One of our favorite things to do is to help experts leverage their knowledge to create “content empires” that work overtime for them and their businesses. By crafting an effective strategy, and providing valuable organic content to your prospective audiences, you can generate a consistent pipeline of leads for your business. Once you have an organic content environment that is optimized for lead generation, you can choose to promote your content to further boost your potential for leads.
Building a Content Empire
The first step toward building your content empire, is to identify your niche, your target audience, and your offers. This involves careful planning and research. Knowing your ideal client inside and out is a necessity. Generally, determining your niche is the easier part. Understanding your target audience is more complex. You need to get beyond “who” might want to buy your product or service, and get into why someone would need your product or service.
Just because your clients tend to fall into certain demographics more than others, doesn’t mean that’s all you need to pay attention to. Make sure that you understand the needs of your clients, and see how you can relate those needs to a wider audience.
Content Planning
Before we start pumping out blogs, videos, social content etc. we need to start with a plan. Planning a cohesive content strategy is a necessity when it comes to SEO, but it’s also necessary for delivering a positive experience to your consumers. Content planning starts with a bit of keyword research, a bit of alignment between those keywords and your audience’s needs, and a bit of organization around subtopics.
Content planning helps you to develop authority in your niche. Sites that focus on a constellation of related topics, with a number of different posts, appear higher in search engine results, and have more entry points for your audience. (More related posts, more opportunities to find you.) Depending on how specific your niche is, your subtopics might be very constricted, or somewhat broader. It depends on the needs of your audience, and your expertise. Don’t stray too far from either!
Keyword Research
There are a couple of aspects to keyword research. Generally, it’s a balancing act. You want to find the keywords that everyone is searching for (higher search volume) but, those are the keywords that are hardest to rank for. So, what’s a newbie to do? Tip: Focus on long-tail keywords, and build your relevance and authority from there.
Note: Long-tail keywords are keywords with leading or trailing phrases (think “knee-high rubber fishing boots” instead of “boots”)
There are a number of sites that offer some form of keyword research tool for free. There are also a number of paid options that offer robust keyword research options. Focus on keywords with low costs per click, that directly align with what you are trying to do. Some tools, like Ubersuggest from Neil Patel give you suggestions based on your selections for how to branch out. These are usually great keyword ideas to include in your content. Including a number of related, relevant keywords, used organically, will boost your content for those searching your long tails keywords.
Learn more about advanced keyword research from this blog post.
Pillar Content
Once you’ve selected a handful of longtail keywords to focus your initial content push on, it’s time to create your pillar content. Pillar content is the content that you build the rest of your site around. It is long form, detailed, and keyword rich. Creating pillar content serves a number of useful purposes.
First of all, it helps organize your site and your thoughts. Creating a few solid pieces of pillar content gives your site and yourself an identity. Once you’ve created a few long form pieces around your niche, you begin to feel and appear to be an expert in the niche. Even if you’ve been an expert in the field for years, getting your content online shows that expertise in an easily searchable and consumable way.
Read more about developing pillar content in this blog post.
Second, pillar content is key for search engine optimization. Keyword rich content that provides legitimate value to your clients will always be supported by search engines. You can boost this even more by using on page SEO tactics, and promoting your content. We’ll get to that later.
Third, having detailed, well-written pillar content gives you a stable of content to draw from for shorter form pieces, different types of media, or just snippets to share in emails or on social. The individual paragraphs and headings from your pillar content are pre-made templates for future blog posts, podcasts, or social posts.
Take the time to build out your initial pillar content with detail, outward links, and lots of relevant longtail keywords. These pages will be the main entry points to your website for most searchers.
Support Content
Once you’ve created your pillar content, and engaged in content planning and keyword research, your mind will likely be brimming with ideas for supportive content. Take a look at your list of long tail keywords. To get started, see how you can adapt and repurpose parts of your pillar content to align more closely with specific longtail keywords.
Use your titles and headers to draw attention to your specific longtail keywords. Support content can take many forms—shorter blog posts; long-form blog posts that “deep dive” into a topic; podcasts; webinars; FAQ pages or entries. There are countless possibilities for repurposing and recreating your content. This is viewed positively by search engines and searchers, because some folk prefer their content in different formats. You’re more likely to reach more searchers by not only hitting on more variations of your keywords, but by doing so in more formats.
On Page SEO
When creating web pages, especially blog post-style content, on-page SEO is going to be a big factor in whether your pages make it to the first pages of the search engine results.
Note: On-page SEO refers to the bundle of tactics we use when designing and creating individual pages, to boost their SERP rankings.
Your biggest factors effecting SEO are your use of H1/H2 tags, and your link-building. With every piece you create, you want to make sure you are hitting your desired keywords in your titles and headers. This is the biggest, easiest thing you can do to optimize your content. The low-hanging fruit of on-page SEO.
Take a deep dive into SEO with this blog post.
Link-building is a little more complex, but equally important. Each piece you publish should have internal and external links. If you mention something from your own content, link back to it, to keep your reader engaged with your content. If you find valuable information elsewhere, include links to those places as well. Going beyond just dropping the links in is where the real magic happens. Reach out to the author of any content you link to, and let them know that you are referencing their work. They will be more likely to cross-post your piece, of shout you out on social media.
From there, you’ll want to get a little more advanced. Using relevant, properly tagged images, and featured images will help your pieces get noticed and promoted. This is a grey area of on-page SEO. Some people claim image alt tags and other metadata don’t count as “on-page” SEO, because they can’t be seen from the “front end.” Others claim that any SEO done to a specific page is part of the “on-page SEO” for that page. We’ll lump them in together for simplicity sake.
USING Metadata
Aligning your on-page SEO and your metadata is the next step to boost your search engine results. Be sure to include metadescriptions for your content, that focus on your audience’s needs and keywords. Your featured images should be tagged with image alt tags that relate to your content, and the image. Pro-tip: take a look at the URL of your piece as well. A well-written URL can mean the difference between a click to your piece, or a click to your competitor.
Optimize for Lead Generation
Optimizing your content for search engines is the first step to getting found on the web. When you’re looking for new prospects/clients/customers, this is a huge deal. But, having a potential sale view your content, doesn’t actually bring them into your sales pipeline. You also have to optimize your content for lead generation.
This is sometimes called “Growth-driven” design or optimization. There are a number of ways that you can optimize your content for growth or lead generation. They generally depend on swapping a valuable piece of content for a valuable piece of contact information from your prospect. This is where your content really starts working overtime for you, generating qualified leads while you sleep.
Gated Content
Gated content is one of the key components to automated lead generation online. People have been doing this for years, in a variety of formats. Basically, gated content is the type of content that you know (through prospect research) that your target audience needs. This could be an online course, a valuable infographic, or specific specs about a certain product you’re selling—or something completely different. The only thing that matters—your target audience wants, or needs it.
It’s going to take in-depth research, or some well-designed trial-and-error, to determine the best pieces of content to offer as gated materials. Even though you are still giving this content away “for free,” you should really think of it as selling this content for the price of some valuable information. You’ll still need to make a compelling offer, and remove barriers between your prospect and the conversion.
Learn more about using gated content with this deep dive blog post.
If they truly need that content, they will be more than willing to trade their email address, name, phone number etc. in order to get it. And that’s our goal. Get ahold of their contact information so we can learn more about them, and deliver them more, valuable content. Once someone gives you that contact information, and tells you something about their needs by what piece of content they downloaded, you have them in your sales funnel. They are a qualified prospect, and your lead generation has begun.
Now that you’ve begun growing a contact list, you can start reaching out to them with relevant offers going forward. Keep them engaged, and you’ve created a marketing flywheel that supports itself through evergreen content, and automated contextualized outreach. This involves developing an automated outreach strategy as well. We’ll talk more about this below.
Repurposing
We talked a bit about repurposing your pillar blogs as different types of content, but this bears repeating. Creating content in a variety formats across a variety of platforms, will only help your brand and SEO.
Some people are specifically looking for videos to explain certain things to them, or are specifically looking for a podcast that they can listen to in the car. Some people are drawn to longer blocks of text, while others are repulsed by a “wall of text” and respond much better to infographics, images, and animations.
It doesn’t have to be costly or time-consuming to repurpose your content either. A quick screencast, or selfie video might be all you need to hit your target audience. A podcast can be as simple as a “voice note” on your phone that you upload to your site or social media. In addition to repurposing your content in different forms, you also want to make use of valuable platforms to promote that content. There are many places online that you can syndicate your content to reach different audiences—often for free.
Syndication
Syndicating your content across a number of platforms is a great way to expand your audience and increase your authority around a certain topic. It can also be a source of networking and link-building, in some cases.
There are a number of ways and places to syndicate your content. Creating a following on sites like Medium.com can help break into other audiences and grow into a thought-leader in your niche. You can also focus on sites like Quora and Wikihow, or more specific forums for your industry. Engaging with people who are asking questions about your niche is a surefire way to demonstrate your value, and make meaningful connections.
Check out our favorite ways to syndicate content, for free, with this blog post.
Another powerful aspect of syndication, bordering on promotion, is the coveted guest blog post. You probably follow a number of blogs in your industry that you consider to be authorities. Most well-known blogs are willing to accept and publish original blog content from other experts in the field, provided that their content is relevant is useful.
This is an insanely useful tactic to grow your network and bring more eyes to your content. Different blogs have different rules and guidelines for what you can post, but at the least you are usually allowed to have one link back to your blog/site in your byline. Some sites allow you to link back to your own content throughout your blog post as well. Be sure to get well-acquainted with the guidelines of the specific blog to which you’re pitching your content.
Promotion
Creating high-quality, high-converting content is only a fraction of this game. It takes a lot of dedication, know-how, and skill to produce the content, but that’s not the whole story. Without some sort of plan to promote your content, you’re leaving a big opportunity on the table.
There are two main schools of thought when it comes to promoting your content. Organic promotion, and paid promotion.
Organic Promotion
Organic promotion is where most businesses start their promotion efforts, for the simple reason that it’s free. You don’t have to lay out any more money than you already have; you just need to dedicate some time to it. There are a variety of tactics you can use to promote organically, but they all come back to the same basic principles.
Find your ideal clients. Where do they hang out? Where do they go to get information? Where do they network?
Learn what content is important, in each of these places. You may need to tweak the content you’ve produced as you learn more about each platform and how your audiences uses it.
Engage and provide value. On any platform, you have to actually engage with people when doing organic promotion. This could take any number of forms. Engaging in comment section discussions, having a chat over a messaging app, or replying to a thread of tweets. Spamming your content across different platforms may help you get a few new reads and engagements, but it isn’t going to lead to much conversion. Offering valuable content builds a level of trust and authority, but connecting with individuals will take this so much farther, so much faster. It’s worth the investment of your time.
Paid Promotion
The next step in the promotion game is to start using paid ads. I’ve written quite a bit on this subject, as there are many effective ways to create and combine paid ad strategies. In general, paid advertisement can mean anything from print ads in newspapers and magazines, television spots, radio ads, or even billboards. We’re going to stick with the digital realm; the best way to promote actual content (not just slogans and images).
Facebook’s Ad Manager is a great tool for budding digital marketers. Get the scoop on how to use it here.
Paid advertisement in the digital realm is still a multi-faceted beast. There are countless options for where and how to promote your content online. I’ll focus on the basics that can be applied across multiple platforms—mostly social media and google ads.
First we’ll tackle basic targeting.
Demographic and geographic targeting
Demographic and geographic targeting are the most basic options for targeting your advertisements to specific groups of people. For location-specific business, you’ll obviously want to limit your ad to the service area. If you are promoting content in a certain language, you’ll want to focus your ad spend on areas that use that language.
Demographic targeting can get a little more precise, and little more tricky. At this point the game, you should have a good grasp on who your ideal audience is, and what demographics primarily compose that group. It’s almost impossible to target everyone that might be interested in your content, without also targeting a whole bunch of people who aren’t interested. So, once again, it’s a game of balance. Choose the demographics that align with the largest, most engaged, swath of your target audience; this will keep your ad spend lower, and your return on advertising (ROA) higher.
Depending on the platform you are using, demographic targeting may be sparse, or extremely complex. One of the reasons Facebook is such a powerful marketing tool is because of their vast set of demographics, and the immense supply of user data that helps to determine who fits into those categories. You can deep-dive into Facebook’s options for demographic and interest targeting, to really fine tune your audience. On other platforms, you’re left with fewer options, which makes tracking and retargeting your prospects even more valuable.
Tracking and Retargeting
No matter where you are advertising online, it’s important to be tracking who visits your content so that you can retarget more advertising to them later. When you post an ad to a broad demographic group, the best indicator of who is likely to seek out your service or product later on, is who engaged with your ad, and who visited your site pages.
By installing tracking code on your site, you can create custom audiences based on the people who have viewed your pages. This is one way that people create powerful ads, that seem to “follow you” around the internet after you visit a website.
Learn the ins and outs of custom audiences in this post.
Facebook allows for the creation of audiences by simply selecting “people who have engaged with your posts or ads,” but you can get more granular if you track people by which page they viewed, or which version of your ad they clicked on. Facebook and other platforms allow you to use your data to accomplish this in a number of ways. If you set your Facebook pixel up to track certain pages (or your google tracking code) you are given the option to create an audience based on views of that specific page.
In a similar vein, you can use your prospect data to create custom audiences based off of any particular list of email addresses (and/or other info) that you have. In this way, you can target ads at groups that have specific meaning to you: former customers; folks who have reached out to you; people who have downloaded your gated content; ect. This helps you to create highly contextualized ads, while keeping your ad spend as low as possible.
Learn how to install and utilize your Facebook Pixel with this blog post.
One way to really get the most bang for your buck, is to coordinate your ad outreach across platforms. Thinking about the way people usually interact with content and content producers, we’ve found success by starting with a Google search campaign (targeting the people searching for answers about a product/service) to bring in new leads; from there, you can create retargeting campaigns aimed at the people who engaged with your google ads!
Check out this blog for a deep dive into how to connect your Google and social media ad campaigns.
Once you get the basics down, you can start to get into some of the more complex options that Facebook and other platforms allow for. Facebook in particular does a great job of optimizing your ads on their own, by serving your ads to people who are most likely to convert, based on their massive reserve of user data.
With the help of that platform you can create dynamic facebook ads that recombine to create the most effective combinations of image, tagline, creative etc. By combining these tactics with a detailed system of custom conversions, you can really start to automate your paid outreach, without your ads losing any of their power or personalization. These are very powerful tools.
Read more about creating dynamic ads on Facebook, and utilizing custom conversions for improved ROA in these posts.
Lookalike Audiences
The next step that will impact your success, is taking your audience data and creating lookalike audiences based off of information and demographics that you don’t personally have access to. By using Facebook’s Lookalike Audience tool, you can use one of your custom audiences to generate a wider audience of people who share demographics, interests, and behaviors with your list. This is an insanely powerful tool. Not only can you create an audience of people, worldwide, that share characteristics with your ideal customers, you can also narrow that audience down by geography or other demographics.
Take a deeper look at creating and using lookalike audiences with this blog post, and take another look at the strategy for using custom and lookalike audiences together here.
This process is easier than you might think. The first step is to create a custom audience that includes the best type of person to advertise to (High ticket customers? Returning customers? Current clients?). Next, you select the lookalike audience tool, and use your new custom audience to seed your new lookalike. Select how refined you want your audience to be, set up geographic limiting if necessary, and Facebook will do the rest. That audience will be in your audiences list next time you create an ad.
Follow Up
Using ads to follow up with your leads is a good way to stay at the top of mind, and keep people abreast of new developments in your business (sales, deals, events, etc.), but direct follow up, via email or messenger is a great, organic way to keep the relationship growing.
There are two main ways to go about this sort of outreach. Intermittent outreach is the type of thing you send, depending on your own timeline. Think, crafting and sending out an email to announce a product launch, or to invite folks to your webinar, etc. These are bound only by your time restraints. Rolling outreach is the type of outreach that is triggered based on the actions of your prospect. The delivery of gated content is a basic example of automated outreach of this kind; it becomes rolling outreach when you use these sorts of behaviors to trigger email or messenger sequences.
Using direct, intermittent outreach is a great way to keep your prospects informed, and to push the offers you most want to sell. You can also use this type of outreach to provide contextualized value. This could come in the form of keeping different subsets of your subscribers updated when you post a new blog on a certain topic.
Using rolling outreach, you can provide highly contextualized outreach based on specific user behavior, and you can automate nearly all of it. Have you ever gotten an email saying that you left an item in your cart, or the price of your item has decreased? These are the sorts of emails that you can trigger, based on a behavior like repeated pageviews, or add-to-cart behavior.
Learn how to best utilize intermittent and rolling out reach with this blog post.
When pushing your content, you can analyze behavior in a similar way, and create multiple-email sequences, delivering content that your prospect will actually be interested in, directly to their inbox. By using email for this instead of targeted ads, we can see more about the prospects behavior (did they open the email, did they click on anything, what did they click on), which will help us to optimize our outreach as we go.
Using a combination of email practices, targeted ads, and demographic ads, it should be easy to stay in front of your audience, and keep at the top of their mind. And the best part is, you can automate the vast majority of this process, so that it keeps working for you while you sleep!
Conclusion
Creating content is still an absolute must when it comes to marketing and succeeding in online-based business. And let’s be real, most businesses have an online component, even if the work is done in person. Creating content is a must, but it is a far cry from the whole story. Years ago, you could get away with creating some great content, and using some killer SEO tactics to get found on the web, and make connections and sales. Nowadays it is much harder, and takes careful planning and execution.
By building out your stable of useful, evergreen content, repurposing it into a variety of formats and lengths, and optimizing for not only search but also conversions, you’re well on your way to kick-ass content strategy. But creating great content in a variety of forms still won’t break you through to the upper echelon of web business. Syndication, promotion, and a specific follow-up plan is essential to building your funnel, and, indeed, turning it into a self-propelling marketing flywheel! There are countless tools that allow you to automate most of these processes (in part or in full). This may seem daunting, but it all works together to create a content empire that is greater than the sum of its parts.
Get in touch today to learn how we can help turn your expertise into a content empire that works overtime for you!
DeMaio Digital Marketing 