How to Make Your Content Marketing 25% More Efficient
Ian Lurie knows how to make content marketing work. I interviewed him after his presentation at the ACP-LS Annual Meeting last October. He shared a lot of ideas and resources to help all of us make our content marketing more efficient, from ideation to analytics.
Ian is not a fan of brainstorming. If you know where to look, customers will tell you what they want to know so you can determine what content you should make.
One place he gets a lot of ideas is SlideShare. You can see what topics are popular and create content around those. You can also see which of your own slides are popular based on what folks are clipping and go deeper on those.
He also has a system to create a mix of content to reach people at different stages of the buyer's journey. If you know skiing, you'll understand Green Circle, Blue Square and Black Diamond as symbols for slopes of increasing difficulty. He compares that to content you might make every week, every month or once a quarter. This gives your audience an easy way in to your funnel and more in-depth content as their interest grows.
At the same time, he suggests a gradient of lightly, moderately and heavily branded content. Lightly branded is content that isn't so much about your product. Moderate translates to using your product in an example of how to do something. Heavily branded is "Use our product."
By Ian's estimate you can get 20-25% more out of your effort by just repurposing. Or save 25% of the cost. Let'start doing this and I'll meet you at the beach every Friday!
Taking efficiency to the highest level, Ian recommends using markdown language for all your written content. Simply put, markdown saves a huge amount of effort moving content from one format to another (Text to Word, HTML, PDF etc.) because it's recognized by all kinds of software. Level 1 and 2 headings, italics etc. are automatically formatted in the final document. He explains it in a Whiteboard Friday video on Moz.com.
Finally, you must listen to how Ian thinks about analytics to find out how customers get to the point of conversion. This is important to think about to make your funnel as effective as it can be.
About My Guest …
Ian Lurie is the Founder and CEO of Portent Inc., a team of marketers, SEO pros and geeks that help clients conquer internet marketing. He is also an Executive Vice President at Clearlink. Ian likes to speak at conferences, write incessantly and occasionally geek out by building new tools.
