1.
Daryl Colwell
@DHCOLWELL
Feb. 12, 2013 | Room 29D
MediaWhiz

2.
About Me
2012
• Oversee business development at
MediaWhiz
• 12 years’ experience in online
marketing
About My Company — MediaWhiz
• Integrated digital media &
performance marketing agency
• Part of Matomy Media Group
• Services: Affiliate, Display, Search,
Social, Data & Email
• Top-25 Digital Agency, Ad Age,
2012

3.
Agenda
• Content Marketing Basics
• Why Content Marketing Is Important to Your Brand
• What Makes Great — and Bad — Content
• Content Marketing Like a Pro
– Improving SEO with Content Marketing
– Lead Generation
• Top-10 Content Marketing Best Practices
• Q&A

4.
What Is Content Marketing?
Content Marketing:
•Establishes authority and provides
useful information
•Should be useful even to someone
not interested in buying your product
or service
•Not disguised as independent
editorial
•Does not have to run in an editorial
environment, like a third-party
magazine
•Provides value to the consumer.
•Is honest and without hyperbole

5.
Content Marketing — The Basics
Basic Rules
1.Lead Generation: Your content should generate leads for your business.
– Don’t create content just to have content.
– Caveat: Don’t create content that is purely sales-driven.
1.Context: Your content needs to be placed in the right venues for the right
audiences.
2.Have a Strategy: One-off efforts won’t cut it. Use an editorial calendar to
plan content each quarter.
3.Timing: Plan publication of content around customer buying cycle.
4.Factor in Cost: Content marketing is expensive. It’s a long-term
investment; not a short-term solution.
5.Make it Creative: Your content needs to bring something new to the
consumer. Otherwise, it’s a waste of time and money.

6.
Why Content Marketing Is Important
It’s simple:
It’s the future of marketing.
Seriously.

7.
Why Content Marketing Is Important
It’s also how you should
be generating new
business.

8.
Why Content Marketing Is Important
You can write for “idea-
spreaders” or buyers.
Write for your buyers.

9.
Great Content Marketing
Why It’s Great:
•Fits the brand
•Builds strong brand
affinity
•Generates new
customers via
subscriptions

10.
Great Content Marketing
Why It’s Great:
•Informs the
consumer
•Entertains and
distinguishes brand
•Builds brand affinity
•Generate leads
Will It Blend?

11.
Avoid These Mistakes
Being Overly Promotional Taking It to the Extreme
Takeaways
•Don't make tone
obviously
promotional
•Visualize the info
•Ensure imagery
and graphics fit the
content
Takeaways
•Back an argument
with convincing
numbers
•Use proportionate
sentiment
•Inform the
consumer; don’t
insult or offend
them

12.
Avoid These Mistakes
Bland Content Misguided Content
Takeaways
•Make your
message
interesting and
distinctive
•Don't just directly
turn figures into
stats
•Use imagination
and wit
Takeaways
•Content needs to fit your brand
and that of third-party publisher
•Tone and context are important

13.
Content Marketing & SEO
Benefits to SEO
•Attracts authority signals (links, social shares) —
improves SEO performance
•Positions brand as authority on relevant topics
•Increases conversion rates
– Educates users on topics that are difficult to
understand

14.
Content Marketing & SEO
How Content Marketing Can Hurt SEO
•Don’t create content for “SEO”
– Write for humans
– Content with purpose of satisfying search engines has
short-lived benefits
•Spam
– Don’t syndicate content to article distribution networks or
off-topic properties
•Inconsistency/falsity
– Fact check and ensure consistency with brand messaging
– Consumers’ trust compromised by off-message or false
content

15.
Improving SEO with Content Marketing
Step 1: Define the target audience
•Perform research on consumers’ buying patterns
•Understand what is compelling and how your product /
service benefits them

16.
Improving SEO with Content Marketing
Step 2: Write about
topics your audience
cares about
•Use keyword suggestion
tools (i.e., Google Adwords
Keyword Tool) to understand
consumers’ searches

17.
Improving SEO with Content Marketing
• Review Q&A sites (i.e., Yahoo Answers, Answers.com) to
see what people are asking about
• Stay on topic — don’t write about anything irrelevant to the
brand

18.
Improving SEO with Content Marketing
Step 3: Offer incentives for readers to
share content
•Focus on the “why”, not the “what”
– How will your content help your customers?
•Facilitate sharing
– Include sharing buttons (Facebook Like, Twitter Tweet,
Google +1, etc) in visible locations

19.
Improving SEO with Content Marketing
Step 4: Leverage influential and
authoritative authors
•Identify authors relevant to a topic
– Search relevant topics in Google+, Twitter, Facebook
(via Graph Search) and search engines
•Invite influential authors to guest post

20.
Improving SEO with Content Marketing
Step 5: Develop your backend SEO setup
•Ensure proper tagging and mark-up of content
– Use rel=author tags in the byline to credit the author of
the content and leverage their authority

21.
Content Marketing & Lead Generation
Your content should generate leads
•Content should help generate leads or incremental
business
•Proper tracking is essential
MediaWhiz as an example
•Create content for brand-building and lead-gen
purposes with marketers and advertisers
•Seed content across internal and external
publications

22.
Content Marketing & Lead Generation
“If you’re not putting some
kind of hook to future
business into your efforts,
you’re not content
marketing.”
– Chris Brogan, Jan. 22, 2013
Source: http://www.chrisbrogan.com/contentmarketing201/

23.
How to Generate Leads with Content
Rule #1: Make your buyer the hero
Produce content that informs
your customers and improves
their business

24.
How to Generate Leads with Content
Rule #2: Never waste content without
offering an “Ask” of some kind
“Ask” is more than a “call to action” or intent.
It’s a request for a specific action.
• Mix of soft and hard sell
• Ask should be reasonable and related to
the content
• Examples of an “Ask”:
• Newsletter / blog subscriptions
• Free appraisals / audits
• White paper download

25.
How to Generate Leads with Content
Rule #3: Make it simple for people to
give you their info
Place call-to-action copy strategically
throughout content

26.
How to Generate Leads with Content
Rule #4: Make it simple for sales team to
interact with leads
Customize form
field page to
generate contact
info you need for
follow-up call /
email

27.
Lead Gen Best Practices
Prep your sales team
• Prep your sales team for influx of new leads
– Some will be qualified leads; others not
– Schedule brief training session with sales team to review
new content
– Get feedback from sales team about questions they
hear from customers
• Use feedback to develop new content and generate
additional leads

28.
Lead Gen Best Practices
Early outreach = lead-gen success
• Odds of reaching lead decrease by >10 times in first hour
• Odds of qualifying lead in 5 minutes vs. 30 minutes drop
21 times
– from 5 to 10 minutes the dial to qualify odds decrease 4
times
• Best time to call a lead: 4-6 p.m. Wednesday & Thursday

29.
The Content Marketing Top-10
1. Know your audience: Write for a specific reader or
customer. Know what they want and how/where they
consume information.
2. Include images: Images will “pop” when content is
shared.
3. Commit: Not a one-night stand. Establish an editorial
calendar and publish often. Give customers a reason to
keep reading.
4. Engage the right buyers with the right content: Write
content for all levels of the sales funnel.
5. Repurpose content: Turn blog posts into white papers;
white papers into infographics, etc.

30.
The Content Marketing Top-10
6. Create series: If you have 10 steps, share 5 now and 5 in
next post.
7. Measure ROI and leads: Track KPIs (visits, conversions,
links, social shares) generated to understand what content
performs best
8. Track trends: Relate your content to emerging industry
trends. Write content that answers customers’ questions
about those trends.
9. Be timely: Publish content when your customers are most
active.
10.Reference industry influencers: Enable others to
generate awareness and leads on your behalf

31.
QUESTIONS?

32.
THANK YOU!
Daryl Colwell
Vice President, Business Development
MediaWhiz
P: 646-442-5513
E: dcolwell@mediawhiz.com | Tw: @dhcolwell