- Content marketing is a killer way to build brand, attract,
and influence customers,
but with so many content marketing channels to post across,
most marketer's to-do list ends up
looking something like this.
Website content, blog content, Facebook posts,
Facebook groups, Facebook stories, Twitter posts,
IG stories
(indistinct babbling)
(disc scratching)
- Time to let you in on a little secret.
At Exposure Ninja, we love content and we found
a content marketing model that works really well for us
and our clients, so that's exactly
what I'm gonna show you today.
Buckle up, me ninjas.
(quick whooshing sound)
Here's how the best marketers create incredible content.
It's a four step process, and it's really simple.
The first step is to identify your target audience.
So, who are you going to be creating the content for?
But more importantly,
what sort of topics do they really care about?
What are their pain points?
This is gonna give you the ideas
for the sorts of content that you can create.
Now, once you've got some ideas, you need to validate them.
So, this is about checking to make sure
that there is enough demand
for the content topics that you are thinking about
so that if you produce that content,
you're actually gonna get some engagement, right?
Now, we'll validate ideas
by doing things like keyword research,
if we're creating content for search to check
how many people are searching for these things each month,
or, if we're creating for social,
we might use a tool like BuzzSumo to check,
are people actually engaging with content about this topic?
Once we've identified a topic our target audience cares
about, we've validated that there's enough demand,
then it's time for research.
Now, research can be taking ideas and information out
of your own head and getting them onto the screen,
it can be talking to people in the company,
or it can be going to do some research online,
it can be running surveys, collecting data.
Once you've done all that,
then it's time to produce the content.
So, this could be writing, it could be filming,
it could be recording audio.
This process works, but the trouble is it's un-scalable
to do it for every single marketing channel.
Ah! You can imagine going through that four-step process
for every post across all of these channels.
Let's say that you're running 10 channels.
You're posting five times per week across those 10 channels.
You don't wanna be doing that 50 times a week.
You just can't do a good job spreading your energy so thin.
So, what ends up happening is people have to compromise
in one of two areas.
Either they typically don't do as much validation
and they don't do as much research
on the content they're producing,
which means it gets less engagement,
or they simply stopped producing for some of their channels,
which means those channels turn into a bit of a ghost town
and that's not a great look for your brand.
Don't worry! There is a better way.
Now, remember our four-step process
for producing amazing content.
Well, it's still the same, but this time,
rather than replicate that process
for every single marketing channel,
we choose one long-form content channel to be our hub
and we do this process once.
For Exposure Ninja and the clients
that we typically work with,
the long-form content hub is usually their blog,
so we'll spend the time identifying the target audience,
validating content topics, researching,
and producing content to go in long-form blog posts.
By the way, I'm gonna show you an example
of this in just a minute.
Now, it's gonna take some time
to put this initial hub content together, but that's okay.
You're gonna get really good leverage on this work later on.
And remember, if you're using the old model,
you are having to go through this exact process
for every marketing channel every week anyway,
so this is saving you a tonne of time only having
to do it once,
but then, once you have that hub content,
you can pull out bits of it
to repurpose across all your other channels.
So, imagine that your long-form content is a blog post
where you might take out tips, quotes, and stats,
and turn this into posts on Instagram,
or you might run a survey about it to an audience
that you've collected in a Facebook group, for example.
You might record a podcast episode about it.
You might film a video or run a webinar about it.
You might send the full article
to some of your existing customers in your email list.
You might send out snippets
of it to prospects in your email list.
You might give it
to your sales team to send to prospects they're talking to.
You might run some PPC traffic to it.
(quiet whooshing sound)
Now, of course, it's not quite as simple
as just taking your long-form blog post,
posting about it on every social channel,
and then writing a press release,
"Hey, we've got a new blog!"
Just to be clear, that will definitely fail.
So, let me give you some nuance here.
Let's look at an example from closer
to home, Exposure Ninja!
So, we're a digital marketing agency,
and one of the things
that we do is we build e-commerce websites for store owners.
Now, we identified a while ago
that our target audience was asking a question.
Should I choose WooCommerce
or Shopify to build out my eCommerce store?
This is a difficult question to answer because there's lots
of pros and cons to each platform and they're two
of the most popular eCommerce platforms in the world.
So, once we validated the idea,
the first thing we did is we wrote
the long-form hub content.
In this case, we wrote it as a really long form blog post
with loads of info and guides to choosing
between the two platforms,
pros and cons of each, advice on how to switch.
There's pictures embedded. There's videos embedded.
It's an amazing post!
Jesse's as an absolute hero,
but she already knows it.
Once we had this massive blog post,
we could take our key elements of it
and turn it into a video script.
We posted that on YouTube and also Facebook
and we posted it
to some Facebook groups that we run as well.
We cut out parts of that video
and turned them into vertical short form video,
which we could use across stories, reels,
and shorts if we want to as well.
We posted about the video
and the blog on LinkedIn Personal and on LinkedIn Brands.
We created a carousel post
on Instagram with a few tips from the video.
Then, we turned the video script into a podcast.
Then we sent an email out
to our customers and our prospects linking them
through to the blog, the video, and the podcast.
So, notice how this target audience, validation, research,
and production thing happened once,
but look at what we're able to get
from that content just by repurposing it
and making sure it's presented in a way that feels native
to each of these different platforms.
So remember, the target audience research,
the topic validation, the topic research,
and the production happened once.
We then just repurpose
and we reformat it to work in each different channel,
but you need to do that!
You can't just take the same information
and just post it in different places.
You wouldn't just read out your blog post
as a podcast, for example.
You might discuss it or you might add some more context
or detailing that you left out from the blog.
If you're posting on Instagram,
you might find a cool picture that represents
what you're talking about.
You might be wondering,
"Tim, do I really need to use all of these channels?"
Simple answer, no.
Even using this model,
running a lot of channels at the same time is
a fair bit of work,
so you're gonna need to prioritise the channels
that are most important
to your business based on what you sell,
how long it takes you to sell it, and who you're selling to.
Of course, people selling you
a particular channel will convince you
that that channel is the most important thing in the world.
If you are not posting 10 TikToks a day
or you are not running a podcast,
then you are a sub-human sloth and you don't even deserve
to take up any space on the internet.
Look at you.
Did you even finish that chapter
of your book in the shower this morning?
(comical springing sound)
Good news, normal person!
You don't have to win every game in the world.
Now, I would suggest prioritising based
on a channel's proximity to commercial intent,
i.e. where are people hanging out,
spending time, before they decide to buy?
Most of the clients Exposure Ninja works
with tend to prioritise search because people are searching
for the product or service that they're selling.
So, the hub content will tend to be blog or knowledge-based.
Of course, we'll also optimise the website content,
we'll drive pay-per-click traffic to it,
we might drive paid social traffic
to re-target visitors who've been on those pages,
and of course, email marketing
because email marketing re-engages dormant customers
so they buy.
And even with a relatively small number
of channels like that, you can get some fantastic results.
We've helped eight figure clients grow over 40% in a year
by dominating Google Search using this sort of approach.
Even running this many channels,
it would've been completely impractical to go
through that whole process for every single channel,
so we use this "Hub and Spoke" approach
to make sure we're getting the most leverage
for our time possible.
By the way, if you want help
with this stuff because you don't have the time
or you're scared of getting it wrong or anything else,
then subscribe to this channel
and request a free review from Exposure Ninja.
We're here to help
and we might even be able to help by doing this for you.
(quick whooshing sound)
So, that's a model that you can use
to do content marketing in 2023.
Now, if you're watching this thinking, "Great, Tim.
How do I actually find out what to write about?"
Well, check out this video.
It shows you how to break your content
into different funnel stages to move your followers
and leads seamlessly through your sales process
to become customers.
So, whatever you sell and whoever you sell to,
you can use this model to do content marketing
that actually grows your business.
Drop us a comment
if you've enjoyed today's video. See you soon.