Content Marketing Full Course | Content Marketing Tutorial For Beginners | Simplilearn

0:08hey everyone this is shruti from simply learn welcome to this content marketing full course by simply learn we'll begin this full course by understanding what content marketing is and some of its popular strategies then we will see how content marketing affects seo and we'll understand how to rank number one on google and youtube by creating high quality content then we will look into the top 10 important content marketing interview questions and answers at the end we will look into minor concepts like a simple beginner's guide to content marketing and introduction to content marketing certification training by the end of this video i can assure you that all

0:46your content marketing career related queries would have been answered for this training with me i have our experienced content marketing specialist rob and greg jabo together they will take you through the various topics of content marketing so without any further ado let's get started before we begin make sure to subscribe to our youtube channel and hit the bell icon to never miss an update from simply learn i'm greg jarbo and what is that i mean what we're going to talk about in this first module of a content marketing foundation course is literally content marketing um okay what is it so content marketing is not a new concept it's been around for

1:27over 100 years in fact one of the classic foundation stories of you know the birth of content marketing goes all the way back to the michelin brothers in france and the michelin brothers you know in case you haven't done your history that's okay you know a little refresher right now were two brothers who made pneumatic tires and they were trying to sell them along with an innovative product at its time called the automobile in an era where the roads were horrible in a place france where frankly people didn't like to get outside of paris and into the provinces because my god what was worth going out there for

2:09you know for paris that's all happening here and what the michelin brothers realized is if they wanted to sell more tires they had to get people to drive farther and farther and use them so what did they come up with the concept that really is the birth of content marketing in my book was the michelin guide and the michelin guide was unique in that it reviewed restaurants not just restaurants nearby in paris but restaurants out there in the provinces and the michelin brothers are the ones who came up with the one two and three star rating system to say this restaurant i know it's way out there

2:55it's you know bad roads uh but guess what to die for the ratatouille ah you you gotta have it this is a three-star restaurant you you it's worth making the trip and oh by the way now since we're gonna give you a guide and you have to get out of paris in order to get there we're gonna tell you where you can find gasoline along the way which hotels you might want to stay at overnight and oh by the way just in case you have to how to repair a flat tire particularly if it's a michelin tire because it's a pneumatic and you know what it's quite

3:31easy to repair and guess what that put michelin on the map why they weren't trying to sell you more tires they weren't telling you about the features and benefits of round or tire repair i mean that was in there but it was only a how-to article not necessarily a feature and benefit what they were doing was they were speaking to their audience about what their audience was truly passionate about which in paris in 1900 was food and by creating content that got the audience to get into their new innovative automobile and drive all the way out there into the provinces for that absolutely remarkable three-star restaurant

4:22people got more flats people had to replace their tires but it was worth it and oh by the way michelin sold more tires so that that's a great story every time you sort of you know hit a pause and like well we're doing content marketing we need to come up with a concept think back to the michelin guide it's it's great foundation so let's go to a modern definition where are we now in the 21st century when it comes to content marketing well you can read the slide here and read the definition and some people like reading definitions i'm not going to read it to you

5:02but i am going to highlight a couple of words in the definition that i think are absolutely critical to any definition of content marketing the content that you create needs to be relevant and it also has to be valuable now if it's not relevant then you're not actually meeting my needs or interests you know and why would i be interested and we've gotten way too tired of screening out the commercial that comes on um you know trying to sell us snow tires and pardon me we live in florida i don't use snow tires what the what the heck is this commercial doing you know interrupting what i'm watching

5:49so relevance is important relevance means that this content isn't going to get screened out and the valuable valuable can can work in a lot of different ways it can be interesting it can be useful you know value is an interesting proposition all by itself but that's the key to content marketing uh it's not just creating more spam it's not just throwing more trash over the fence and hoping something happens this is something where if you've created valuable and relevant content you know what your customers will find you that's a whole different kind of proposition i know there's some skeptics who are saying oh come on come on come on

6:35content marketing is just a fancy new name for social media marketing right and the answer is well there is some overlap and we're going to deal with that in module three but let me just be clear here social media content is part of what content marketing needs to create but it can also create content for your website and that's not the social media it can also create content that your pr people can share with reporters or bloggers and that's not normally considered social media content and by the way all of that content can be optimized so maybe it actually is part of seo not social media marketing in fact

7:22that's the other place that content marketing really overlaps and it's not coincidental it so happens that around february 2011 when google rolled out the first of its multiple versions of the panda update all of a sudden even seos started to pay attention to content marketing why because google changed the rules and what google basically said is if your content isn't valuable or relevant you know what it's not going to rank very well in our search algorithm and all of a sudden people who had been used to like putting keywords in the right places realized content matters i mean i've got to actually tell stories that are

8:09interesting i've got to create information that's valuable yeah you can make it relevant that's the optimization part but you know if you're trying to optimize a piece of boring irrelevant trash god bless you good luck so yeah content marketing has grown it's like tripled in terms of web search interest since the panda update and then we're talking about panda 1 of course there was panda two panda three panda four i mean come on google is driving us in this direction and so content marketing is pretty relevant today now one of the other things that uh people in content marketing struggle with is oh but you don't understand i do

8:55b2b content marketing or i'm a small business or part b i'm an enterprise and so content marketing has to come in flavors right well possibly maybe on occasion so let's just question that assumption for a second you know content marketing has been around now long enough and enough people have done it that some research has been conducted and has been conducted against b2c marketers and b2b marketers and small business marketers and enterprise level marketers and when they start asking key questions like okay we're going to try to determine what is the difference between an effective content marketer and an ineffective content marketer let's see the results

9:47well first of all the most important thing to be an effective b2c content marketer is you need a documented content strategy okay all right i mean people who are winging it aren't as effective as people who actually have thought about this and written it down got it okay no great insight but you know interesting to note secondly they've got to have somebody in charge who oversees content marketing oh lord does that mean we have to have a reorg or maybe we just have to designate somebody who reports to somebody else whatever but guess what it really helps if somebody is driving this process third they've got to be using more

10:38content marketing tactics than their less effective peers and this is not an argument more is better this is just pardon me that's the way the data falls out the people who are actually more effective are doing more different kinds of things a broader range of tactics and who knows maybe it's that broader range that's part of the success formula same thing is true with social media platforms the effective content marketers are using more than the ineffective ones and last but not least and this may be a sort of a result of the first four by gosh effective content marketers generally have greater percentage of the overall marketing budget in their

11:28organization wow okay that's the b2c marketing forum but you don't understand i'm not a b2c marketer okay so let's take a look at the b2b content marketing formula guess what you need to have a documented content marketing strategy to be an effective b2b content marketer you need to have someone who oversees content marketing strategy it helps if you are using more tactics and more social media platforms and guess what you spend a higher percentage of your overall marketing budget on content marketing well that's similar to the b2c content marketers but you understand b2b is different yeah there's a couple of small differences but guess what overall the top five criteria

12:21are similar and when you get to small business here's what you're going to see same five criteria and you're in an enterprise i know the world is different for enterprises actually not so much so four different data points let's net it out ah there's a pattern and the pattern is is i don't care what flavor of content marketer you are you can be b2c b2b you can be small business you can be large enterprise at the end of the day there are five things that you've got to focus on if you want to be effective we've already covered these and are there differences between small businesses and large enterprises between

13:05b2b and b2c well sure but they're all at the margin what's the downside if we don't do this you know is anyone going to come in and like wacus and the answer is um maybe not inside your boardroom but it may happen on the next sales call that one of your salespeople makes they may encounter someone i like to call the man in the chair and the man in the chair actually refers back to a classic mcgraw-hill ad campaign from i think the 1960s but basically the guy in the chair asks theoretically some questions from quote maybe your salesperson okay i don't know anything about you i don't

13:50know about your company i don't know about your company's product i don't know about your company's you know reputation or anything about you and so what was it you were going to try to sell me and that's the downside of not having a content marketing program content marketing has been around for over 100 years but in the online world customers are behaving in lots of new ways and they're consuming content on various kinds and types of devices that changes things content marketing is now about creating content that consumers will engage with and act upon not just read or listen to or watch so in this introductory module we're

14:40going to provide you with an understanding of how content marketing affects the decision making process when people are on the customer journey to making a purchase and with a solid content marketing strategy your customers buying decisions can actually happen faster you can basically shorten the decision-making process and you can reach and expand to new prospects so one of the things that we hope that you're going to learn after basically taking this module you should be able to do the following first of all you can define content marketing and other related concepts secondly you should be able to explain why content needs to be relevant and valuable

15:33in order for it to be effective third you need to describe the overlap between content marketing seo social media marketing fourth you need to name five traits of effective content marketers and last but not least you need to explain the benefits of content marketing these are our objectives and hopefully they're going to be your learning outcomes so content marketing is not a new concept it's been around for over 100 years in fact one of the classic foundation stories of you know the birth of content marketing goes all the way back to the michelin brothers in france and the michelin brothers you know in case you haven't done your history

16:21that's okay you know a little refresher right now were two brothers who made pneumatic tires and they were trying to sell them along with an innovative product at its time called the automobile in an era where the roads were horrible in a place france where frankly people didn't like to get outside of paris and into the provinces because my god what was worth going out there for you know for paris it's all happening here and what the michelin brothers realized is if they wanted to sell more tires they had to get people to drive farther and farther and use them so what did they come up with

17:06the concept that really is the birth of content marketing in my book was the michelin guide and the michelin guide was unique in that it reviewed restaurants not just restaurants nearby in paris but restaurants out there in the provinces and the michelin brothers are the ones who came up with the one two and three star rating system to say this restaurant i know it's way out there it's you know bad roads uh but guess what to die for the ratatouille ah you you gotta have it this is a three-star restaurant you you it's worth making the trip and oh by the way since we're going to give you a guide

17:51and you have to get out of paris in order to get there we're going to tell you where you can find gasoline along the way which hotels you might want to stay at overnight and oh by the way just in case you have to how to repair a flat tire particularly if it's a michelin tire because it's a pneumatic and you know what it's quite easy to repair and guess what that put michelin on the map why they weren't trying to sell you more tires they weren't telling you about the features and benefits of round or tire repair i mean that was in there but it was only a how-to article not

18:31necessarily a feature and benefit what they were doing was they were speaking to their audience about what their audience was truly passionate about which in paris in 1900 was food and by creating content that got the audience to get into their new innovative automobile and drive all the way out there into the provinces for that absolutely remarkable three-star restaurant people got more flats people had to replace their tires but it was worth it and oh by the way michelin sold more tires so that that's a great story every time you sort of you know greetings everyone and welcome my name is rob sanders from simply learn and

19:24today we're going to talk about content marketing strategy so buckle up and let's get right to it and we're going to get right into some of the best practices some tips some methodologies some things you should be doing with content marketing so right out of the gate let's start talking about knowing your audience okay so content is all about writing for a particular audience so it's just like speaking except when we're speaking to somebody we're speaking directly to them content is very similar and so we have to be able to know our audience ahead of time so what you can do is collect demographics of your target audience based on

20:09who's coming to your website so you can get that data in google analytics under audience email subscribers i mean who is subscribing to your emails who do you already have in your email database and you can look at social media i mean you look at facebook you can look at the people who already connected to you okay these are just some three three of many examples you could be doing to gather data on your audience okay you have to know who your audience is before you start writing you know for a successful content marketing strategy you really just need to know your audience and basically you're going to

20:46segment them based on their interest so that content is going to be catered to that audience okay so if it signs that likes a specific you know product uh that you offer or feature that's part of that product that you offer then that's the segment you're going to be writing about so you need to collect your data on your audience ahead of time and then you're going to segment that audience okay so you're not going to write content for everyone because the shoe doesn't necessarily fit for everyone okay the shoe has to fit for specific foot and in this case we're talking about an audience we need to be able to

21:25segment our audience out and you could certainly segment them out by age by gender by education level by income by interest i mean these are just some of the examples again it could be new returning or new reusers versus returning users it could be users who have purchased from you in the past versus users who haven't purchased from you in the past it could certainly be an age range or it could be even going further on interest level or combination thereof okay so for example you can get that demographic information using google analytics just got to go into analytics under audience under demographics you're going to see age and

22:07br its age is broken out by age range and you're going you'll see gender so you're going to see a breakdown of gender and use that to your advantage so if you're going to you know write some content and you know 99 of your traffic is female the age of 18 to 24 then you know that content's been catered accordingly so we could certainly go to facebook page insights and get some really good demographic data there because facebook is all about demographics okay so you could see exactly you know how many fans you have broken out by men versus women and then you can see again same thing as google analytics

22:49you could see an age range breakout you could use twitter analytics i mean twitter has share some really good insights into education level so you know if you're dealing with you know highly sophisticated people who have master's degrees or even higher or let's just say even on linkedin you know that a majority of the people you're trying to target are c level meaning ceos or cfos or cmos you know chief marketing officers or chief executive officers then you're going to cater your message a little bit different than say mid-range managers or or you know even high-range managers or even vps so use your audience information you collect on

23:36these various platforms to your advantage okay so let's jump into number two we want to create high quality content now i know this sounds like a given but and i say but heavily yeah there's not a lot of high quality content out there on the internet so separate yourself first and foremost always always always create high quality content it's gonna result in a lot of things are going to benefit you you know one you're going to come across as you know somebody who knows what they're talking about and that's going to help increase your brand awareness okay when you increase your brand awareness people know about you so

24:15it's likely going to increase traffic to your website or if you're on social media you know if you produce good high quality content people are going to share that content okay so from an seo perspective it can improve website ranking meaning if you have good quality content you know and it's really focused in on a specific topic or a certain set of core words keywords then you're gonna rank improves website dwell time meaning hey you get good content people are gonna hang around to see what else you have to offer okay so it's no secret that you know good content you usually leads to you know quality

24:54engagement and then certainly last but not least you can gain a lot of leads here meaning hey somebody likes what you have to say whether it's a video or blog post or or infographic you know people are going to become more interested more engaged spend more time and that's all going to funnel through to somebody taking that next step in the funnel and becoming more interested in your service or even purchasing one of your products so creating high quality content involves brainstorming topics and terms you know you've got to do the upfront work due diligence is at work here so brainstorm some topics use a keyword

25:33research tool to gather results so if you have a topic you know one of the benefits of quality content is rankings go to google's keyword planner understand how much quality and and understand how much competition each keyword has or understand how much volume each keyword has that's what's available in google's keyword planner or any really any keyword planning tool you always want to create original content okay so you don't want to plagiarize or take somebody else's content and then you want to support that content with compelling headlines so if you have a piece of content you got to get somebody's attention write a nice headline that's going to

26:15grab their attention okay so give valuable content to readers and add resources from well-known sites so if you you do borrow say a data point from another source then you know cite that source you also want to create engaging and thought-provoking content get somebody to think i mean people are going to rage your content because they not they don't know the subject matter their interests in the subject matter and they want to be able to spend the time taking something away from that content follow a logical structure and use relevant images i can't stress this one enough you know just throw things on a web page you know

26:53put some structure to it maybe you have to break it out if you feel like you have too much content there's no harm in breaking it into part one versus part two get people uh tease them a bit get them to come back and read part two okay use different content forms in case somebody's interested maybe you want to capture some data you know prefer short paragraphs to make the content readable remember if you're talking to c-level folks you know maybe you don't have to dummy down the content so to speak but if you're dealing with you know folks or people that are right out of high school

27:27or still in high school then adjust your content in format and paragraphs accordingly and then update the content as well just because you publish it doesn't mean that it's done i mean when we're talking about a web page we're talking about something that is actively changing or can change the medium that is dynamic okay so if a data points change go back in and update that data point and then let people know about it because they may want to come back and and you know check in to see how much that data points change so these are all you know good takeaways for creating high quality content there's some other

28:05things that you should be aware of you know grammatical mistakes you know you need to avoid those there's no reason for grammatical mistakes today's technology doesn't allow for it and hey listen we all have friends we have colleagues my desk is sitting next to a colleague who's more than happy to read something before it gets published so take advantage of the resources you have available no reason for it because if you have a grammatical mistake you just lost a lot of credibility you know don't be afraid to add a clear call to action at the end of your content if somebody's interested in reading it they're

28:43probably going to be interested in taking the next step whatever that next step is okay so creating content that fulfills viewers requirements meaning if somebody's searching for something and your content shows up in the search results then they're actively looking for you what are you offering them is it fulfilling their requirements you know don't be afraid to use examples throughout your content in fact work in or integrate some case studies in there show clear examples to stress your points and then just don't put words on a web page you know so break up that content with an image that's going to be visually appealing okay and you can add

29:22images from public domain sites meaning stock imagery if that's what's going to help create visually appealing content and then give more information to your audience and we say prefer to give more information meaning hey going back to the content i was saying about breaking it up organizing it if you have more information you don't withhold it have them come back and read a secondary blog post or secondary piece that supports the original now we want to move from high quality content to running a b test baby test so important why because with a b split testing you can increase your conversion rates okay so four elements

30:05to test and your content marketing strategy so if you have content say a blog and you're testing that blog you know test out the images test out the forms do you have a long form or short form you know test out the content length you can have a variation that is a lot shorter than the original does that increase or decrease bounce rates play around with call to actions your call to actions do matter you know do you want to use a softer call to action a softer tone or do you want to use something very direct and strong you know test call to actions to see what's

30:39going to get people to move closer through the closer to purchasing and through that funnel so a b testing to me is something that should be naturally done with google optimize it's free so with images you know you could test a lot of different variations of images anything from people to you know outlandish imagery to just something very stock and neutral but just make sure that those images are relevant to the post you know test the length of that content you know again if you know that your average time on page is very low you know don't write something very long write something that you think is going

31:17to stick with that time on page but on your a b test create something maybe a little longer if it's engaging enough maybe somebody's going to stay a little bit longer on the page so you know create a variation it's going to play with that length okay so use analytics to your advantage to figure out as a baseline what amount of content is getting people to stay on the page then see if you can push the envelope one way or the other okay improving the page with sign up forms really what you want to do is create a user friendly experience so when you have sign up

31:50forms and don't make them non-intuitive don't make them difficult you know link maybe up to facebook or google so if they're creating an account they can create an account via google or facebook or you know don't put too many forms on the page and then on those ctas as i mentioned play around with the tone you can also play around the color i mean i test color all the time believe it or not color does matter don't use red use green people react to different colors but again you have cultural variances as well so you got to take that into account if you're in the middle east or

32:25the far east asia you know color schemes and what you say matters and it changes versus say you know europe or the west okay so keep that in mind when you're making changes on color or tone or placement and things of that nature so you want to conduct a competitor analysis so we're talking about creating high quality content testing that content you know brainstorming some topics you know looking at your audience you're doing all this work you might as well take the next step and figure out what it is your competitors are doing so you can opt for competitive analysis by identifying your competitor's top performing content for

33:07specific topics okay and so really what we're trying to do here is improve our conversion rates so what are your competitors doing what are their baselines we can maybe up that annie i mean that data is also available in google analytics so you can look at benchmarking reports in google analytics to get some form or fashion you can also go to facebook and look at your competitors facebook pages and see what's performing in terms of engagement but what you want to do is find out your strongest competitors by using search engines or check which websites are competing with you and again that could include facebook as well or maybe even

33:47linkedin so you go with the search engine route you can always type in that coveted keyword that you want to be found for see who's ranking ahead of you and you can see the metadata meaning the title tag in the meta description you can actually see hey what are these guys writing that's getting them recognized in the search engine rankings so you can certainly if you go to search engine route you could certainly leverage an seo platform like search sem rush or moz or something like that that's going to allow you to get some good insight on competitor information so keep in mind there are seo platforms

34:25that will give you information on your competitors and that's what these seo platforms are good for so number five moving on choose a suitable content format so now we've done all this homework we know what we want to say we know who we want to say it to we're ready to do some testing but we need to find a format because it's not always about a web page per se meaning content on a web page there's not always about a blog post with content in that blog post okay we need to decide the type of content that's going to fit what we're trying to say so

35:02again you can go the traditional route with just posting a blog post and there's nothing wrong with that because with a blog post you can incorporate video and imagery you could also go a more harder route when i say harder more i say official route with an e-book or case study something that a user is going to be able to take away with maybe download okay something more official um something more in-depth something with a harder stamp on it so that that shows individuals that you've taken the time you've done this homework you've done this research you've done some really in-depth analysis and now the proper format for that is not a blog

35:43post it's an ebook now if you're into talking like i am then you can certainly do a podcast and podcasts are always popular depending on the topic so you got to be aware of the topic now videos are always always a good option you got the likes of video and video and youtube and some other you know video platforms out there that allow you the ability to get found very quickly especially with the likes of youtube you know people use youtube before they go on to purchasing a product so think about that so if you're trying to get somebody if you're trying to sway an audience to

36:22move from being a brand awareness and a loyal you know customer to taking the next step okay to purchasing more or purchasing for the first time and so videos kind of help convey that now if you're trying to convey a lot of different points then an infographic might be your best option instead of having to write out all those points you know try using an infographic to convey those points visually now again with blog posts it should have valuable content that can be shared by your website visitors on social so that's the key make sure you have those shareable social icons now with ebooks it should

37:01have longer in-depth content so and it shouldn't be published frequently so maybe if this is something you're doing annually then ebook could be the format with a case study what you should have a customer story that succeeded in and you solving that customer's problem so the case study is always there for you know somebody to get an idea of what you're all about infographic is just visualizing data in a more organized way in a more visual way so somebody understands what you're trying to convey now with that podcast again suppose your audience doesn't have an interest in reading again it could be a certain age certain gender a certain culture hey

37:44everybody absorbs information differently so think about it ask yourself is a podcast the best way to communicate to my target audience and then videos are highly engaging they're also shareable on blog posts and pretty much most if not all social media platforms so once you've done that once you choose the proper format you want to choose a content management system that's going to work for you so you want to be able to choose something where you can plan appropriately produce manage publish and measure results all in one place there are plenty of content management systems out there that will help you do all of those things okay so some examples are

38:30wordpress hubspot binder i mean we can list hundreds if you're into blogging you know wordpress is the way to go if you're into building out landing pages that you want to you know share you know hotspot could be the way to go okay there are lots of available options out there so moving on number seven target your audience using emails okay so what are we talking about well we all know what emails are emails help us to communicate directly with our target audience and convert them to leads so email is a good way to follow up with your audience so if you've done a podcast follow up with an email you know

39:11maybe get them to you know fill out a survey via email based on that podcast or if you create a podcast about some data that you talked about in that podcast follow up that with with them via email with an infographic perhaps okay built into the email okay there's lots of ways that all these formats can complement themselves via email okay you could certainly take a blog post and package it into an email and have a link pointing back to the blog post maybe as a teaser or if you're doing a series a series of blog posts you know you could tease that in an email so an email is a

39:49good way to you know follow up with your target audience indirectly or directly when we say indirectly you know you can collect emails and send out those emails with you know certain information or what you should be doing is targeting and segmenting your emails just like you are your content so if you're producing content for a certain audience then make sure that particular audience gets that same email now some of the email content that you could share with your target audience are newsletters okay seasonal emails promotional emails automated messaging and what we mean by automated messaging hey if somebody just purchased from you send them a thank you email maybe follow

40:32up a couple days later with another email with a survey or what you could do is if you know who your loyal customers are you know target them with a promotional email so there's lots of ways to slice and dice content via email okay just make sure you know your target audience is there's lots of things you can do in email again you can complement lots of different formats within email as i mentioned before with a podcast or a blog post so keep all that in mind email's a good way to communicate with your audience okay the last point we want to make here is use

41:07native ads okay so we talk about native ads it's one of the smartest ways to connect your audience with your brand so for example this is a native ad on buzzfeed okay it's about 15 bands that probably won't exist without led zeppelin okay so for you folks out there that don't know who led zeppelin is a rock group from the 70s late 60s 70s okay disbanded in 80 81 82 early 80s okay but you know people grew up like myself listening to led zeppelin okay so you could see the headline here 15 bands that probably won't exist with the outlet zeppelin you know i'm interested in who those bands might be even if you

41:50don't know who led zeppelin is okay you might be inquisitive to say okay who is this led zeppelin group and what are these 15 bands the key here is not to say the headline or led zeppelin per se but it's a native ad and it's sitting next to content talking about music okay so according to forbes online audiences are 25 more likely to look at a native ad than at a banner and so that native ad in this case we're talking about music needs to be sitting or accompanied alongside content talking about in this case music you know would help if it was rock music just music in general might get enough

42:33to get peak people's interest okay so if you're going to create content you know align that content with something that's you know naturally going to fit and that's why we call them native ads because they're native to the content that they're associated with so finally after all that's said and done when all you've done is create good content follow up via emails targeting your audience and associating that content with you know content natively then you can always measure your content performance so my favorite part of it all you go into analytics going to facebook insights you know you want to go in and check out how

43:14that content's performing and you want to do that because you want to be able to see what's performing what's not performing the key here is associating the content with kpis that's really the key so measuring the right metrics can help you understand whether your content is engaging or not so again measuring the right metrics okay so when we're talking about a video you're not necessarily going to look at page views you're going to look at video views so you know some of these basic metrics of users and sessions and pages bounce rate you know dwell time that's all great but you just need to make sure that you're

43:54aligning the right metric with the right asset so for example if you have a case study or ebook you want to make sure that you're measuring how many downloads the ebook or the case study received again with the video you want to measure video views now if you're packaging up emails and sending them out to your target audience you want to make sure you look at open rates and click rates okay so a lot of things you can be looking at so make sure you choose the right metrics because there's hundreds and hundreds of metrics to choose from so just be aware all the different metrics that are available

44:31you know if you're in it for search okay how much traffic getting from search where are you ranking so there are a lot of things you need to think about so think about the content that you're producing and think about how you want to be able to measure that content so let's go back over our checklist here so what you could do is create an editorial calendar in fact i would highly suggest you create an editorial calendar in order to keep track of all the content you've done over a period of time are you making your content worth reading that means are you checking the results of that content

45:06what we just went over measuring the content is it worth reading have a column set up in that editorial calendar you know performing or not performing if it's not performing don't do it again okay curate your content okay you always wanna you know make sure you're reusing or using or adding to the content that you've created guest post on influential blogger websites you want to add statistics numbers and quotes to your content make it engaging make it look like you've done your homework you could share all your content not just on social media but you know platforms like slideshare now you can share it on all

45:46social media platforms i'd highly recommend it and again you can even repurpose it as a blog post so if it's a podcast then you know you can recite that podcast in the form of a blog okay so get some testimonials that support some of your content again create a podcast you can send out an email with a survey or trying to solicit some testimonials or if you post something on facebook you know leverage the feedback you get from facebook in the form of a testimonial okay and then you want to promote your blog post for maximum success and a lot of that means seo so make sure you do your due diligence and

46:24get the right keywords in that blog post okay so you can create personas for different user audiences okay so remember it's all about tone okay so if you're going to create a blog post make sure your tone is aligned with that right audience whether that be young middle-aged or older are you choosing the right type of content okay you'll know based on the results okay you want to add h1 and h2 tags on your web pages why because when we're talking about content we're talking about organizing the content and h1 and h2s help you organize the content appropriately customize the metadata metadatas title tag and meta tag

47:05descriptions and even all tags okay all of that is for search so you want your content to show up in search whether that's video infographic or blog post all of it can be shown in search results so make sure you write a good title and make sure you write a good meta description because that's what people are going to see when they search okay so you want to create a detailed summary and title and again that goes along with the title tag and meta description and then you want to make it easy for the audience to ask questions and comment on your blog so don't be afraid

47:38like i'm gonna do right now in this video is if i'm missing anything from this checklist feel free to comment hey i've written my fair share content but i could be talking to an audience that is just as qualified as i am and they may have some tips so feel free to comment underneath this video now don't be afraid to ask just like i just did people are always willing to provide constructive feedback so don't be afraid to ask for it and make it easy so to me every blog post needs to have some form of a comment box because blog posts are out there to solicit engagement now

48:16let's recap everything we talked about because we'd certainly covered a lot and there's a lot to cover when it comes to content marketing so one know your audience again you can lean on google analytics you know demographic data whether it be age or gender you could do the same with facebook and twitter and linkedin you know every platform has some data you could take away create high quality content when i mean high quality content brainstorm some topics has it already been written to death about or is this unique you know don't write something your competitors are writing okay don't copy what your competitors have written organize your

48:55content support it with good imagery all of these are tips to creating high quality content okay when you create that content think about running to maybe test you know run some variations and switch out the image switch out the call to action see what's going to get people to react and engage with the content conduct competitor analysis so lean on the facebooks of the world to see what your competitors are posting see what's engaging for them okay you can also lean on these seo platforms like sem rush and moz all you got to do is plug in a domain and they're going to give you some information about

49:35where a particular competitor ranks for keyword or how many backlinks and what websites are linking to them so all that's available in these seo platforms okay so you want to choose a suitable content format we listed a few from ebooks to case studies to podcasts to infographics to blog posts to videos it's up to you what you think is best for your audience just keep in mind you need to be able to measure it and so that's the important thing if it doesn't work the first time out then you might want to consider changing out the content format choose a content management system you know plenty out

50:13there wordpress is a good one if you're going to be a blogger okay blogging allows you to you know post optimize that blog post you know you could have the ability to share that blog post across social platforms and you can also have that blog post show up in search engine results so you can't do any of that without a good content management system so you want to target your audience using emails okay so email is a good way to again further communicate with that particular segmented audience and again you could use it to send out promotional emails to loyal followers or you can use systematic emails to send an

50:56email a thank you email somebody purchases and then another follow-up email and again you can repurpose some of the content you've done in another format in the form of an email so you know if you created a video you know put that video in the form of an email and send it out to your audience to make sure they're not missing out on that video you just created so lots of ways to use email take advantage of email it's your ally here okay use native ads okay don't be afraid to put that content and pair it with some other content on another website it's been proven people

51:31are going to engage in an ad that they see based on the content they're currently reading because the ad if it's native it's going to be similar in nature to the content they're currently engaged in and then measure your content performance i can't say this enough make sure you're leveraging google analytics okay with google analytics or facebook insights or twitter or linkedin or any other platform you're running on they're gonna have data on what you've posted so take advantage of it align your kpis so if it's an e-book or case study don't measure just traffic measure how many people are actually downloading them in most organizations the people who are

52:17doing search engine optimization have been doing it for a while and i can tell you because i've been doing it for a while that in the old days it was mostly technical with a little bit of content sprinkled in so for arguments like let's say 80 20. 80 of what an seo needed to learn how to do had to deal with you know you know your meta tags your metadata you know uh cms systems even blah blah blah blah and oh by the way yeah you need some content on the page well here we are a long time past that and if this you you you look through

52:54this slide here for example this is the latest guidance from google on the kind of content they want and if you look through the list here most of the items on it aren't technical and frankly most of it is content and if you think about it what this means is is that the job description for seo has changed dramatically particularly beginning with the panda update but then including the penguin update and then hummingbird and pardon me more and more and more seos had better be interacting with the people who are creating quality content engaging content credible content useful content it's not enough just to put keywords in

53:45the right places anymore on pretty thin content that won't get you where you want to go so again different uh paths maybe the same direction but the folks in content marketing and the folks in seo frankly need each other and they may or may not recognize it in your organization but you know it's a starting point this is a conversation you you probably need to have content marketing is complex it often overlaps with other elements of marketing the the most typical overlaps are with social media marketing and seo and uh there probably already are in your organization those kind of groups the seos may be on

54:36one floor and uh the social media marketing people may be in a different building you know whatever but the new success formula says we got to get all those folks to the same table now we may have to do it virtually we may have to use you know webinars in order to hold those kind of meetings who knows but the point is is that you know the world is shifting and organizational structures need to shift with it and again you know that's not something you can change tomorrow but that is something that will evolve over time and for what it's worth it turns out that let's just say

55:19the people who were in seo they may or may not admit it at first but they absolutely need to work with the people in content marketing why because basically after panda and penguin the rules shifted and it's less about your title tag and it's most mostly focused now on the quality of your content and whether that content is link worthy which means it's really compelling content it's remarkable content that's content that's gonna get people to link to it because wow that's you know and that's not necessarily part of the skill set that was required to be a successful seo five years ago or 10 years ago

56:13so again you got to get these folks to the table they've got to work together you know and um and again that means the organizational structure probably needs to shift and the same is true with the social media marketing folks you know they went out and their initial goals and objectives were you know get lots of likes you know get lots of fans get lots of views get lots of twitter followers why because that seemed to be the metric that the platform gave us and so we used it to measure success well it turns out none of those measures actually measure real success because they're focused on being

57:00successful on the platform boy i have lots of fans as opposed to being successful in business wow that generated lots of leads and sales so there is a real real discrepancy between let's just say the center of gravity okay it's not facebook you're not going to make a lot of money on facebook you know that's just not set up to do business you've got to get those folks that you've engaged in facebook to your website where they can buy something and that's a you know radical shift for all the folks who uh are in social media marketing to say wait wait time out but that's not what i was told a couple

57:48years ago and the answer is that's correct what we've learned over time is that being engaging is useful if it's harnessed to a benefit and i'll tell you in most organizations the social media marketing people are under cloud because they aren't delivering business benefit and they too need to learn to work with the content marketing people in order to do that and in some cases they may not be creating the right kind of content that actually generates leads and sales as opposed to you know is inexpensive to create to get my next fan or my next twitter follower so the key metrics here are no longer

58:40how many likes or comments or shares did you get that's nice but how many sales leads did you generate what percentage of those converted into sales that's a radical change but again it helps when the social media marketing people are at the table with the content marketing people greetings everyone this is rob sanders from simply learn and today we're going to talk about how to rank number one on google high quality content and talk about the impact content has on your ability to get your website ranked number one on google so let's just say you have content on your website and the content is ranking on

59:33you know page four of google and it's that blog with ice cream recipes and if it's just content for the sake of content is not really informative then it's not necessarily going to get good engagement in the eyes of google you know they want to rank content that's very informative it's very fresh it's exciting to read it's interesting it's going to have good engagement so if it's a recipe or an article about any topic if it's the content is just not informative then you're not going to get good engagement and when you don't get good engagement if people don't stay on the site to engage in the content and

1:00:12they just leave the website after landing on the page causing a bounce then the content is just going to continue to fall down the rankings and we want to prevent that we want to move up the rankings we want to be number one on google we don't necessarily want to fall in the rankings for our content so content is a key driver in being able to rank number one on google so if the content is on page nine what can we do well we want to be able to you know take that content and do something with it we feel like we did write engaging content so let's go ahead

1:00:48and share it on social media and to me social media is a good platform to share your content because on social media platforms like facebook for example you're building a community on that platform that community is already interested in your content so if you're sharing an ice cream recipe especially in the summer time and you're engaging with your community on that platform then the likelihood of that community on that platform is going to increase engagement increased engagement will send social signals to the search engine that says hey this content is good quality likewise for any other platform most social media platforms have engagement metrics and those engagement

1:01:33metrics pass signals is it good is it not good do we like this content are we giving it a thumbs up are we going to want to follow it are we going to want to share it and so if you share content that you feel is engaging on social platforms then it's going to be engaging and it's likely going to cause an increase in engagement for example a decrease in bounces and once you share that quality content then the likelihood of it moving up the rankings even as far as number one on google is going to be greater so you always want to start out writing good quality content so let's

1:02:10talk about good quality content because google does take content seriously they do take into account what other people think of that content so high quality content is an important factor so how to create good content that's always the question so let's talk about some best practices here remember in the last segment we talked about keyword research so we want to perform good keyword research why because we want to choose keywords remember we're choosing multiple keywords per page one keyword could be related to our brand one keyword could be related to the content but another key word could be related to a user's intent like recipes if you

1:02:52recall the example we use with bread recipes maybe somebody's looking to type in a keyword that says how do i make you know a bread or how do i make a specific type of bread or how do i make banana bread or what's the best recipe for banana bread they're question related and we want to be able to answer those questions so that's where choosing those right keywords that's going to respond to a user's intent so starts with choosing the right keywords so remember we talked about a number of different tools when we talked about keyword research so there's a research tool that you can use called phrase.io and

1:03:31that will help you do quick research on you know keywords and trends and whatnot so if you know about a research tool that you use for keyword research then drop us a comment below i'd be interested in getting your comments about keyword research and what research tools are out there so if you know something better than phrase.io drop a comment below and we'd be interested in getting your perspective so keyword research is key but creating content that fulfills users requirements so answering those questions it's a recipe we want to answer that question if it's directions we want to answer that question if they don't know how to do something we want

1:04:09to answer that question that's the whole idea behind content content is not just to fill a page it's to really fulfill users requirements that's when you get good engagement so if somebody's typing in something on google and they're looking for an answer your content should answer that question but we also want to make the content readable so in other words you know write for your audience don't impress anybody with very high vocabulary type words that somebody doesn't necessarily know the meaning of don't use jargon don't use a street language for example use everyday common language that's just easily digestible when your audience is reading and then

1:04:52we want to keep that content organized and so when we mean organized we want to use headers and subheaders you know break your content into paragraphs keep the flow organized if we can keep the flow organized then it's going to be easier for somebody to read and then it's okay to add resources especially resources from credible sites so if you can incorporate those resources in there then it's just going to add the credibility to your content let the audience know that hey i've done my research on this topic and this is what this person has to say about it this person who seems to be credible okay so it only adds value to

1:05:28your content so these are all tips to remember when creating content and then the one important tip here is we want to use white hat techniques and when we say white hat techniques that means you know if we've chosen keywords that are going to answer somebody's question we don't want to stuff those keywords into the content we want the content to be naturally written so when we say opt for white hack uh techniques that's what we mean write the content naturally keep it organized keep it readable include third-party sources and make sure it answers a question so they're different types of content so there's content where you just write words to

1:06:08install text based you could also use an infographic an infographic is simply just a graphic that visualizes exactly what you're trying to explain for example if we want to write an article about how to write good engaging content we don't necessarily have to write all that out as a text we can create an infographic so for example here's an infographic on 20 effective ways to basically not bore your readers but write engaging content so you could see this is an infographic it's all graphically laid out so infographics tend to be easier to understand because they're visual they're easy for the end user to comprehend because there's

1:06:54generally no jargon it's usually images that are portraying the points of what you're trying to get across and so it tends to break it up the monotony of just text it's more visually appealing and it's laid out and organized so you can see this infographic has 20 different steps or rules and they lay those out all here in this infographic and the great thing i like about infographics is you could you could share them on social media you can re-engage them as a post you could save them on really any social platform so infographics tend to tell a better story and versus say just writing text you can

1:07:32use video and images so you don't necessarily have to lay it all out in an infographic you can certainly insert a video or an image into your content especially if it's a blog post if it's a blog post then sometimes video and images on its own tell the story you don't necessarily need text to go ahead and tell your story a video or an image as they say tells a thousand words and so images and videos are great to use in a blog post so using different forms of content you know you always want to review your content when a user dwells on your web page for a longer time google will tend

1:08:17to think okay this person's engaged so we're going to rank that favorably so if you're using infographics videos and images then the chances of somebody being more engaged are going to increase versus just text that's not well organized and written out in a way that somebody doesn't necessarily understand so be creative in the types of content you use so longer engaging content tends to bode well with search engines so this is according to hubspot so the more word count you use the more words you use the chances of you ranking higher are going to be better just take into account best practices you want to maybe break up the

1:09:01content with an image organize it make it engaging use headers so it's not necessarily just words it's the words and how those words are written how they're structured the types of keywords you're using how you're engaging with your audience there's a lot of factors again there's best practices we just went over but the key is you know if you have longer more engaging content then it's going to bode better for you on search engines so a couple of steps to create high quality content so you want to begin with a comprehensive introduction so always introduce your content remember the content should be relevant to the keywords so if you're

1:09:42choosing keywords in your keyword research think about answering that question if somebody's typing in bread recipes maybe they're looking for banana bread recipes how to make the best banana bread or how to make banana bread using dried figs we want to be able to align our content with that keyword naturally you want to create a title that's worthy that's click worthy so remember if you're in google search and you're doing search for something simple like bread recipes we want to make something that's going to be you know engaging for somebody to click on like easy perfect yeast bread or easy crusty french bread or something that's

1:10:22going to be engaging you know the best bread recipes or how to make the best homemade bread you know something that's going to draw somebody's attention to the title of that blog post so we want to include lsi keywords so what i mean by lsi keywords in your content we mean you know long tail keywords make it natural headings and subheadings should consist of keywords and variants so if you're writing headers and subheaders include the keyword in there and that way the content always stays relevant to the audience okay shorten your sentences and paragraphs so don't write long paragraphs remember we want to break this up we want to make it easy for the

1:11:04end user to read and we want to always put internal links on our blog post why because if we have internal links then if we have a link from one blog post to another blog post or say our blog post to an internal page on our website we want to make sure that it's relevant content that way somebody's reading something and you have an internal link let's just say from a bread recipes page to a banana bread recipes page then they may find it interesting click on that link and go to the banana bread recipes page so it's keeping somebody engaged on your website so putting in internal

1:11:44linking will help keep the end user engaged because you're offering up links that's relevant to the content you always want to break up that content with images okay we want to use alt tags meaning we want to pen the image with text so that way if the image doesn't load then at least the alt text will load so we can incorporate call out boxes and more importantly we want to update our content regularly so we always want to get the best recipe out there if it's banana bread or different ways to create banana bread or always just coming up with ways to update the content so we

1:12:25want to keep our content our blog post fresh and then we want to include a cta call to action if we include a call to action then that's going to keep somebody engaged and have them act on your content so these are steps to creating high quality content and so let's look at an example here and this is a three month old post on buzzfeed and it's 21 pictures that restore your faith in humanity so it has a lot of likes a lot of tweaks and that means it's engaged people are engaged when reading that and so if we go and look at it as an example we could see it

1:13:02on a buzzfeed here 21 pictures that will restore your faith in humanity so this was written back in 2012 again a lot of engagement but if we look at it we can see immediately that it's taking into account third-party sources it's got some content it's got images it's being broken up by images we can see there's call to actions on there in the form of social so people can go ahead and go ahead and share it if they like it okay it includes videos includes images third-party sources so it's a good post because listen you know it's engaging content it's probably answering somebody's question about humanity and

1:13:46we could see clearly that look you know there's a lot of different examples here from a lot of different sources and we could take action on this content so not just video not just images but text as well and so it's very engaging answers questions takes into account the different types of content available so this is a good post in that regard so content's updated regularly it's engaging and it includes sources from high authority websites some do's and don'ts on the content so take into account the best practices i mentioned about creating high quality content answer those questions that the end user wants to hear you know because that

1:14:27likely is going to be their search and so you want to be able to respond to the end user that's part of creating high quality content different types of content i.e in the form of infographics or videos or text or images you can add images from public domain sites you can be relatable and use examples to clarify points just like the buzzfeed article simplify complex words don't use sophisticated language talk to your audience as if you they were standing right in front of you and use bullet points to exemplify your examples your points so some do's the don'ts obviously don't lift content we don't want to lift

1:15:10content from another website so that's plagiarism so we want to have our own unique content we also don't want to take images from other websites and so if you do happen to find an image that works for your post and it's on somebody else's website ideally that's not a good situation but if you do happen to do that then always give credit to the website okay so if you took it from xyz.com credit xyz.com for the image and even put a link back but ideally you don't want to take images from other websites just as much as you don't want to take copy you don't want to take

1:15:48images use your own imagery and content but if you don't have imagery then you can always go to stock photography there are plenty of websites out there where you can sign up for a subscription like adobe stock images as an example you can sign up for an account and in some cases you can sign up for a free account and use stock imagery okay don't give less information to your audience give them to your audience what they deserve which is the information they're looking for they're looking for the best banana bread recipes give them the best banana bread recipes incorporate your own images break it up with titles give them

1:16:26a good quality piece of content that they're going to be able to engage with and so if you put long paragraphs in your content then it's going to be less engaging so try to avoid those long paragraphs remember shorten up the paragraphs keep the language simple add in images answer those questions use third-party credible sources but write it in your own words and you should be on your way to creating good quality content creating high quality videos and some of the best practices around that so along with everything we mentioned about choosing the right keywords we always need to keep in mind that the videos we create need to be of high

1:17:07quality so the content itself in addition to the keywords this is a primary factor in ranking so in order to have keywords we need to have content and in order to rank we need to have you know good content so let's talk a little bit about creating content and what's involved with that and what we really mean by high quality videos so if you have a video content that is not informative or relevant to the topic it won't rank so that's just common sense so you need to create content that's aligned with the topic obviously and then that way you have keywords that are in line with the content so but if you

1:17:46have content it really isn't aligned with the topic then you're not going to rank no matter how much you've optimized that video so just keep that in mind so there's a couple of things we want to look at here so high quality content is determined by really two metrics so we're not sure about how good our content is and how good of high quality video we've created we want to look at audience retention and user engagement so audience retention is simply the percentage length of your video that the audience has watched it's the percentage your audience has watched so focusing on audience retention is important for

1:18:26people who want their videos to rank high so if you want to rank you need to optimize for the keywords but got to keep in mind content so content is related to audience retention and user engagement so audience retention percentage length your video of your video that the audience has watched and for example it can be both absolute in minutes or percentages so audience retention can be the average view duration or percentage of the audience that watched then we have user engagement so yours are engagement viewers who are engaged with your content and so that means they're either sharing it subscribing commenting or liking so those are all forms of

1:19:07engagement so the percentage of users who watched or how long they watched versus engagement or in combination with engagement are two factors for ranking so let's talk about some tips for creating high quality videos so we want to publish longer videos and so what do we mean behind longer videos so what's the reason for longer videos let's just suppose we have two videos one shorter in length and went longer in length first video is 15 minutes long the second video is seven minutes long so on average if viewers watch about 40 of both videos then video x which is 15 minutes long will have more than twice

1:19:50the watch time of the video that's seven minutes long so remember duration we want you know people to watch our videos longer so if the video is longer in length if it's 40 then it's gonna have a longer audience engagement audience retention so that's one of the reasons you know from a metric standpoint so even when viewers watch you know both videos the time is going to differ so we want to take into account longer videos for primarily that reason is because you know it gives an end user an opportunity to watch the video longer and then it's going to help us rank our videos longer

1:20:28so we talk about watch time so if one video has higher watch time than the other watch time is just the number of views times the average view duration so another tip is we want to plan our video script so we want to keep the content organized my recommendation is you know create an outline first and once you create an outline of how the video is going to flow then start populating with content and so to me that's how you can keep the flow organized okay is really with an outline starting out with it on how there's no videos are no different than say a presentation if you've done a

1:21:06powerpoint presentation you always want to start out doing an outline then we want to upload high resolution videos high resolution we don't want to create videos that you know are small resolution like say you know 400 by 400 resolution or something you know something really small we want to create something a very high res so according to back or link more than 50 of videos on the first page of youtube are high definition so high definition videos of higher quality are going to be shown on the first page of youtube more often than not so high resolution videos organizing the content publishing longer videos are examples of

1:21:48creating high quality videos we also want to make sure that content is relevant to the title so if we're talking about machine learning basics you know obviously the content is going to be about you know intro to machine learning or what is machine learning and then the title should reflect that content so aligning the title sets the expectation for the end user so when they see a title what is machine learning then when they watch the video they're expecting to learn about machine learning and what it is so if it meets expectations then the chances are that person who's watching the video is going to watch it longer and that means it's

1:22:27going to fulfill the viewers requirements and when you align everything accordingly keywords titles content then at the end of the day view users going to watch it and the more they watch it the higher the engagement the higher the engagement the better chance you have to rank some other tips that you could use to create high quality videos so we want to be able to you know use examples to clarify your content so you know don't be afraid to go into another screen like i am i want to i'm talking about videos jump into the machine learning basics video which i've done throughout this session i can simply do that by keeping

1:23:05the user engaged here this video is about machine learning basics well the title is online with the video we made sure that we have a nice description about what the video is about and we're aligning the expectations so not only that i'm showing you example within the video itself so we want to use examples throughout your video to keep the user engaged it will also help clarify what you're trying to express in the video itself so we want to make it visually appealing so visually appealing means imagery or examples in the video and then when we talk about imagery you know you want to use good images in your

1:23:44video so use public domain sites that are available to you like shutterstock or flat icon i mean there are plenty of those sites out there so feel free to use any one of those sites to use high quality images in your video give more information to your audience okay giving maximum relevant information can help gain more views and so when we talk about more information again it goes back to you know examples you use there's no should be no shortage of examples here description use all 5 000 characters at your disposal imagery we want to build up as much information as you can in the video itself to keep the

1:24:24end user the viewer engaged we also want to create original content so always create original content you could certainly get ideas from youtube if you want to create a video about machine learning see what else has already been done do searches on youtube itself but you know when you want to create a video yeah you can create another video about what is machine learning but just make sure it has your own take on it you're the subject matter expert when creating the video create it with your own original content have high audio quality and video effects so just like you see here on this video we have effects in it

1:24:58and the audio is of high quality meaning no background noise no distortion and we want to be able to speak clearly in the video so you want to speak clearly loudly concise just as i'm trying to do now so that you can understand what i'm trying to say or what the viewers trying to to understand when they're watching the video so watching and listening are two of the components and you want to make sure both of our high quality avoid distractions we don't want to pause you don't want to ramble on a particular point too long we want to keep users engaged so you always want to move from

1:25:34one point to the other intermix it with examples those are ways to keep the users engaged we want to include transcripts or subtitles for your video so transcripts is just more content that's aligned with the video and the search engines will be able to pick up that content and help your video rank so to me that's a key component to creating a good video is having the necessary content to go along with the video that outline i referenced earlier in terms of organization you always want to have a content outline so what topics are you going to cover in the video that's why you need the outline to point that out

1:26:12confirm that before you actually start creating the video okay focus on the initial 15 seconds so that's key you know somebody's going to click the play button of your video and if you don't catch them in the first 15 seconds then they're likely going to pause the video or just go ahead and close it out altogether so you want to be able to capture somebody's attention right off the bat and even before they click on that play button you want to make sure again you're exceeding expectations that title is aligned with the content so in your first 15 seconds it basically needs to be catchy but also setting the

1:26:47expectation of what the user is expecting so in this example here we want to pay close attention to the first 15 seconds that's when viewers are most likely to drop off so we can look at audience retention in youtube so use the options above the graph to view absolute audience retention or relative audience retention so audience retention is basically how many views a video received and the percentage of the total number of video views and that includes every moment of the video as a percentage so we'll show you an example of what that looks like so here if we go to the machine learning basics video we

1:27:25can look at the audience retention report and this is since it's been uploaded the lifetime audience retention so here we can see a nice graph the percentage of people who viewed it and how long they viewed it so in percentage so here for example i can see you know 43 44 watch the video for at least two minutes here i can see 28.6 watch it for six minutes plus so that's the audience retention it gives us an idea in terms of percentage how many people or percentage of people watch the video at what length so that's audience retention so we want to keep that number high at the very initial stage of the

1:28:04video and we want to keep it high throughout and that's why you always want to create high quality content using those examples using imagery making it organized content not pausing you know going from one point to the other those are all best practices to keep the viewer engaged and then we want to add resources from well-known sites so throughout this video we've used backlinko there are other sources we've used so if you have a source go ahead and put it in your video to add credibility and then we want to use cards to your videos so this cards is basically a feature that recommends relevant videos to your audience so in

1:28:41addition to machine learning basics there could be other videos about machine learning that we can recommend or youtube can recommend to the audience to set up end screens you want to make sure that with end screens you can use relevant videos to your audience towards the end of your video so you can recommend relevant videos towards the end of your video you can also create playlists so this is a feature that keeps your audience engaged with relevant content by autoplaying the next video so if you enable this feature it's going to go from one video to another pattern interrupts keep the audience engaged so basically it allows your audience to stay within

1:29:22one video without having any interruptions involved and so going back to the did you know audience retention report helps you analyze how well your videos are engaging to the audience so what do we mean by that well if i go back again to my audience retention report how engaging was it well i could see 42 percent 43 watched it on average of 3 minutes and 21 seconds so to me that's pretty good of course we always want 100 of the video the video is seven minutes long if almost half of our audience saw over half of the video then i would say that's pretty good people were engaged

1:30:01so audience retention just is a good report to start looking at to help you understand how engaging is my video if your video is not engaging you know you can always go back and edit it or fix it or tweak it so remember the average view duration for all videos and top performing videos listed by all time we can look at that information as well in addition we can look at demographics so we can get an overview of the age gender and location okay we can look at playback locations report and what the playback locations report does is it helps us determine the platforms where our videos are being streamed from

1:30:38within youtube look at the traffic sources where did the viewers come from devices did they look on mobile or tablet and so if there's any doubts you know if you have any questions please drop a comment below but especially if you have any doubts on the metrics so if we go back into youtube we can look at analytics and if we're looking at analytics we can see more and then this is going to show us everything we need to see from device type so if i click on more i can see my playback location so this will show me where the video was watched it was on a watch page or a

1:31:13channel page i could see the traffic sources i could see the gender and age so if i click on the viewer age report i can see the percentage of views by age so i can get a lot of information about my video and how it's performed who's watched it what they've done with it where they come from all the information they need to know okay so it's all within youtube analytics so again if you have any questions about that you know just drop a comment below especially if you're new to youtube you may have some questions but just know that every video you publish to youtube

1:31:48high quality align with your keywords you're going to be able to view the metrics by looking at youtube analytics now before we get into the tips and tricks let's take a refresher on what exactly is content marketing content marketing is a form of marketing that involves the creation and sharing of online content to help generate audience interest in a brand's product or services this means providing information that the audience considers valuable and relevant in a consistent manner so that it drives some sort of profitable customer action so let's talk about the content that falls under content marketing there's options like blogs videos infographics case studies white papers

1:32:37and ebooks so why is content marketing so important firstly it helps build awareness trust and loyalty in your brand the more your brand provides accurate and well-researched content the more people learn about and trust your brand the more the audience trusts in you the more they're likely to buy from you creating the content is relatively inexpensive and can be done in-house content marketing will also enable your brand to increase traffic to your site and get more conversions it also helps improve other marketing tactics like search engine optimization social media and public relations now let's have a look at the content marketing process the first step is to determine what

1:33:25goals you want to achieve with your marketing campaign it could be increased conversions website sign ups and so on then you set up buyer personas from among your audience that can buy your content but what exactly are buyer personas now these are research-based profiles that represent your target customer buyer personas help you describe your brand's ideal audience the decisions they make the challenges they face their interests and so on next you'll have to set up content audits to determine the best type of content that works for you you also need to set up a content management system like hubspot squarespace wix and wordpress they'll help you with increased collaboration

1:34:12greater support run a b test and much more you need to brainstorm for new forms of content that your audience can enjoy after that you can zero in on a particular form of content that would work the best for you and finally you can publish and manage your content now let's talk about content marketing tips number one remarket your content content marketing is one of the many ways you can spread your content to a buyer audience you can define the audience you want to market to and then tag visitors who come to your site and using google's display network you can strategically position your ads in front

1:34:55of people on google or its partner websites who previously interacted with your website and advertised to them through this you can build awareness and engagement with your audience here's an example of a banner advertisement i would be shown if i was shopping for a macbook pro on amazon and changed my mind at the last moment this ad would maybe stay at the back of my head until eventually i go and finish that purchase now let's go to number two answering complex questions with your content targeting specific keywords is extremely helpful with your content this is why you need to focus on google's featured snippet this position

1:35:38also known as position 0 enhances and draws user attention on the search engine's result page through the featured snippet you can drive a large amount of traffic to your website while cementing your position as an expert in your industry you can have different forms of snippets like definition boxes where a snippet of text gives researchers direct and concise definitions and descriptions you could have tables where data is taken from the page and displayed in a table you could have ordered lists where items are presented in specific order and you can also have unordered lists next up number three we have create a personality for your brand

1:36:21if you're looking to grow a following for your content try not to copy how already established and successful corporate blogs do things nowadays audiences tend to prefer content that has a certain humanness about it tend to follow solo influencers they advertise their brand by being themselves in a way they're selling themselves by being themselves you need to analyze what these popular and influential blogs are doing and incorporate into your brand's website thanks to this your audience will connect with you and come back for more now here's an example of one of the largest players in digital marketing neil patel see how he himself is the brand and if

1:37:07you've gone through his content you know it's pretty great as well that's what you should be striving for moving on to tip number four ensure that your content matches your brand's voice to make sure of this you need to constantly review your editorial standards and make sure your tone and quality remain consistent you need to ask your audience questions about how you can develop and refine your brand's voice by answering these questions you can provide your audience with a more cohesive and helpful experience your tone of your brand can vary on the basis of what type of content you are planning to post and what the goal you

1:37:46want to achieve from the campaign next up we have number five back up your arguments for data using statistics and facts to make a point by including a link to the original source makes it extremely credible this data can help the audience grow trust in your brand to persuade them that your content is valid and valuable this will also help your brand grow as an industry expert at number six we have use specific keywords now make sure you use specific keywords in your content this takes care of the seo aspect behind your content this will also help your content have a greater chance of being found indexed and ranked

1:38:31it could also help your content rank for niche topics within your industry moving on to tip number seven evaluate the success of your content with data earlier we talked about why it's so important that you back up your content with data now let's talk about how data can help you improve analytics tools will help you learn more about how well your content is doing the age demographics of the people enjoying it who doesn't their locations the best time to post and much more with this data you can make sure that your time and money are being used in the best possible way some of the most popular tools in the

1:39:14market are buzzsumo evernote hubspot trello and wordpress these will help you find topics and influencers within your industry you can capture organize and share notes collaborate with team members create sales funnels and much more now we've reached midway right now so i've got a question for you do you guys have any tips for content marketing that we haven't covered yet let me know in the live chat alright so let's get back to our list tip number eight is to be consistent with your content post your best performing content and make sure they follow a consistent schedule finding a balance of the different types of content to be posted with the help of

1:40:03a content calendar will show your audience that you're committed to providing them helpful and informative content this will also establish your brand as an authority and thought leader within your niche it will help your audience depend on you for quality content and give them a reason to return tip number nine is to make your content actionable providing actionable steps or information in your content will coerce your audience to take a particular action quickly it can help you create valuable content and fix pain points faced by your audience build a strong relationship with them and earn their trust it also leads to increased engagement and a positive brand experience

1:40:48it provides users with real value and solutions leading them to take action here we have an example from trello where we see a pop-up with a call to action asking interested users to input their email ids to sign media today involving more than 200 marketers more than 49 percent of them felt content marketing was really important to their digital marketing campaigns and more than 25 percent of their budgets are used for visual advertising content like images infographics videos and other forms of rich media will help you enhance the message of your brand and reach a wider audience here's an example of advertising by coca-cola although there's not a lot of text in

1:41:32the ads you can immediately recognize the unmistakable branding and the message they're trying to send moving on to tip number 11 create trending and evergreen content creating content that's evergreen and trending with your own unique angle statistics and research will be a huge advantage since you'll have to update it every now and then you'll get a great deal out of the work without having to do a lot of work here's an example of one such evergreen article people are never going to stop wanting to learn how to do seo so with a little tweaking every few months to reflect new changes that google may have done you'll

1:42:15have an article that you can get considerable mileage out of next up tip number 12 is to understand content that works for you you need to analyze what content works on different social media platforms for example you all know youtube is the best place for video content instagram and pinterest for visual content twitter for smaller snappy content and so on understanding what works and what doesn't will help you better spread your content across the internet tip number 13 is to understand your target audience now like i mentioned earlier your marketing campaign isn't going to bear fruit without targeting a specific audience understanding who your audience is is

1:43:04one of the most important steps for this you can find this out by asking questions like who you're engaging with online their age location language etc by using social listening to find out what audiences are talking about your brand using tools to research what social channels your audience is using and so on after understanding them you can set up buyer personas for your audience tip number 14 is to perform a b testing now abs testing will help you understand what your audience likes or doesn't what content works for you and much more you can do a b testing on headlines and title tags call to actions content

1:43:49formats image types content length and much more it can also help you make better decisions in the future and finally our tip number 15 is to reach out to people sharing similar content one of the best ways to build your audience is to get people or influencers who already share content within your niche to share your content now since these people already have a trusting audience they would be a lot more likely to enjoy your content content marketing interview questions and answers so thanks for joining again and here's how it's gonna work so if you have any questions to these questions or answers feel free to just comment right

1:44:34below this video and we'll get back to you as soon as possible we're going to go through a series of questions and i'm going to answer those questions for you starting out what are the essential components of a good web content okay so essential components okay so what do we want our content to do well we want it to be useful so web content should be written in a way which caters to what the reader wants okay so somebody's not going to read your content if it's not useful for them okay this because it affects reader engagement okay so if it's not interesting it's not useful

1:45:08somebody's just not gonna read it plain and simple it also has to be engaging so listen even if it is relevant to a user you still have to write the content so it's engaging so you want to add elements like imagery videos hey you can even turn your content into an infographic okay you want to do something that's going to be engaging for the user if it's engaging they're going to read it and engage with the content okay and then good content should have some call to action so content must be written in a way that can drive call to action okay so if you're writing a blog post you know i've

1:45:43seen a lot of blog posts just simply start and with good content but it doesn't leave the user with anywhere to go so have that call to action put some internal links in that content give somebody a place to go after you're done engaging with the good content you write okay so some other things to think about some other components for good content well credibility so you know anybody can write but are you writing about something you know what you're writing about are you a good talking point a good expert or have experience about this content so you also want to use you know information from a legitimate

1:46:21source okay so you don't want to grab something in your and use it in your content that's just not legitimate because it does hurt your credibility and the organization's credibility and then also originality i mean write something that nobody else has written so obviously you don't want to plagiarize because if you plagiarize and there are tools out there where people can easily just put their content in there to see what else is out there see if somebody else has plagiarized it so it's very easy to find people who plagiarize so don't be that person what i would recommend create a good content calendar and come up with some ideas before you

1:46:59write them next question related to content marketing so what are the types of content you can create well there are a lot of things you can create start with the blog blog to me is always a great place to start it's a blank canvas for your ideas your thoughts your opinions okay that's a great thing about a blog it accentuates personality you can create a video videos are always engaging you can create an infographic infographics to me are you know hidden gem instead of somebody reading the same old same old you're laying this out in a very visual way that's easy to understand create a case study okay so

1:47:37if you're a digital marketing expert you've done social media for another client you know write about it you know show the successes show that you are an expert show that you've created successful campaigns and social and in the form of case study you can create a white paper white papers are good educational pieces you can also create an ebook okay ebook hey if you have a lot of content you want to lay it out and ebook's a good way to go and you have a lot of choices here when it comes to content a lot of choices okay so what are the advantages of having a content

1:48:09counter so i alluded to that just a couple of seconds ago so let's really break this down here because content counters to me are so important well first of all calendar part of content calendar allows you to think about dates so if you're planning something you're going to have important dates in mind okay so content calendar it almost ensures you don't miss anything you know that's a good opportunity for you to leverage like you know black friday cyber monday you know it's probably important you know when those days are if you're in e-commerce so that's why having a content calendar helps it helps you plan out your content based on

1:48:45important dates or based on dates that work for what you're trying to do they also help because you could stick to a consistent schedule okay so if you don't have a content calendar you're probably just arbitrarily writing content here and there well what if your users crave and really engage with the content they're going to want more sticking to something consistent is going to really get people come back for more they know when you're going to post they're going to be waiting for it and if it's every tuesday morning eight o'clock hey post it tuesday morning eight o'clock your users will get used to that schedule and

1:49:20it does help build up your following it does help help build up your community and in the end cultivates a long relationship and then having a content calendar also allows you to mix up your content okay so you can see and plan ahead different types of content in different formats that way it allows you to mix it up whether it be a blog post a an infographic a video about different topics okay some other advantages here saving time it just allows you to prepare for the future when you can prepare you're efficient and when you're efficient you're not wasting time and so to me having a content calendar is a

1:50:01must because a lot of us are busy who has time especially if you're going to work in a new company let's say writing content you definitely want to have a content counter because you're going to want to use that time to efficiently plan this is a new company you're going to start working at you want to understand who this company is what they've done in the past what you haven't done and what you want to do okay so all of that helps you plan and prepare and it saves you the time and effort and hassle down the road and then at the end of the day you want to be

1:50:32able to figure out what works so planning your post puts less strain on you and your team members as well as company resources because when you plan and you post you're going to get data and then when you get data it's either going to work or not work and if it doesn't work then you know in the future you're not going to put that piece of content or the topic in the content calendar again it's that simple okay some other advantages fresh content okay so having a con content calendar allows you to always keep content fresh ken you're gonna be on a consistent schedule and you're not gonna be writing about

1:51:05the same things over and over again so it could be just simply twitter if you're putting a content calendar and it together for twitter well you don't want to have the same tweets every other day so it does ensure that you're getting tweets out there that are fresh that are new that are different and again figure out what works a content counter makes it easier to measure results and optimize performance so you always want to you know maybe put some metrics in with your content calendar so you can see side by side content historically that is performed content that is not performed okay so next question you may

1:51:41get what type of content works in each stage of the customer life cycle so you have awareness engagement purchase post-purchase advocacy okay so let's break these down here so awareness okay so you want people to understand who you are okay that could be a guest blog an influencer helping yell it could be a cold email a v a video that can potentially go viral a social media post introducing a product you have engagement so you want people to engage with your content what are you gonna do to get people to engage well you could certainly write an email and have people open that email and go to your website

1:52:20you can have an ebook where people can actually download and read it or you can have a blog where people can comment or landing page where they can fill out a form submission you have evaluation so with social media we know there's a lot of engagement going on but when you're putting content out there you can certainly open it up to testimonials okay you can generate white papers okay or you can generate case studies case study is a good way for companies to evaluate what you've done in the past if you've worked in it for a specific product in the past and it's worked you certainly want to put that out there for

1:52:53potential clients in that same industry purchase trying to get people to purchase what are you going to do well you can certainly have landing pages a nice you know website a nice shopping cart with some nice content okay onboarding emails get those emails out there and get people to go back to the website and purchase of course you can have product and service details as well meaning you know one one page downloadable pdfs that describe the product okay you post purchase okay so people who've already purchased you could certainly send out follow-up emails and you can do blog round-ups you know give people an opportunity to see

1:53:30what features or updates are happening to the product okay of course case studies of repeat customers or content types that detail a new feature or service okay so if somebody's already purchased and you may want to send them some content of another product that complements the product they bought so a lot of things you can do to engage with your user who's already purchased and then advocacy you want people to help you out here so have the user generate the content you can have exclusive discounts for your community they're gonna be your advocates so give them exclusive discounts and then pictures of customers engaging with your products

1:54:09okay who's not gonna share that so you're gonna have people share that information in other words you can generate content where hey people can help you out here and be your advocate okay so how do you decide what topic and subject to write on okay well going back to the content counter that always helps you see what you put in that content calendar but there are some other methods you can use and you could certainly identify your target audience and not only identify your target audience but what their needs are okay so you can write content based on audience you could certainly do some research with keywords okay what's

1:54:44trending what keywords are not trending okay and right around what's trending for example okay you could certainly take a look at social media for example cora i always look at korra core is interesting entertaining informational people are certainly having conversations on core and you can certainly analyze those conversations because they certainly get in depth and you can decide hey do i want to write a topic around something that really just won't go away in terms of conversing core is a good example of analyzing conversations they tend to be a little bit more in depth so some other things you could do you can look at your

1:55:18competitors and what kind of conversations are happening on your competitors blogs or or your competitors social media platforms and pages you can keep track of blogs and articles from subject matter experts commentators critics and so on okay so you can get ideas from them another question you may get which is very important if you're going to start working for a company you need to understand the tone the tone of your content because that is going to fit and be in line with the company you're working for okay so you're always going to have a brand personality so the characteristics of a brand are the guidelines based on which the content

1:55:54strategy is developed the tone of the content must align itself to the content strategy your audience profile so you got you need to determine who your audience is okay and how the brand wants to be seen by that audience so you know if you have an older audience you're not going to use younger audience i.e street lingo or today's lingo and the younger generation uh you're going to use you know language that's going to fit the audience you're talking to and then of course the channel itself so the content you create must be irrespective of the channel and consistent with brand attributes okay so you gotta pick and

1:56:33choose the channel if it's linkedin for example hey you know linkedin is more business oriented okay so you're not gonna be you know as humorous as you would be say on instagram or facebook all of these have one thing in common again that's brand guidelines you have to stay within the brand what is the brand's personality how do we want to talk to our audience and what platform are we using to talk to our audience how do you promote your content once it's live well that's always a good question hey you doing the the work the putting in the hard work to create this you know it

1:57:07could be a video and videos take a long time it could be an infographic an ebook okay so send it out via email okay if you haven't an email list send it out and let people know this content's there put a link in the email or even a piece or snippet or preview of the content in the email so you're using the email to broadcast and encourage people to you know if it's an ebook get the rest of the ebook okay you could certainly leverage social media to engage with your community that's the best you know just as good as email get out there and let people know hey i got i got my book

1:57:41published come and download it you know you can give a discount to the first 100 people that download it okay you can always promote your content via ads so whether that be google or facebook you always have an opportunity to meet more prominent by advertising the content that you have to offer so you can always reach out on social media again targeting interesting people directly so you can always interact with people on social or you can write for others attract people from the web to important pages of your website by guest posting so you can always go on to a popular blog post and write something and you

1:58:20know link it up or or have it be relevant to the content you've written so next question how can you determine how well your content is doing okay very important again you've done all the work you put the content calendar together you got the content ready to go it's published you're promoting it social email guest blogging but you want to determine how it's doing well depends on the channel really is what it comes down to so if it's organic search you want to be able to see if it's ranking for the keywords you optimize that content for if it's social you want to be able to

1:58:55see if you have engagement shares comments etc of course you can always look at analytics and see how much traffic that blog post is getting or that page with the white paper is getting okay so you can always look at your analytics and look at the traffic okay and again you can always look to see if there are conversions in the form of an inquiry or lead or sale so at the end of the day you want to align the content with the channel and you want to align the kpi with the content and channel okay so if it's social you're not likely going to get conversions

1:59:31unless you're doing paid ads if you're posting organically on social then you're probably going to get some engagement so you have to align the right metric with the right channel what are the steps involved in the content marketing process okay so you really need to decide what goal you want to achieve with the content marketing campaign so that goes back to what i was just saying a minute ago if you have content you post it on social then what's the goal what are you trying to achieve well you're probably going to get engagement and likes you need to define buyer personas to determine the audience best suited for

2:00:06your content okay so you're always writing for an audience and you're going to market that content for that audience so you always got to keep that in mind okay run content audits audits to determine the best type of content that can be used in other words how did it perform what kind of engagement did you get with the infographic or did that video really really perform well or do we want to use you know a blog post next time around or an image next time around so continuing on here you want to choose an appropriate content management system okay so how are we managing all this

2:00:42content okay is it wordpress or is it another platform okay you could start brainstorming for ideas for new content so again that goes back to the content calendar you leverage your content counter to always create ideas for new content okay then you want to settle on a particular type of content that you want to create okay so once you come up and you're managing your content you you come up with some ideas then you obviously want to choose the format and then of course you want to publish and manage your content after it's all said and done so these are the steps involved again just quickly decide on the goal the kpi

2:01:21deciding your audience look at what's worked and not worked in the past get your content set up in the platform okay or get the platform ready to go i should say okay generate ideas with that content counter i ideally go to the content calendar for the ideas choose that type and then publish and manage and when i say manage i mean again going back to analytics or going back to the kpi that you align with that content to see if it's performing or not okay so next question here how do you target the right audience for your content it's a very good question you're not writing

2:01:57content for everyone let's be honest here so you have to collect demographics of your target audience based on who's coming to your website based on who subscribed to your emails based on who's following you on social media so in other words you have people interacting with you okay in different channels and you need to understand who these people are so if they fit a certain age range your generation are they skewed more female to male education level what's their affinity or interest okay do they have a certain income so you need to really break down your audience here and you could do that in analytics you could

2:02:34do that on social you can do that just by looking at your email list okay that all those will paint a picture as to who your audience is i'm greg jarbo i'm a member of the market motive faculty in this first section we're going to talk about what content marketing is how it works and also explore why it works it seems like a new buzzword to you it's actually a term that's been around for quite some time it's just web search interest in content marketing has tripled since 2010 according to google trends and that's why a lot of people are now just starting to get their arms around it

2:03:13so what is content marketing well according to rebecca lee a friend of mine who wrote an article in advertising age content marketing is not just a glorified way to say social media marketing it's actually a little broader concept so content marketing does include social media and you can use blogs facebook twitter youtube vimeo linkedin google plus pinterest foursquare instagram flickr stumbleupon tumblr slideshare and quora and you can put all of those together in a content marketing program and all of this content can be optimized so it can be found in search engines as well as in social media or in the usual places like your website

2:04:05one of the ways to sort of conceptualize this is the classic venn diagram brian clark of copy blogger has put together a really interesting white paper called the business case for agile content marketing in which she's created this particular diagram that shows search social and content and the overlap of the three is where he positions content marketing and that may help you understand where it fits it's sort of a little bit of this a little bit of that but it also shows you both the potential leverage that you can get when you begin combining these elements but also the potential conflicts you may encounter inside an organization who

2:04:44says hey wait a second that's my job and the real challenge to content marketing is getting people who have been doing their job independently headed off in their own unique direction to actually collaborate and coordinate what they're doing and leveraging each other's capabilities to create something that's a little more powerful and with that we have come to the end of this video on content marketing full course i hope it was informative and interesting if you have any questions about the topics covered in this video please ask away in the comment section below our team will help you solve your queries thanks for watching stay safe and keep learning

2:05:28hi there if you like this video subscribe to the simply learn youtube channel and click here to watch similar videos to nerd up and get certified click here