Now. I've missed it at my company. This is what we are.
Functionally, these are the things that we do. We're kind of we're an eclectic company, the technical term for Misfit.
We do many different things. I've issued the the advice to be to do one thing and be very good at it.
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.
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.
It's been since turned into a book, but it can be found on my blog today for free on the pursuit of everything.
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.
Now whenever I consult with organisations about content strategy,
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.
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,
take the time to go through the cathartic process of articulating why you do what you do.
It will be invaluable, and it will change everything about your business.
Now, once you've defined your category and augmented our attributes and your ethos, your essence as a company,
it's time to start thinking about content marketing and what is content marketing.
Content marketing is defined as any marketing that involves the creation and sharing of media to acquire or retain customers.
And it is the most effective low cost form of marketing that the world has ever known.
But before we can even start, we need to answer these three questions.
Now, this seems obvious, but you would be surprised at how many organisations don't actually.
And companies and entrepreneurs don't start to ask these questions of themselves before they get going.
Who? Who is your customer target and not just your potential customers, but your stakeholders?
If I'm Disney and I'm selling a new kiddie movie, right?
The customer, the one who says, who's buying is the parent. But the most influential stakeholder is her seven year old daughter.
You understand? So understanding the full scope of the people who are influencers in the decision to
purchase now at larger organisations and I suggest this for even small businesses as well,
we create what's called customer personas,
or we actually create fictitious names and fictitious biographies of the people who are stakeholders or or involved in the decision or purchase,
because it helps you understand and stay focussed on those people as you create content.
Now two is what your exact offering is. What is specifically what is the offering or service that you that you are providing me?
This is where your category attributes come in. Helpful. And then the third, of course, is why your unique ness, your value proposition.
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.
The answers to these questions dictate the content that you produce, the audience that you produce it for,
and the platforms that you'll end up using to distribute the content that that you create.
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,
or if we're consulting with a client on any new activity that they're launching.
This is fairly simple, and I'm going to start right here from the left. You have your properties, right.
These are the things you own your website, your blog, your newsletter. And then you have your embassies.
These are all your social, social outlets. And it can include it shouldn't include everything.
It should only include what's relevant to you and your customers, which is not every every social platform on the stock brand mentions.
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.
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.
Right? Because this is your ad buy. And in this case, I'm focusing in particular on paid search and social,
because both of those should apply to every small business, no matter how small you are.
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.
Those two areas, channels are either no cost or low cost, and you control them entirely.
You control what you do there. Now notice one thing about this matrix is basic matrix here.
Everything is fed by content. Fred Wilson, famed venture capitalist in New York City who runs Union Square Ventures, who backed Twitter,
Tumblr and every other Start-Up under the Sun has said in no uncertain terms, a currency that the currency of the web.
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.
So we're going to get into a little bit specific examples of what that is.
So first we'll take a look at email newsletters.
Email newsletters are simultaneously the most unsexy yet highest converting content marketing channel that you have available to you today.
My my buddy Jeff Pulver, who is the founder of a company called Zula, and he was one of the founders of Video.
IP is a voice over the Internet and one of the people that pioneered it in the early nineties.
He he told me one time, A.J., always remember this.
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.
You live and die by your list.
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.
And now I'll give a perfect example of a company that uses their newsletter effectively as a marketing and content marketing tool.
Creative Mark in San Francisco How many people have heard of Create a Market?
So Creative Market is an online marketplace where you can buy design assets directly from designers and developers.
Effectively. It's a farmers market where artisans can sell fonts, typography, themes, plugins, template templates,
graphics, things that you as a non designer, non developer can purchase and employ easily on your site.
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.
It's really great, great service.
Now they send out this weekly newsletter, Create a Market Does highlighting their new designers and their new design assets every week.
Now, the essence, it's a beautiful little newsletter. The essence of the newsletter is to provide design inspiration.
It's not salesy. They do point back to their work, but it's not a bunch of buy buttons all throughout the email.
They spotlight new shops. They curate things that I might be interested in.
They get to know me over time based on purchasing patterns and click through on the things that I will actually dig.
So it gets better and better over time as I use it, and it's actually very, very useful.
If you're if you're at all in a design industry, which at this day and age, we all are.
Now, does this drive sales? I had my accountant pull this from our accounting records at Misfit.
So you can look there at the bottom. That little inspiration newsletter that Creative Market sends me weekly has cost
me $161 in tiny little transactions over the course of the last six months.
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,
we've spent $500 just by clicking through on an email newsletter that they send weekly to give us design inspiration.
But in the end, many times leads to some type of conversion. That's insane.
Now Creative Market have over 250,000 members and they're only two years old.
You do the math on whether this piece of content for them and this as as this has not a cutesy newsletter
but as a significant strategy in their marketing matrix is something that that's worth doing.
Now let's take a look at another form content marketing blog.
Right? Everybody knows about blogging.
This is absolute baseline for any company organisation is easy to set up on things like Square Squarespace Tumblr.
My personal favourite is WordPress.
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.
If you don't have a blog as a small business these days, the chances are you literally, literally do not exist.
And your activity on your blog should never be haphazard.
We always talk about whenever you come and think about a blog, it shouldn't just be about talking,
you know, Oh, this is happening in the office, or I'm thinking about this idea.
Set up an editorial calendar. We take blogs and we take advantage of blogs, too.
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.
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.
Now, a fabulous example of a company using their blog to drive traffic and to gain audience and awareness is Buffer.
Buffer who here knows Buffer? Probably a few more. Yeah.
Buffer is a simple tool that allows you to manage all your social media accounts in one place,
allows you to schedule out updates on all your social media accounts.
They do this for businesses as well,
and for businesses they provide deeper analytics for ten bucks a month and they've got an interesting premium strategy.
Now their blog is ubiquitously spoken about as an indelible resource for people,
for social media managers and people that are that are social media professionals.
It's a congregating point for their community, and their blog is why people know them.
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.
They don't actually talk about themselves much.
Buffer is one of the most open, helpful and transparent companies on the web, and the purpose of their blog is to be helpful,
to be informative, and to position themselves as thought leaders in social media, which is the space in which they operate in.
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,
19 of the 20 are free education and information, two that they provide for their community and growing their community base.
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.
It's a desktop application,
and it'll measure analytics from your your blog and actual your terms and how you're performing and different social sharing outlets.
And they learn a few things that are about their content activity that I thought it might be useful for us to know.
You see anything particularly peculiar here? The articles that have the highest shares are also the ones with the most words.
This is completely perpendicular to what people tell us to do on the web.
What people are telling us, what conditional advice is, is that everybody's lost their ability to focus, right?
Nobody reads anymore. That's what we hear. All that's in 140 character world.
So we just need to we need to keep everything short. Blog.
Your blog should be 300 words or less, but Buffer outlandishly performs on articles that are 2500 of 2500 words or more.
Now, why is this the case? It's because they understand their community,
their audience are social media professionals that need continuing education when their audience went to school.
Right. Social media moves at such a clip that there's nothing in textbooks that actually
talks about anything relevant to social media today because it moves so fast.
So these this is their textbook. They need it. They need this information.
And buffer provides a valuable service to their community by providing this for free.
Now, if you know your audience and you know your stakeholders, you can start to craft content that is specifically for them.
They also learned, to their surprise, that their content had been prolifically shared around on Pinterest.
Now, what did they do about that? They began optimising all their blogs, right?
Normally on a blog you would have horizontal or square photos.
They started optimising and going back in time optimising their blog post to create vertical photos because
they visually display better on Pinterest and they realise how much they've been short a share on Pinterest.
They also started to include a bit more infographic or information in the photos that they shared in association with their blog posts.
And they started using something called rich pins in Pinterest,
which is a simple snippet of code that will pull the headline, the author, and a little bio about what the article is about.
Some other fun facts that they learned. The most popular days.
The posts were Tuesday. Most popular days to share was Monday.
So they started changing their activity in their content marketing. So Monday is the most popular day to share.
When we really want something, get out there in our editorial calendar.
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,
who do content right, particularly blogging in specific, they realise that it should be data driven.
Right. Although it's a service to your community and the purpose that you do with that you blog is not to convert.
It's not to be a salesperson that everything you're talking about is how people can buy your stupid product.
Right. But buy, buy, buy using tools like.
Like Spider, which, which I mentioned, you can actually create data driven analysis that lets you know, what do people actually dig?
What do they share? How many words do they want to see? And it can help inform any content strategy that you provide.
Now here's another example of a content platform that that people use,
but many small businesses and start-ups don't, and I'm not sure why, because it's ridiculously inexpensive.
I missed that whenever we talk about a content strategy. Three Pillars newsletter.
It's what I've just talked about newsletter, blog, and an actual serious blog strategy and content strategy there.
And a webinar program. Webinars give you the opportunity to host virtual events about topics that are related to your industry.
It doesn't matter if you're a baker. It doesn't matter if you're buffering.
You're you're in social media. It doesn't matter if you're an app builder.
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.
Right. But without the cost and without actually having to gather people in one physical place.
Now, Citrix, a client of our longstanding client, VARs, their webinar program, for example, never highlights their products.
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,
things that they think that their target market or their stakeholders or their audience could gain something from.
And by doing this, every time they launch a webinar, right, they collect prospects, they collect emails, names.
They also ask people to put in their industry and their title. They know about the people who are approaching it.
It's gated content. There's a gate there. The currency is money, it's free.
But the currency is your email address and a little bit more information about you and that they produce dozens of
webinars a month and they don't even have to create the content themselves because they just ask experts to come on,
similar to the way that Magdalena here asked other people outside the university to come out and share with you guys.
It's the same model. Now let's take a look at something a bit more non-traditional in our content strategy Instagram.
We all use it, right? Most of us use it to document and curate the exhibition of self, don't we?
But let's look at an example of Instagram being used as a content strategy by a real business.
Now wall atmosphere. We run a publishing house, which I mentioned called Misfit Press.
We love to focus where we come from, an artistic background.
I come from a design background. So Wall Street is a creative arts magazine.
It's a print magazine. There's no digital copy of it, Creative Arts Journal.
And it's about makers and artists in the Midwest.
Now because of our market and because of human resource limitations.
Wall Street is one publication that we have we acquired and we only have two part time staff on on on Wall Street,
which both of them were founders, very creative people, amazing folks.
But because of those limitations, we have to limit the scope of the channels we can be in.
So we actually use Instagram as our primary marketing channel.
Now Wall Street is currently that as a Start-Up,
we're only on our third issue and we're currently being distributed on shelves in retailers in eight countries.
All three issues have sold out and we're doubling the print run for issue number four.
And our entire content strategy is based on our community and Instagram.
So what type of content do we produce and create here? Borrow our.
Instagram's fairly simple. It's just an extension at Wolf three of the ideas and stories that you might see in any issue.
Sometimes we run contests where people can possibly win a copy of Limited Edition magazine.
It's also an insight into the world and into the mind of Noah, who is the founder and creative director of Wolf Tree.
So getting an insight into the way he looks. He's a photographer. He's beautiful, beautiful photography.
And sometimes. This happens.
You can see in a comment right over here. Anyone in Minneapolis retail your magazine.
So by creating this this community online that is about photography,
it's about beauty and simplicity and about the maker movement and about the artisan movement that's cropping up in the Midwest.
We've created we've collected this community, and some of those people stop by and actually want to become customers.
And it is the only way that we market, and it costs us exactly $0.
Now, there is one truth that binds all of these organisations and all these examples that I've given you together.
They understand one concept. One precept that the concept of community is more powerful than the concept of a customer.