(upbeat music)
- If you paid attention to anything in marketing these days,
you've heard the word content.
You've heard people talk about content being king.
I'm here to tell you it's air today.
It powers almost every single channel.
But don't let that scare you
because a lot of people look at content
as just another tactic, more stuff they have to do.
But I'm here to tell you less is more, but with a plan.
You don't need more content,
you need very focused content that is very intent
on attracting and guiding a customer journey.
Think of content as the voice of strategy.
Now, the first way to determine
what content you should write, what should be in your plan,
is to do something that a lot
of SEO folks call keyword research.
Now don't let that intimidate you either.
It's not just for search engine optimization.
What keyword research allows you to do is discover
what people actually are looking for,
what questions they actually are asking,
what's their intent when they turn to a search engine
and start trying to solve a problem.
That's going to be the basis of how we determine
what content is going to be important for us
to add to our website and to all of our marketing efforts.
What I want you to do is look for maybe four or five
what I call hub themes.
These are your key topics.
Or if you were writing a book,
these might be the major sections that kind of bring
the body of work of your book together.
So for example, if you were in estate attorney,
it might be probate,
or a financial advisor,
maybe one of their hub themes would be estate planning.
What you want to do is create these four or five themes,
and what you're going to do is you're going to come back to,
these are going to be the major sections of your website,
but you're going to come back and you're going to contribute
more content to each of those themes.
And we're going to tie all those together
so that they become an asset for your business,
and they're based on the major things that people,
your ideal client, are out there looking for.
There are a couple of tools to help you get started on this.
The first one is something called
the Google Keyword Planner.
Now this is a tool that's actually
to help advertisers do a better job of advertising.
But what it does is it gives you data
into what people are searching for,
the volume they're searching for,
what people are actually willing
to pay for those search terms.
And this can be a great place to start
to kind of wind down what your themes are going to be.
Maybe it's a list of 8 or 10 or 12 topics
that you come up with
that you think maybe these are good topics.
There's another kind of fun tool called AnswerThePublic.
So it's just answerthepublic.com.
And what that does is that takes your search terms.
So if maybe you come up with some of your keyword phrases
in the Google Keyword Planner,
you take them to AnswerThePublic
and it will give you a whole list of the types
of questions people ask around those themes.
And I have to tell, questions are really important
because it's pretty easy to know
what somebody is looking for
when they ask a specific question,
there is very high intent.
So you might also want to look at your own questions,
the types of questions that you get from clients.
Those can be great hub theme topics.
Look at your sent email in your outgoing box.
All the emails you've sent over the years can in many cases,
start to turn up themes and questions and topics
that people are talking about.
So we're going to create this list of 8, 10, 12 themes,
and then we're going to spend some time doing
a little more research to get that down
to your four or five hub themes
that are going to be the basis of your editorial plan
for the next 12 months.
(upbeat music)