Content Rising Summit 2015: The Content Standard Case Study
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Skyword Director of Marketing Ruben Sanchez and Content Marketing Manager Ted Karczewski present on the lifespan and growth of their premier media property the Content Standard.
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Content Rising Summit 2015: The Content Standard Case Study
- 1. #ContentRising | 1 Case Study: How You Can Fall In Love With Your AudienceJune 17, 2015
- 2. #ContentRising | 2 Session Speakers Ruben Sanchez @CentralSQ Director of Marketing at Skyword Ted Karczewski @TeddyHK Content Marketing Manager at Skyword
- 3. #ContentRising | 3 “The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure.” Christopher McCandless
- 6. #ContentRising | 6 OBJECTIVE #1 Building and Growing a Loyal Audience
- 9. #ContentRising | 9 “If you are looking for traffic, I can tell you I don't have money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills, skills I have acquired over a very long career.” “Users, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will convert you.”
- 11. #ContentRising | 11 Social Ads Managemen t Earned Social Schema & Snippets Web Analytics Technical Site Audits
- 13. #ContentRising | 13 In 2012, the Content Standard was an Independent Site
- 16. #ContentRising | 16 The Rent is Too Damn High
- 17. #ContentRising | 17 The Content Isn’t Game Changing
- 19. #ContentRising | 19 Bad Results are Often Based on Lack of Focus
- 20. #ContentRising | 20 Want to Focus? Then Bet the House!
- 22. #ContentRising | 22 Build an Audience for Your Content with Existing Resources
- 23. #ContentRising | 23 Build an Audience for your Content with Existing Resources
- 24. #ContentRising | 24 Build an Audience for your Content with Existing Resources
- 25. #ContentRising | 25 Build an Audience for your Content with Existing Resources
- 26. #ContentRising | 26 Build an Audience for Your Content with Existing Resources
- 27. #ContentRising | 27 OBSTACLE #2 Finding Out What Your Audience Really Craves
- 28. #ContentRising | 28 How to Find Out What Your Audience Really Craves
- 29. #ContentRising | 29 Useful x Empathy x Inspired = Great Content - Ann Handley
- 30. #ContentRising | 30 What does it really mean to be useful, empathetic, and inspiring?
- 31. #ContentRising | 31 Useful: Using Site Analytics to Understand Utility Articles about increased investments in content strategy performed higher than average.
- 32. #ContentRising | 32 Useful: Using Site Analytics to Understand Utility Articles about continued use of SEO in content creation performed higher than average.
- 33. #ContentRising | 33 Useful: Using Site Analytics to Understand Utility Articles about the challenges of telling great business stories performed higher than average.
- 34. #ContentRising | 34 Useful: Using Site Analytics to Understand Utility Articles about other market leaders who had broken through the noise in their careers performed higher than average.
- 35. #ContentRising | 35 Useful: Using Site Analytics to Understand Utility Key takeaway: Our audience is full of people who need: • Advice on how to sell their big content ideas internally • Tips for being a better writer, designer, videographer • Tactics for getting their work found online • Wisdom from those marketers who have been in their shoes
- 36. #ContentRising | 36 Empathetic: Social Listening to Understand Emotion
- 37. #ContentRising | 37 Empathetic: Social Listening to Understand Emotion What social listening tools helped us define: • Section categories • Language variations used by our audience • Up-and-coming topics worth getting an edge on
- 38. #ContentRising | 38 Empathetic: Social Listening to Understand Emotion
- 39. #ContentRising | 39 Inspired: Learning to Tell Stories that Matter
- 40. #ContentRising | 40 Inspired: Learning to Tell Stories that Matter
- 41. #ContentRising | 41 Inspired: Learning to Tell Stories that Matter
- 42. #ContentRising | 42 OBJECTIVE #3 Designing for Reader Experience
- 43. #ContentRising | 43 How Do you Cater to a Large Group of Readers?
- 47. #ContentRising | 47 “You want to talk to individuals who really care about whatever niche topic you’re aiming for. See what drives them, see what their curiosity is about, see what makes them unhappy about what they see.” How Did you Know What Was Important for Readers?
- 49. #ContentRising | 49 What Does it Mean to Build Trust? “One way is through transparency. You tell people what your intent is. This is who I am, I’m a newspaper. I’m a corporation. This is who I am. This is my intent.”
- 50. #ContentRising | 50 We Made it Clear. This is Who We Are
- 51. #ContentRising | 51 When Things Go Wrong, Don’t Barricade Yourself
- 52. #ContentRising | 52 How did you know what was important for readers? “In the end some smart reader would say to me, ‘Look, you’re the editor. You should know what we want. We don’t really know what’s possible. You need to dream some dreams yourself and give it to us.’”
- 54. #ContentRising | 54 OBJECTIVE #4 Powering the Hub with Great Content
- 55. #ContentRising | 55 Powering the Hub with Great Content
- 56. #ContentRising | 56 Powering the Hub with Great Content Questions to ask yourself: • What does your media site do differently? • Why would a reader spend time on your site? • Why would a reader come back again? • Who is your ideal reader, and how do you reach them? • How frequently will you publish?
- 57. #ContentRising | 57 “Working with the Content Standard gives me the opportunity to write about my craft and my passion: storytelling.” - Taylor Mallory Holland The Content Standard Contributor
- 58. #ContentRising | 58 Powering the Hub with Great Content Writer Management Tips • You don’t need a lot of creatives, you need good creatives • Face time (or air time) is important for writer connections • Learn their passion points • Help support with personal brand growth
- 59. #ContentRising | 59 OBSTACLE #5 Proving Your Worth
- 60. #ContentRising | 60 Proving Your Worth: the Content Standard by the Numbers Case Study Results: • 75.86% increase in traffic in first 12 months • 49% of total Skyword.com traffic comes from the Content Standard in 2015 • On track to double visitors year-over-year • 406% increase in subscriptions in first 12 months
- 61. #ContentRising | 61 “Numbers aren’t everything”
- 62. #ContentRising | 62 Proving Your Worth
- 63. #ContentRising | 63 Proving Your Worth
- 64. #ContentRising | 64 Proving Your Worth
- 65. #ContentRising | 65 Proving Your Worth
- 66. #ContentRising | 66 Proving Your Worth Top Lead Generators for Skyword 1. Request a Demo form on Skyword.com 2. Contact Us form on Skyword.com 3. The Content Standard Subscription form
- 67. #ContentRising | 67 Proving Your Worth • Providing buyer insights • Learning and adapting • Building trust
- 69. #ContentRising | 69 Session Speakers Ruben Sanchez @CentralSQ Director of Marketing at Skyword Ted Karczewski @TeddyHK Content Marketing Manager at Skyword
- 70. #ContentRising | 70 Thank you Please share your feedback with us: http://j.mp/crsummit7
Editor's Notes
- In every great story, the main character—the person we’ll follow throughout the plot line—is on an adventure in some capacity. From point A to point B. In pursuit of love. In vengeance and in vindication. In happiness and spirituality. But isn’t it funny that what we all take away from these stories is often not what occurs at the very end of the adventure, but the lessons learned along the way. The moral challenges the character faces. The adversity overcome, and the loss felt deep down. These points of conflict and resolution pull us in as viewers, and when we’re the main characters in our own life stories, they’re what motivate us forward.
- It’s easy to sit at the end of a project and reflect on all of the mistakes made – the what ifs, should haves, and if onlys. It’s even easier to listen to others talk about their mistakes and react in fear—play it safe. As content marketers, you sit at the tipping point of digital marketing. Everything legacy businesses have done up until this point has only grazed the surface of what CAN be done to reach an audience, build trust, and transform online communication as we know it. Today, we’re going to walk you through Skyword’s own adventure in becoming both a technology company and a digital media publisher, and the results we saw once we took a leap of faith. We will walk you through 5 obstacles we faced in building our premier media property the Content Standard. The goal here is to talk about the lessons we learned on our journey, so that when you get back to the office next week, you’re inspired and equipped to take that same leap of faith into brand publishing.
- We’re just two B2B marketers. But we have to be so much more than that now. Stick with us, and we’ll show you how to you can be more than just a b2b marketer.
- It’s what I was hired to do. I joined Skyword in November 2012. And for a while the marketing team was made up of just 2 people. Me and my boss, the VP of marketing.
- I sat down in the interview and I remember talking about my expertise in SEO and Social Media gained at my job at the time, where I worked with Adam Audette, an SEO visionary who shared the stage at big shows like SMX, SHOP.ORG, I remember talking about my successes….
- Like many of you as marketers I was hired because I had a knack for planting seeds and making them grow, This is an orchid growing out of a tree, At home I by the special lights and the special spray and the orchids die, Some gardeners stick them on the side of a tree and they grow like crazy go figure. Anyway, I talk about my research in Google+ and Facebook, and how through technical know how we were able to grow social following for one retailer by 100%
- Marketers are smart, we’re scrappy, we make roses grow from concrete….. Screw Liam Neason, We’re the heroes from that movie, “TAKEN”
- Today as digital marketers we all have some knowledge across a broad set of marketing specialties.
- Mine were in social media strategy and SEO. I had never built a loyal audience from scratch. I had only used techniques to engage and convert web users. To grow traffic, to grow rankings, to grow fans, not to retain a monthly readership.
- So I got the Job. Thinking that the focus was going to be to grow Skyword
- So I came on board to Skyword, but from the beginning marketing budgets and focus were split. We had this news site that was expensive and time consuming.
- It felt very limited reaching 2 separate and distinct audiences with what felt like half the budget and half the focus.
- Even within the small organization there were two different team meetings set up to work on the content hub with our copy editors versus the website. Content and marketing were extremely siloed. And the users suffered. Even when they enjoyed some of our content there was no clear path or linkage between the branded content on content standard and skyword the company.
- Content marketing is heating up. It’s a competitive space with CPCs over $20 and really tough and well established media companies like CMI and business competitors. In this rapidly growing content marketin space --- the rent is just too damn high.
- Unfortunately, this was the same old story of the cobbler’s kids not having any shoes. We simply could not afford to create great content and to develop an audience at the same time. Here’s a picture of little baby Ted working on some content.
- Instead of investing time in a clear and unique perspective in our content, We were chasing traffic sources as they emerged, and covering trends that may not have mattered to the desired target audience of marketers like you and like ourselves who understood the need to develop and test out our content skills.
- Feb 2014, we decided to own the Content Standard and everything that had ever been published by moving it to Skyword.com This was a massive technical project. And If I were still just solely focused on being a social and SEO marketer, then I’d tell you about the challenge of redirecting all that content, and eliminating the tagging system we had in place previously, and consolidating our twitter audiences, and maintaining 2 instances of wordpress…..
- But instead, I’ll talk about the opportunity that we got to expand our marketing expertise as a team. Because the net effect of clearly signaling to the market that you own a content hub (whether it’s on domain or off domain) is that you get to use all your existing resources more effectively.
- Use TCS content to nurture subscribers, and to drive response from our larger marketing database.
- Build relationships with freelance writers, editors, and journalists. Earn opportunities to cover, and make the news at industry events, and interview amazing speakers.
- Power network display and retargeting campaings. New site users will usually see an add that offers them the chance to read some of our top performing content with no download required.
- And an opportunity to learn what types of educational and suport materials that our platform users want and need by reading and responding to blog comments. That’s just good SaaS marketing,
- But even with consolidating resources and a central hub for publishing, we knew nothing about the people we were trying to reach. Without that understanding, our strategy wasn’t any smarter or more effective. We had to find out what our audience really craved to be successful.
- For a long time, marketers acted on intuition, creating content and marketing strategies around topics they felt were of interest to a specific audience. There wasn’t much data to guide these assumptions—sometimes they paid off, other times they flopped Data has opened up new doors for brands, allowing them to create valuable content that doesn’t interrupt consumer behavior online. Relaunching the Content Standard gave us the opportunity to go back to square one and really understand who we were trying to reach through storytelling.
- Borrowing from Ann Handley’s expertise, great content is useful, empathetic, and inspiring. But before you can be all of those things, you need to understand your audience’s needs, what tugs at their hear strings, and what their goals are so you can help inspire them to reach those milestones. We had a great formula developed by Ann, we had the tools on hand to help better understand on readers, but we hadn’t put in the time. We never really got to know these people.
- https://stocksnap.io/photo/739BBHC8KM By running a site analysis, looking at the top performing articles across current categories, seeing what had the highest number of backlinks and social shares, what pages people spent the most time out, we came away with an idea of what our audience thought was useful.
- Readers needed advice on how to sell content marketing internally. They needed tips on how to improve their craft, and then how to make sure it was found online. And, they wanted to hear from marketers who had been in their shoes, who had broken through the noise. To our readers, useful content is what empowers them to build a presence both in and out of their organizations.
- Before we could go about creating content that our audience could relate to, we needed to put ourselves their their shoes---a lot of shoes, to be exact. We turned to social listening tools to help us get a better idea of what the industry at large was discussing in the content marketing industry. We wanted to know what, people who were interested in content creation thought about video; what people running influencer marketing campaigns thought about SEO. How did these people interact and consume various topics, at once, on the web, and how could we put our own unique touch on these topics.
- Social listening tools like Sysmos take a snapshot of the Web at the very instant you click “analyze.” We used this tool to dive deeper into the concept of content marketing. We need that phrases like content strategy and SEO were important, but what about the up-and-coming topics that mattered to readers? What about the specialists in highly regulated industries who need guidance, too? What about the language variations that often get lost in translation on the Web? By using the ideas we gathered from our site analytics as starting points, we were able to dive into a deep web of social data, conversations, Tweets, blogs and news, that helped us develop a wire frame for the new Content Standard. Each category was based on hundreds of social clues given to us by our readers, whether they knew it or not. Social listening allowed us to spend some time in our audiences shoes, so we could go out and create content that they could empathize with.
- By using the ideas we gathered from our site analytics as starting points, we were able to dive into a deep web of social data, conversations, Tweets, blogs and news, that helped us develop a wire frame for the new Content Standard. Each category was based on hundreds of social clues given to us by our readers, whether they knew it or not. Social listening allowed us to spend some time in our audiences shoes, so we could go out and create content that they could empathize with.
- Site analytics and social listening data gave us a good idea of what our audience cares about when it comes to work—and we got pretty good are creating useful media that was relevant to their experiences and needs. However, we reached a point where useful and relevant content wasn’t enough to keep growing influence with our regulars…or to reach a much broader spectrum of readers. We needed to figure out how to inspire people through stories, and to do that, we had to remove our marketing hats and throw out the data and just talk about our audience, as people.
- At this point, using site and social, customer profiling and audience persona development, we had a lot of ideas of who we were reaching, their roles and industries, and skill sets. But we still weren’t thinking of them as people. In a workshop, the entire team began to list out all of the characteristics associated with our personas. What they feared, what they loved, any behavioral quirks and insecurities, and then at a much higher level, what motivated them. This led us to do a second navigation site redesign a few months ago to focus on the concepts of business and personal transformation, creativity, leadership, and career growth.
- Ultimately, this helped us create a two-pronged editorial strategy that focuses half of the time on the utility needed in content marketing (being both useful and relevant) and the inspiration needed to succeed (by telling entertaining stories).
- Remember Ted’s formula for great content? Useful x Empathy x Inspired He was talking about real useful content, but he just as easily could have been talking about Overall Reader Experience. Which is made up as much by the web product, the container that holds the content as it is by the video or the slideshow or the text. Which all should load quickly by the way.
- I was grappling with this question from a creative, from a conent strategy, and from a design perspective for a long time. How can I know what these people need? And build a real relationship with them? I learned this great lesson in marketing from two great women who have nothing to do with marketing. I learned to design for individual people. Because groups are name less and faceless. A group of people can never be accountable to you, to use your content well. And when they ignore you, then you will start to feel less and less accountable to them and their needs and interests. Stop calling them groups and start thinking of them like people. Like really important people whose happiness matters to you personally.
- My wife in West African garb accepting a cocoa pod in the field. Working on a project funded by World Cocoa Foundation and Hershey. This projects she works on have limited funding. In her world of international development there’s little room for error on limited budgets and little room to pivot strategies once a project has started. So when she’s planning a new project she chooses measurable goals, and focuses on building relationships with local government associations and interest groups. That is to say she meets the people that are invested in the mission of the project. But a big part of the work is checking in with people to see how the work benefits them
- Visiting with the people you serve. Talking to them and determining how your work and your content benefits them is crucial. So when building an audience, survey them often. Talk to them, and learn from them. Their feedback is a gift. Here’s a gift my wife got on a recent trip. Yes that is a goat. And he was delicious.
- Geneva Overholser is an independent journalist in New York City. She was professor and director of the USC Annenberg School of Journalism until July 2013. She was the ombudsman for The Washington Post from 1995 to 1998 and served as a columnist for the paper. From 1989 to 1997, she was a board member of the Pulitzer Prizes at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and served as the chair in her final year.[1] She was editor of the The Des Moines Register newspaper from 1988 to 1995, where she led the paper to win a Pulitzer Prize in Public Service in 1991.
- Commenting and responding is key to trust building and to audience development.
- Providers of content need to think about what they might do that's different. What they might do that would challenge people because people like to be challenged. That’s something that I took to heart. This year, TCS major goal is to experiment with storytelling in many different mediums. We’ve been doing so much more with video, and we’re just starting to vet a creative pool that can do cool work in HTML5 content templates that support video, and data visualizations. But the core for now remains editorial content and I’ll turn it over to Ted.
- Strategy is only one piece of the content marketing equation. Another major aspect is creative execution. Without the right storytellers, the Content Standard wouldn’t provide any value to our audience. Now we had this huge site to manage and fill with great content. One slip-up in publishing and we could easily lose the trust of our audience. We were faced with the challenge of identifying and recruiting the right freelance and in-house talent to drive the Content Standard forward.
- We were a small marketing team back then. We didn’t have the money to recruit dozens of freelance writers and pay them to create 20+ articles for us each month. From the start, we new we had to select a couple rising writers who could help us learn how to think like editors, and then take what we learn and empower internal team members to contribute to the Content Standard. But before we reached out to anybody, we asked ourselves these important questions. We found that by being honest with ourselves in the preliminary stages of writer outreach we were able to immediately answer our freelancers’ questions and give them the sense that we knew what we were doing (even if we didn’t always know).
- We based our external contributor selections on a few fundamental metrics (social influence and experience) and one extremely subjective measurement (our gut feeling). You can do a lot of upfront research on who you work with in a freelancing capacity, but one of the most important pieces of advice I can give, is to put work aside at the beginning and get to understand who you’ll be working with. Your writers are your audience members, too – are you equipping them with the tools and inspiration to write stories that will amaze your readers and make your business money?
- What I see a lot of content marketers do wrong in managing a team of freelance writers is keeping them out of the strategic loop. Because many of these freelance writers never actually come into the office or meet their clients face to face, it’s easy to forget to catch them up to speed on matters happening inside the walls of your business. For me, I look at my freelancing team as my co-workers. Oftentimes, they’re bringing new, amazing ideas to me. They’re picking at the web and diving down rabbit holes to uncover interesting conversations and chatter. They’re the expert writers who string sentences together to produce beautiful prose—why wouldn’t I want them as invested in my media site as I am? Here’s what I’ve learned thus far about managing a freelancing team successfully.
- Here is what we’ve seen as a result of putting all of the pieces together. Audience grew 75.86% in 12 months to represent 35% of total site traffic to Skyword.com (In 2015, TCS represents 49%) From Feb. 2014 to Feb. 2015 we reached 295,000 people So far this year we’ve reached 207,651. We’re on track to double last year’s traffic. We’ve seen 70% of 2014’s traffic through two quarters of 2015. Subscriptions increased 406% in 12 months In 2014 we generated 960 subscriptions. In the first half of 2015, we have generated 1,704
- You will run into situations where you need to justify the spend allocated to your content strategy. Learning how to measure awareness, engagement, and conversions will always be important. But, as Robert McKee told us earlier today, it’s how you package up these nuggets of information to tell a story about the trajectory of your program that will not only keep it afloat—but grow it massively. One of the biggest assets you can use to measure and support your program is the backing of your peers, especially your sales team if you’re B2B. Content marketing requires you to both market out and inside of your organization. Figuring out how to get your sales team set up to leverage your content as a powerful sales tool will make it indispensible. Here’s how we used Marketo + Salesforce to turn the Content Standard content into one of our biggest pick-up lines.
- The Skyword marketing team is closely aligned with our sales team. To provide them as much audience information as possible, we use our marketing automation platform Marketo and CRM Salesforce, to capture sitewide information on our readers. Every Monday an automatic report is delivered to marketing of the quarter’s web activity by known leads. You can see here here how many content pages a given lead has visited this quarter.
- Report showing drill-down of individual lead and everything he/she has viewed Using Marketo, I can click into a lead’s profile and see exactly what he’s visited. It looks like this one has visited our Innovator Series and read a piece with AnneMarie Dooling of Yahoo Travel. This interview focuses on the importance of audience development. Jump a few lines down and you can see hew has read two pieces about social media marketing…and then a few more pieces about marketing technology. All of this information can shape how we approach him as a prospect or client. Perhaps he is looking for better ways to build a loyal audience through social. We know this without him having to tell us, and we can proactively approach him with our ideas. It’s like doing your homework before it’s assigned.
- Salesforce view of that lead from the sales persons perspective, summarizing all conversations All of this information is also recording as “interesting moments” in Salesforce—affecting lead scores. Our sales team sees this information whenever they click into his profile on Salesforce, and they can immediately use it as context to future conversations. Based on this person’s web acitivity, Salesforce suggests he might be a top priority to follow.
- Salesforce view of the Marketing dashboard that showing TCS/marketing programs contributing to pipeline Another report that’s generated automatically for marketing is a dashboard report from Salesforce. It shows us where all of our leads are coming from, what months we over or under-performed, and the dollar amount associated with certain lead sources. Here you can see that there’s currently over a million dollars worth of opportunities in the pipeline generated by the Content Standard.
- At the end of the day, your KPIs and metrics aren’t enough to prove the effectiveness of your publishing program. To get the most out of your program, you need to measure adoption and content usage across your organizations. For B2Bs, sales enablement is your ultimate goal. We learned that by syncing up with our sales team, we were able to provide them with deeper buyer insights that helped them develop smarter sales strategies. But we also learned from them—as they approached new prospects and entered new markets, we saw how people reacted to certain topics and media formats. It’s just as important for us to listen and learn from sales as it is for them to use what we create. No more sales vs. marketing—in the content era you’re one team. And ultimately, your goal should be to build trust with your teams internally just as much as you build trust with your audience. They need to believe in what you’re doing, be on board to contribute their ideas during brainstorming sessions, and you need to help them see the value of content in the sales process. If these goals aren’t part of your strategy, then you won’t succeed. https://www.oracle.com/marketingcloud/resources/sales-enablement.html
- Every good story includes conflict and resolution. It’s what makes the adventure or journey so worthwhile. As you start out on your own content marketing journeys—or as you reach the inevitable fork in the road on your current strategy—I encourage you to take a moment to reflect on what you’ve learned along the way. What parts of this process have molded you into who you are today, and how could you have done more to put yourself in your audience’s shoes. To transform your business and break through the noise. To tell stories that really matter. Thank you.