people
might find more & more choice
debilitating”
-Professor Sheena Iyengar, Columbia University
Choices Are Overwhelming
http://www.nytimes.com/
2010/02/27/your-money/
27shortcuts.html?_r=0
Giving people a lot of choices makes it hard to make a decision / perform an action.
Having too many social buttons on your content has the same impact…

18. Align Sharing Options
Focus on your audience and the outcome you want
• Which channels are most effective for you?
• What are the goals (actions) you are trying to achieve?
• Note – different content / site sections may have different goals! Change it up if
necessary

19. Examples
Good example:
Moz blog post vs
SEO guide…
Different options for
different content?
A LOT of options overall
Follow HP at top vs share
article below pic
Deprecated options
bottom right

20. Owned Media Pt 2

21. Frequency & Timing
This Really Works
Pick the right times of day and days of week to share your own content on social media

22. Post Your Content Multiple Times
Kissmetrics
Share your content multiple times. Don’t assume your followers saw your one Tweet about your content - remember,
the shelf life of a Tweet is only 18 minutes! (see earlier slide)
Each new post should be accompanied by a schedule that spans days/weeks/months of sharing.
I really like this visualization from KissMetrics to help visualize.
Here’s a great post: http://blog.kissmetrics.com/double-your-social-media-traffic/
Text

23. Post Your Content Multiple Times
PULL QUOTE
STATE A FACT
KEY TAKEAWAY
COMMENTARY
PICTURE FROM POST
TIP: @MENTION SOURCES + USE HASHTAGS
TRY DIFFERENT TYPES OF POSTS – GET MORE SHARES/RT’S
Don’t just share your content the exact same way every time
Vary it up - re-use the best-performing posts.
The right side of this slide is an example of different Tweets and Facebook posts we wrote for the same piece of content

24. Rule(s) of Thumb
http://blog.bufferapp.com/self-promotion-in-social-media
Are you engaged on social media? Or are you just broadcasting your own content?
Don’t just broadcast your own content…
At the very least - share great stuff from other people, engage with others, get ‘personal’
How much of your own is right? It depends. :) Check out Buffer’s blog linked-to above.

25. Don’t Neglect Your Email List
@flavorflav
Some of your contacts don’t follow you on social media… or they may never see your Tweet or Facebook post or
LinkedIn update for whatever reason…
Don’t neglect your email list - people that receive your emails are some of your biggest fans - they’ll probably help you
spread the word.

26. Paid Social

27. PAID SOCIAL FOR CONTENT
MARKETING
Diminishing reach of facebook
organic posts, firehose of
tweets, etc
Link building is time consuming,
difficult, low ROI and at times,
risky
Social targeting = interests &
audiences (personas!)
Pssst – ongoing client
engagements
Paid social advertising can be a very cost-effective way to generate awareness for your content and help
overcome some obstacles to organic content promotion in social

28. FACEBOOK ADS FOR CONTENT
MARKETING
• Create real
• Use your customer personas
• Custom audiences
• RSS subscribers, newsletter
subscribers, etc
• Tip - use your custom
audience to create “lookalike”
audiences
• Tip - target people that like
wordpress, blogs or tech
crunch, mashable etc
• AdRoll retargeting
Don’t just “Boost” posts!
campaigns

29. SU PAID DISCOVERY
CONTENT MARKETING
• Excellent targeting
• High volume
• Tip – visually engaging content
works best
• Additional social amplification
as a side-effect
• Does SU work well for you?
Consider adding the button
ACTUAL Visits for Cheap

30. PROMOTED TWEETS FOR
CONTENT MARKETING
• Precise targeting
• Pay per engagement (psst
impressions are free)
• Tip: Target lists of users
who ‘look like’ the users
you want to reach (kind of
like ‘look alike” audiences
• Adroll retargeting
Promoted Tweets

31. OTHER OPTIONS I KNOW
NOTHING ABOUT
That statement isn’t entirely true - I do know something about these options/networks but we didn’t use them
in the making of this case study. :)

32. Earned
Media?

33. Quick Recap
The basic story here is this - sticking with this piece of content and bringing these different tactics to bear
over time has resulted in awareness that helped this piece of content EARN media… including increased
organic traffic over time from all different channels

34. Flav Says Thanks
@blizzle
ben@add3.com
@flavorflav