Introduction
Continuing on with our Ignite Search MozCon blog series, where we discuss some of the most influential and informative presentations at the 2019 MozCon Digital Marketing conference in Seattle, Washington. In this week’s blog post we will be discussing Casie Gillette’s presentation ‘Making Memories Creating Content People Remember’
Who Is Casie Gillette
Before jumping into the presentation, we would first like to introduce Casie Gillette. Casie is the Senior Director of Digital Marketing at KoMarketing, a B2B digital marketing agency that focuses in search, social media and content located in Boston, United State. In this agency Casie leads digital marketing strategy, helping to guide company initiatives, service offerings, and the organisation’s online presence. With over 10 years of industry experience, Casie regularly speaks about search, social, and branding at top marketing conferences, including SMX, SearchLove, Pubcon and of cause MozCon.
Now For The Presentation Details
Casie begun the presentation with stressing the importance of being held accountable for the content we produce for our clients, and not just crating content for the sake of creating content.
Today, we are still creating way too much content, averaging around 4 million blog posts a day. However, we are not measuring them. 47% of B2B markets don’t measure Return of Investment (ROI) from content marketing. And furthermore, 42% of B2B don’t converse with their audience as part of their market research.
But progress takes time.
Casie mentioned it was not all bad as 70% of content being produced prioritise quality of quantity. And furthermore, 77% of B2B marketers create content based on stages of the buyers journey!
The content we produce should be designed to resonate and connects with our audiences. Like a child and a story book. 52% of marketers use storytelling in content and this approach isn’t only done by the big branded companies like Nike or Apple. Smaller companies do it too.
The Story Of Wegmans
Casie proceeded to showcase Wegmans as an excellent example of a company that has optimised their content marketing strategy to truly connect with their audience.
Wegmans is an American supermarket chain in upstate New York. They aren’t just a brand; they have built a brand that people can connect with through their content. Content such as recipes and health tips – content that is actually helpful.
They produce materials such as recipes, magazines and cook books to help make their customers’ life easier, with a strong focus on the farmers and their stories behind where they source their products. That is the key.
The Key To Content Marketing
The key to content marketing is caring. So what do people care about? Casie explained that people care about themselves first and foremost. Brands that provide quality content will have the objectives to resolve people problems. Content that reflect their interests will developed a stronger connection between the brand and the market.
But how do we do that?
4 Steps to Creating Meaningful Content
1. Identify Needs
To begin our content creating process we need to understand who our audience are and what they want. This include considering the following questions:
- Who they are?
- What they care about?
- What problems they have?
Casie explained that in this day in age we have access to a number of tools that can help us answer the questions listed above.
Firstly, who our audience can be answered with a number of common analytic tools today. Such as Google Analytics’ demographic data set. For more information on how to use Google Analytics, read our previous blog post – 3 Easy Google Analytics Reports to Help You Improve Your Conversions.
The audience report will can provide us as content markets the specifics to our people who are actually visiting our websites. Other tools Casie mentioned include LinkedIn’s demographics tools whereby we can access information about our audiences’ location, job functions, seniority, titles and many more. Furthermore, SEMRush’s display advertising tool can provide insight on where our displays are running and who they are targeting. If you are not running any display ads, you can easily identify audit your competitors display ads and observe who they are targeting.
Secondly, what do they care about can be answered with a number of useful tools. Casie expressed her admiration for Buzzsumo – a powerful online tool that allows any user to find out what content is popular by topic or any website. This tool can help identify who is sharing what content and further break it down by interested, topics and domains. Another honourable mention includes Kparser – a professional keyword research and long tail suggestion tool. This tool can find relatable terms around a given keyword. Furthermore it can provide us with search results for the following platforms – YouTube, Google News, Google Images, Amazon, DuckDuckGo and many more.
Lastly, while having all this audience data we can commence investigating into their problems. This brings forward a number of tools such as SEMRush, Buzzsumo and Storybase.
Although Casie did not go into detail the methodology to retrieving this data, she suggested we look into it at our own time.
2. Think Simple
Moving forward, Casie suggested we consider generating content that resonates with our audience and in doing so she recommended that we keep it simple. As many content marketers have been programed to developed long and complex pieces of content (2000 words), the reality is the content we create will need to serve one purpose – speak directly to to what our audience care about.
Casie shared Summer Salt’s content marketing approach. Summer Salt is a swimwear company in the United State with a strong marketing approach to keep it simple and provide their market with useful information.
Casie’s spoke on behalf of many women that locating the correct swimwear for their body can be a tedious task of sifting through long technical content and extensive charts. Summer Salt has created a tool that asks users simple and easy to answer questions. And through this they were able to provide a recommended swimwear size.
This approach can be applied to a number of businesses. Casie provided the audience with a few examples including:
- Buffer Social Media Image Sizing
- Seer’s Screaming Frog Guide
- Avalaunch’s Social Me-ow-dia Explained
All of which have demonstrated to have provided useful content to their audience. Casie recommended K.I.S.S (Keep It Simple Stupid) and get to the point and left us with this statement:
“Bigger does not always mean better”
To help you to get to the point, Casie recommended the online tool E-Summarizer. This free online tool allows users to copy and paste extensive text and generate a summary of the text provided:
3. Get Creative
Casie explained that this step may pose to be quite difficult for some individuals. However this can be overcome easily.
Given the example from Catopexi’s product GIF display at on Facebook, Casie walked the audience through her fascination for the colours being used for an array of their windbreakers. She stated that this display ad was both clever and simple.
Studies show that people remember 80% of what they see and do, over reading (20%) and what they hear (10%). So whilst having to consider visualisation in your content marketing activities, Casie suggested choosing colours wisely:
Colours make a difference to how humans respond. So think about what you want to convey. Furthermore, Casie suggested visual materials with movements as video posts receive 38% more engagement than image posts.
In addition to colours and movement, we will have to consider location. Casie explained that there is a reason why the first thing we often ask someone when we meet them, right after we learn their name, is ‘where’s home for you?’
Simply put, there is an undeniable connection with humans and location. Therefore, Casie suggested we consider where we place these visual materials.
Here are a few tools that can help you jump start your creative process:
- pixlr.com
- remove.bg
- snappa.com
- recordit.co
- giphy.com
- lumen5.com
Above everything else, Casie mentioned the most useful tool you can use is your phone! The technology that exists in your pocket is capable of developing the visual material you need for your content marketing activities. Take advantage of it!
4. Tell a Story
Casie begun this presentation with the analogy of children’s’ connections to stories. At this stage, you will have all the materials you need to generate a story that is specifically constructed for your audience.
She left the audience with this final quote prior concluding her presentation:
“Messages delivered as stories can be up to 22% more memorable than just facts”
What We Can Take Away From This Presentation
As digital marketing specialist and professionals alike, we understand the movement towards providing valuable content. How valuable these content are is subjective to numerous factors. Casie Gillette has eloquently discussed the importance of generating content in an objective approach with a strong subjective demeanour.
