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Now. I've missed it at my company. This is what we are.

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Functionally, these are the things that we do. We're kind of we're an eclectic company, the technical term for Misfit.

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We do many different things. I've issued the the advice to be to do one thing and be very good at it.

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I like to do lots of different things, but 90% of the people who have come to us, to the people who engage with us, came through this.

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This is a free 16,000 word collection of essays that articulates some of the things we believe as a company that can be found on my blog.

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It's been since turned into a book, but it can be found on my blog today for free on the pursuit of everything.

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It's been downloaded literally hundreds of thousands of times, and it continues to be the main point of entry for all of our work at Misfit.

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Now whenever I consult with organisations about content strategy,

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no matter how big or small one of the great and this is just a pro tip for you guys, this just a pro tip.

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One of the main things that I that I mentioned right from the beginning of any content strategy is to take the time to write a manifesto,

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take the time to go through the cathartic process of articulating why you do what you do.

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It will be invaluable, and it will change everything about your business.

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Now, once you've defined your category and augmented our attributes and your ethos, your essence as a company,

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it's time to start thinking about content marketing and what is content marketing.

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Content marketing is defined as any marketing that involves the creation and sharing of media to acquire or retain customers.

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And it is the most effective low cost form of marketing that the world has ever known.

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But before we can even start, we need to answer these three questions.

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Now, this seems obvious, but you would be surprised at how many organisations don't actually.

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And companies and entrepreneurs don't start to ask these questions of themselves before they get going.

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Who? Who is your customer target and not just your potential customers, but your stakeholders?

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If I'm Disney and I'm selling a new kiddie movie, right?

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The customer, the one who says, who's buying is the parent. But the most influential stakeholder is her seven year old daughter.

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You understand? So understanding the full scope of the people who are influencers in the decision to

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purchase now at larger organisations and I suggest this for even small businesses as well,

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we create what's called customer personas,

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or we actually create fictitious names and fictitious biographies of the people who are stakeholders or or involved in the decision or purchase,

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because it helps you understand and stay focussed on those people as you create content.

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Now two is what your exact offering is. What is specifically what is the offering or service that you that you are providing me?

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This is where your category attributes come in. Helpful. And then the third, of course, is why your unique ness, your value proposition.

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And this is where augmented attributes and ethos, in essence, will help define why it is that I should pay attention to you in the first place.

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The answers to these questions dictate the content that you produce, the audience that you produce it for,

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and the platforms that you'll end up using to distribute the content that that you create.

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Now this right here is a basic marketing matrix is what we use a misfit whenever we're launching a new line of business and a new project,

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or if we're consulting with a client on any new activity that they're launching.

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This is fairly simple, and I'm going to start right here from the left. You have your properties, right.

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These are the things you own your website, your blog, your newsletter. And then you have your embassies.

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These are all your social, social outlets. And it can include it shouldn't include everything.

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It should only include what's relevant to you and your customers, which is not every every social platform on the stock brand mentions.

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This is what you don't control as much. You can control a little bit with PR, but you can't really control it that much.

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This is how, how and when people are blogging about you or reviewing you on sites and whatnot and then advertising, you have full control over this.

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Right? Because this is your ad buy. And in this case, I'm focusing in particular on paid search and social,

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because both of those should apply to every small business, no matter how small you are.

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For the sake of this, the next few minutes, I'm going to focus on the first two on properties and embassies because A, it's either no costs.

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Those two areas, channels are either no cost or low cost, and you control them entirely.

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You control what you do there. Now notice one thing about this matrix is basic matrix here.

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Everything is fed by content. Fred Wilson, famed venture capitalist in New York City who runs Union Square Ventures, who backed Twitter,

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Tumblr and every other Start-Up under the Sun has said in no uncertain terms, a currency that the currency of the web.

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Our links, our hyperlinks to something else, to content. The creation of content is what you share on your blog, on your newsletter, on your embassy.

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So we're going to get into a little bit specific examples of what that is.

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So first we'll take a look at email newsletters.

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Email newsletters are simultaneously the most unsexy yet highest converting content marketing channel that you have available to you today.

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My my buddy Jeff Pulver, who is the founder of a company called Zula, and he was one of the founders of Video.

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IP is a voice over the Internet and one of the people that pioneered it in the early nineties.

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He he told me one time, A.J., always remember this.

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No matter what happens in the social web, no matter all these cute little tools that come out, you live and die by your email list.

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You live and die by your list.

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You can set up an email newsletter easily and freely using things like MailChimp, which I'm sure all of us in here know about it.

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And now I'll give a perfect example of a company that uses their newsletter effectively as a marketing and content marketing tool.

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Creative Mark in San Francisco How many people have heard of Create a Market?

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So Creative Market is an online marketplace where you can buy design assets directly from designers and developers.

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Effectively. It's a farmers market where artisans can sell fonts, typography, themes, plugins, template templates,

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graphics, things that you as a non designer, non developer can purchase and employ easily on your site.

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It's a brilliant concept. They curate the world, their community of designers, and then provide this in a in an easy shopping cart for you to buy.

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It's really great, great service.

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Now they send out this weekly newsletter, Create a Market Does highlighting their new designers and their new design assets every week.

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Now, the essence, it's a beautiful little newsletter. The essence of the newsletter is to provide design inspiration.

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It's not salesy. They do point back to their work, but it's not a bunch of buy buttons all throughout the email.

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They spotlight new shops. They curate things that I might be interested in.

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They get to know me over time based on purchasing patterns and click through on the things that I will actually dig.

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So it gets better and better over time as I use it, and it's actually very, very useful.

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If you're if you're at all in a design industry, which at this day and age, we all are.

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Now, does this drive sales? I had my accountant pull this from our accounting records at Misfit.

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So you can look there at the bottom. That little inspiration newsletter that Creative Market sends me weekly has cost

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me $161 in tiny little transactions over the course of the last six months.

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That's just me in my company. If I included Melissa and the rest of my staff, many of whom need design assets all to all land, in the last six months,

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we've spent $500 just by clicking through on an email newsletter that they send weekly to give us design inspiration.

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But in the end, many times leads to some type of conversion. That's insane.

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Now Creative Market have over 250,000 members and they're only two years old.

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You do the math on whether this piece of content for them and this as as this has not a cutesy newsletter

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but as a significant strategy in their marketing matrix is something that that's worth doing.

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Now let's take a look at another form content marketing blog.

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Right? Everybody knows about blogging.

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This is absolute baseline for any company organisation is easy to set up on things like Square Squarespace Tumblr.

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My personal favourite is WordPress.

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You need a little bit more game to be able to develop there, but I think it's the best of what's available out there for us today.

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If you don't have a blog as a small business these days, the chances are you literally, literally do not exist.

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And your activity on your blog should never be haphazard.

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We always talk about whenever you come and think about a blog, it shouldn't just be about talking,

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you know, Oh, this is happening in the office, or I'm thinking about this idea.

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Set up an editorial calendar. We take blogs and we take advantage of blogs, too.

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We take it for granted that we live in this time, but it gives us the opportunity to have our own editorial under our control.

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If we went back 15 years and told people, told business people, then that they would had this level of power, they'd be shocked at the possibilities.

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Now, a fabulous example of a company using their blog to drive traffic and to gain audience and awareness is Buffer.

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Buffer who here knows Buffer? Probably a few more. Yeah.

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Buffer is a simple tool that allows you to manage all your social media accounts in one place,

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allows you to schedule out updates on all your social media accounts.

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They do this for businesses as well,

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and for businesses they provide deeper analytics for ten bucks a month and they've got an interesting premium strategy.

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Now their blog is ubiquitously spoken about as an indelible resource for people,

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for social media managers and people that are that are social media professionals.

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It's a congregating point for their community, and their blog is why people know them.

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But the genetics of their blog is free education, as you can see from this update, and this is a typical blog post by Buffer.

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They don't actually talk about themselves much.

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Buffer is one of the most open, helpful and transparent companies on the web, and the purpose of their blog is to be helpful,

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to be informative, and to position themselves as thought leaders in social media, which is the space in which they operate in.

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They've already published, I think it's 595 articles, but only one in 20 of those articles are about buffer and about the work that they do a buffer,

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19 of the 20 are free education and information, two that they provide for their community and growing their community base.

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Now, recently, they used a free tool called Screaming Frog from a company called Echo Spiders, a free tool that allows you to measure on your blog.

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It's a desktop application,

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and it'll measure analytics from your your blog and actual your terms and how you're performing and different social sharing outlets.

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And they learn a few things that are about their content activity that I thought it might be useful for us to know.

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You see anything particularly peculiar here? The articles that have the highest shares are also the ones with the most words.

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This is completely perpendicular to what people tell us to do on the web.

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What people are telling us, what conditional advice is, is that everybody's lost their ability to focus, right?

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Nobody reads anymore. That's what we hear. All that's in 140 character world.

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So we just need to we need to keep everything short. Blog.

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Your blog should be 300 words or less, but Buffer outlandishly performs on articles that are 2500 of 2500 words or more.

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Now, why is this the case? It's because they understand their community,

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their audience are social media professionals that need continuing education when their audience went to school.

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Right. Social media moves at such a clip that there's nothing in textbooks that actually

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talks about anything relevant to social media today because it moves so fast.

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So these this is their textbook. They need it. They need this information.

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And buffer provides a valuable service to their community by providing this for free.

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Now, if you know your audience and you know your stakeholders, you can start to craft content that is specifically for them.

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They also learned, to their surprise, that their content had been prolifically shared around on Pinterest.

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Now, what did they do about that? They began optimising all their blogs, right?

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Normally on a blog you would have horizontal or square photos.

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They started optimising and going back in time optimising their blog post to create vertical photos because

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they visually display better on Pinterest and they realise how much they've been short a share on Pinterest.

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They also started to include a bit more infographic or information in the photos that they shared in association with their blog posts.

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And they started using something called rich pins in Pinterest,

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which is a simple snippet of code that will pull the headline, the author, and a little bio about what the article is about.

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Some other fun facts that they learned. The most popular days.

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The posts were Tuesday. Most popular days to share was Monday.

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So they started changing their activity in their content marketing. So Monday is the most popular day to share.

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When we really want something, get out there in our editorial calendar.

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We'll make sure to bring it up on Mondays. Now, the reason I'm sharing this with you is because the people who do this right,

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who do content right, particularly blogging in specific, they realise that it should be data driven.

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Right. Although it's a service to your community and the purpose that you do with that you blog is not to convert.

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It's not to be a salesperson that everything you're talking about is how people can buy your stupid product.

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Right. But buy, buy, buy using tools like.

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Like Spider, which, which I mentioned, you can actually create data driven analysis that lets you know, what do people actually dig?

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What do they share? How many words do they want to see? And it can help inform any content strategy that you provide.

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Now here's another example of a content platform that that people use,

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but many small businesses and start-ups don't, and I'm not sure why, because it's ridiculously inexpensive.

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I missed that whenever we talk about a content strategy. Three Pillars newsletter.

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It's what I've just talked about newsletter, blog, and an actual serious blog strategy and content strategy there.

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And a webinar program. Webinars give you the opportunity to host virtual events about topics that are related to your industry.

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It doesn't matter if you're a baker. It doesn't matter if you're buffering.

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You're you're in social media. It doesn't matter if you're an app builder.

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It doesn't matter what type of business you're in. It basically allows you to produce a workshop or a conference similar to this setting.

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Right. But without the cost and without actually having to gather people in one physical place.

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Now, Citrix, a client of our longstanding client, VARs, their webinar program, for example, never highlights their products.

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Never. They simply invite experts in their field and in their in their world to share about topics that they know that their target market will dig,

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things that they think that their target market or their stakeholders or their audience could gain something from.

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And by doing this, every time they launch a webinar, right, they collect prospects, they collect emails, names.

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They also ask people to put in their industry and their title. They know about the people who are approaching it.

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It's gated content. There's a gate there. The currency is money, it's free.

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But the currency is your email address and a little bit more information about you and that they produce dozens of

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webinars a month and they don't even have to create the content themselves because they just ask experts to come on,

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similar to the way that Magdalena here asked other people outside the university to come out and share with you guys.

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It's the same model. Now let's take a look at something a bit more non-traditional in our content strategy Instagram.

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We all use it, right? Most of us use it to document and curate the exhibition of self, don't we?

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But let's look at an example of Instagram being used as a content strategy by a real business.

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Now wall atmosphere. We run a publishing house, which I mentioned called Misfit Press.

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We love to focus where we come from, an artistic background.

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I come from a design background. So Wall Street is a creative arts magazine.

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It's a print magazine. There's no digital copy of it, Creative Arts Journal.

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And it's about makers and artists in the Midwest.

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Now because of our market and because of human resource limitations.

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Wall Street is one publication that we have we acquired and we only have two part time staff on on on Wall Street,

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which both of them were founders, very creative people, amazing folks.

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But because of those limitations, we have to limit the scope of the channels we can be in.

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So we actually use Instagram as our primary marketing channel.

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Now Wall Street is currently that as a Start-Up,

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we're only on our third issue and we're currently being distributed on shelves in retailers in eight countries.

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All three issues have sold out and we're doubling the print run for issue number four.

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And our entire content strategy is based on our community and Instagram.

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So what type of content do we produce and create here? Borrow our.

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Instagram's fairly simple. It's just an extension at Wolf three of the ideas and stories that you might see in any issue.

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Sometimes we run contests where people can possibly win a copy of Limited Edition magazine.

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It's also an insight into the world and into the mind of Noah, who is the founder and creative director of Wolf Tree.

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So getting an insight into the way he looks. He's a photographer. He's beautiful, beautiful photography.

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And sometimes. This happens.

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You can see in a comment right over here. Anyone in Minneapolis retail your magazine.

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So by creating this this community online that is about photography,

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it's about beauty and simplicity and about the maker movement and about the artisan movement that's cropping up in the Midwest.

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We've created we've collected this community, and some of those people stop by and actually want to become customers.

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And it is the only way that we market, and it costs us exactly $0.

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Now, there is one truth that binds all of these organisations and all these examples that I've given you together.

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They understand one concept. One precept that the concept of community is more powerful than the concept of a customer.