RACHEL STERLING: Hello, and welcome
to another Hangout out with the Google Small Business
Community.
My name is Rachel Sterling.
Guys, I could not be more excited for today.
We've got Buzzfeed, masters of content
here, to give us the straight scoop
on how small businesses can create awesome content
marketing.
Let's give a warm community welcome to Keith Hernandez
from Buzzfeed.
Keith, thanks so much for being here.
KEITH HERNANDEZ: Thank you, Rachel.
Thank you for having me.
RACHEL STERLING: Oh no, it's great.
So tell us a little bit about what you do at Buzzfeed.
KEITH HERNANDEZ: Sure.
At Buzzfeed, I'm the Director of Brand Strategy
for our global team.
So what that encompasses is I work with about seven people
across the world to help them put together
great social marketing campaigns.
RACHEL STERLING: That's great.
And we have one question that we always ask all of our guests
before we get started with the discussion.
If you can have a Hangout with anyone in the world,
who would it be, and what's the most embarrassing thing
you would ask them?
KEITH HERNANDEZ: Oh, man.
OK, cool.
It would have to be Elon Musk.
He's just so interesting.
And the most embarrassing question--
I don't know embarrassing it would be,
but I want to know when he's actually
going to admit that he's a superhero
and that he's here to save the world.
RACHEL STERLING: Or he's here to just power
all of our homes and cars.
KEITH HERNANDEZ: Yeah.
Small steps, small things.
RACHEL STERLING: My husband knows that I'm
waiting for the golf wing SUV.
KEITH HERNANDEZ: Oh, yeah.
I'm just waiting to get out of New York City
so that I can feel comfortable buying a Tesla
and run around with it.
RACHEL STERLING: They're awesome.
So let's get started with our conversation today.
We're talking about content marketing.
In advance of this conversation, we
took a poll in the community.
Maybe you answered some of our questions.
And we found that 49% of our members
currently use content marketing.
However, one in five community members
aren't sure they know what content marketing is.
Can you fill us in?
What exactly is content marketing?
KEITH HERNANDEZ: Yeah.
Well, first, it's exciting to hear that 49% are using it.
A little scary that that means a lot of them
also don't know what they're doing.
RACHEL STERLING: Well, let's fill them in.
KEITH HERNANDEZ: But quite simply, content marketing
is telling a story before the sales message.
That's creating and building a narrative and storytelling
through social platforms.
And that could be as simple as taking a picture of the latest
dish at your restaurant or filming a 15 or 30 second yoga
pose for your new studio, or as elaborate as creating
a two or three minute video that would live online.
RACHEL STERLING: I often find that small business owners are
the most passionate about what they're doing, because they're
so ingrained in their business.
And so who better to capture the passion about what they're
working on than themselves?
KEITH HERNANDEZ: It's so true, yeah.
I think the problem that big companies
have some time is trying to figure out how do they
put their personality into something
that's 10,000, 20,000 people.
When it's your passion project, it's
your personality that decided to make this small business,
you should let that shine, and you should let that go out.
So often, people are buying from you
because they know and trust who you are.
So let that live on your social platforms.
RACHEL STERLING: That's really great advice.
Let's talk a little bit more about creating
editorial content.
The best content feels editorial.
KEITH HERNANDEZ: Absolutely.
RACHEL STERLING: And Buzzfeed is awesome at this.
This is why we're here.
You guys create amazing content.
Can you share some best practices
on creating editorial content that
doesn't feel like marketing?
It has to feel more authentic.
KEITH HERNANDEZ: Absolutely.
I think, again, this comes with the generation
that we live in where most people over the age of 21
have seen thousands of advertisements
on a daily basis.
You're bombarded with it.
So we're actually more in tune with what's
happening with advertising than any other generation before.
So we'll tune out when we know there's a sales pitch coming
in the first five seconds.
What we want is a story that's going to entertain us,
delight us, provide us information.
We look at it Buzzfeed that there's four main pillars
that brands should focus on when they're
creating great narrative.
The first one is emotion.
This is the idea that it has to have something,
whether it's a silly laugh, it's bringing a smile
to somebody's face, or it's breaking up their day
in some sort of way.
If you offer that, it feels like a little bit
of an emotional gift, something that they can bring back.
RACHEL STERLING: And it's enjoying for them
to consume that content.
KEITH HERNANDEZ: Absolutely.
RACHEL STERLING: I love reading something where I'm reading it
and it makes me feel something.
You're going to have better brand recall if you actually
can tie in emotion to what you're reading.
KEITH HERNANDEZ: Totally.
And think about your day to day.
If something is just giving you the straight facts rather
than tying it into some emotional accord,
you're going to remember it, but you're not
going to want to share it with your friends.
I think for us, one of the biggest values
is, will somebody take this outside of just reading it
for themselves and think, this is great for me,
but it's also going to be amazing for one of my friends.
I should share that with them.
And that emotional connection starts with that.
RACHEL STERLING: You mentioned four pillars.
Let's go through some of the others.
KEITH HERNANDEZ: Sure, absolutely.
Another one is information.
What we've found-- especially on boards like Pinterest
and Twitter-- if you can provide additional information
that your reader is going to feel value in--
and this is not just the price of the product
or why the product is going to work,
but how they might use it in their day to day.
What we found, for example, is how to videos and hack videos
to make somebody's life easier or better work really well.
RACHEL STERLING: I'm going to make a confession right now.
I have looked at many of the BuzzFeed hair hacks.
I am not as talented as the people that are featured
in the Buzzfeed hack videos.
I'll try it, and it just ends really bad.
And then my husband walks in the room,
and he's like, what are you doing?
And I'm like, don't ask.
KEITH HERNANDEZ: Yeah.
I've also used those, and the curly hair ones
are ones that get me all the time.
And I can see that happened with you as well.
I've tried growing my hair out to ill effect a lot of times.
And I've used the Buzzfeed videos
to tame it down and make sure.
RACHEL STERLING: So maybe this becomes our follow up video,
is you and I try to do all the hair hacks in the Buzzfeed
list.
KEITH HERNANDEZ: I would love that.
We did one where there's a post roulette on you literally
click the button and it tells you what type of hairstyle
to wear that day.
RACHEL STERLING: That's amazing.
KEITH HERNANDEZ: It's a lot of fun.
RACHEL STERLING: OK.
So you talked about emotion.
We talked about information.
What comes next?
KEITH HERNANDEZ: Aspiration.
I think a lot of people are using social media
to think about their future and to think about how
they can better their lives.
So creating content that gives somebody
a goal forward-- one thing we did on the editorial site
recently is a clean eating challenge where we offered up
the recipes, we offered up the food
that they should go out and buy, and also some of the lifestyle
changes to do that.
What we found is that there's a one-to-one relationship when
somebody is starting to prepare for a little piece
of betterness in their life that they'll start
to share it with their friends.
RACHEL STERLING: How was the results from the clean eating
challenge?
KEITH HERNANDEZ: How are they?
RACHEL STERLING: Did people really engage with it,
and did people really change their eating habits
based on those?
KEITH HERNANDEZ: Absolutely.
And we haven't seen the results of before and after pictures
yet, but what we're doing is monitoring on social media
and also following up and encouraging on social media.
So when we see somebody who tags their friend and says,
hey, we have a wedding in three months.
We should start to do this clean eating challenge.
And we see that they've tagged each other,
we will follow up with encouragement.
And that's that personal addition.
I think a lot of people think of Buzzfeed as a big media
company, but we have a community management team.
When people are talking positively,
we want to reinforce those messages.
RACHEL STERLING: That's fantastic.
I think I would fail that.
I have a weakness for donuts and cookies and wine.
Maybe not all at the same time.
But I would certainly fail a clean eating challenge.
KEITH HERNANDEZ: Yeah.
My Instagram name is Cookie Panderer.
So I have also a really difficult weakness
for the cookies.
RACHEL STERLING: I'm definitely seeing a follow up video here.
OK.
So we talked about information, aspiration, emotion.
What's for the fourth one?
KEITH HERNANDEZ: The fourth one-- and it's
probably the one should be ingrained in everything
that you do-- is identity.
I think when people think about marketing,
the old school way of thinking was
let's go for the widest cast, the widest net,
try to get the biggest possible audience with a huge TV spot.
But with social media, you're able to get not only niche,
but micro niche, and think about who exactly you audience is,
and who the best customer potentially could be,
and write for them.
What we found at Buzzfeed is when
we write for somebody-- like curly haired people,
or left-handed people-- you would
think you're leaving out 90% of the audience,
but what you're actually doing is reinforcing
that 10% to feel like the story was written especially
for them.
RACHEL STERLING: We've found this here at Google, also.
I worked at YouTube for a little while.
And when we would talk about doing ads on YouTube,
it was always just don't put your TV spot on YouTube,
because it's not going to work.
You're talking to people on a completely different way,
online versus on television.
KEITH HERNANDEZ: Yeah, absolutely.
And that brings up a great point about being diverse,
having a diverse message for diverse platforms.
The way that you talk on Facebook
should be a little bit different than the way
that you talk on Twitter.
Think about your own social media
habits and the way that you portray yourself on LinkedIn
is a little bit different than the way
that you're going to share something on Snapchat
or on Instagram, or at least I hope.
RACHEL STERLING: Bikini pictures on Snapchat,
business suits on LinkedIn.
KEITH HERNANDEZ: I hope.
Those are general things, but yes.
RACHEL STERLING: Well, thank you so much for breaking that down.
So just so everybody remembers, the four pillars
for creating editorial content are identity, aspiration,
emotion, and information.
Is that correct?
KEITH HERNANDEZ: That's correct.
RACHEL STERLING: OK.
So people are always talking about viral content online.
And people are always saying, I want to create a video
and I want to make it viral.
Can you explain to people what exactly a viral video is,
and what types of content have gone viral on Buzzfeed?
KEITH HERNANDEZ: Yeah.
So be careful with the word "viral,"
because it has different meanings for different folks.
A big company might look at a video that
has 10 or 20 million views as not even a success and not
viral.
But another company might look at getting 5,000, 10,000 people
to sign up for something as a viral success.
So the key for virility for us is really
are you getting outside of your standard social network.
Are people starting to share it a little bit more
than the one or two or three people that
normally would share it.
Is it connecting in a human way?
RACHEL STERLING: And is it connecting
to people who you were not actually
physically connected to?
KEITH HERNANDEZ: Yeah, exactly.
When you start to see those tree branches go away from the 100,
150 people that you normally associate with on Facebook
and into different realms of the internet.
RACHEL STERLING: OK.
So what have you found has been content at Buzzfeed that most
traditionally goes viral?
KEITH HERNANDEZ: I think the key thing
is it's grounded in reality.
The headline has to match what the story is going to do.
I think what we found pretty quickly
is if there's a curiosity gap between the headline
and the story, people are going to feel like they were duped
or tricked into clicking, and they're not
going to want to share it.
RACHEL STERLING: I hate that.
And so many people will do that.
They'll be like, click here to find out
what Kim Kardashian did that you won't even believe,
and then you click there, and it's like, Kim wore a ponytail.
KEITH HERNANDEZ: Yeah, exactly.
It's like, you would not believe what this baby did.
It's going to make your brain explode.
And then you click, and it's like, the baby had food.
RACHEL STERLING: But when Buzzfeed produced an article
about the spider-- watch what happens when this guy kills
a spider, and then it turns into 1,000 spiders-- you literally
showed that, and then it gave me nightmares
for a week after I watched it.
RACHEL STERLING: Yeah.
And the headline is really that moment of truth.
It's that first experience with your brand.
And if you don't deliver in the message afterwards,
you are leaving a little bit on the table.
What you want to do is make sure that what they're getting
is something that they're going to feel
proud of sharing afterwards.
RACHEL STERLING: That's great.
Let's move on to the next question,
which is about formats.
So Buzzfeed has found a lot of success
with content using videos and then the listicle.
And so for those of you who don't know,
listicle is any content that you would put
online that is in a list form.
Would you advise small businesses
to use these two types of formats for creating content?
KEITH HERNANDEZ: Yeah.
The listicle came about by our team realizing
that mobile is here and now.
People are using their mobile phones
more during the day than setting at their desktop.
And so we wanted to create an environment that
was easy for people to scroll through.
So we looked at the slide show as something
that was 5, 10 years ago was a great way
to get out great photography.
But when you're on a mobile phone
and you're waiting in line for your coffee,
trying to get through 50 pictures--
RACHEL STERLING: I hate the loading.
Especially if you're on Starbucks Wi-Fi
and it's slow because so many people are on it,
the loading will kill me.
KEITH HERNANDEZ: Yeah.
Very particular example.
RACHEL STERLING: Sorry.
That's never happened to me.
I go into loading rage.
KEITH HERNANDEZ: So what we did is
we created this listicle, which is a multiple images in one
load so you can get through the whole post
without having to multiple do it.
My suggestion would be to start small rather than trying
to think, oh man, am I going to get to 25 images that will
brighten up somebody's day?
Start with two or three that you think are going to work,
and experiment with those.
Put them into your Pinterest or Facebook or Twitter feed
and see how the comments do.
And if those start to work, then start to build a series.
All of our editors work that way,
where they will create something small, experiment with it,
and then build out into something larger.
RACHEL STERLING: We've gone over format,
and we've talked listicles and videos and the best way
that you should start small.
Let's say I'm a small business owner.
We were chatting before we got started.
Your wife is a yoga instructor.
Let's say I'm a yoga instructor, and I
want to start doing content marketing to advertise
my new yoga studio.
What would you recommend I do as my first couple of steps
as I dip my toe in the water in content marketing?
KEITH HERNANDEZ: One of the first steps
is to see what the rest of the community is doing.
I think the strongest advocates of your brand
will be the other people working in your community.
So I would say look at what they're doing on Instagram,
on Twitter, on Vine, on Facebook,
on all these other social platforms.
And when you want to create stuff, create
a diverse set of messages and images
and see what's really working out there.
But also, build your personality into it.
I think the key to everything with small business
is people look at it as-- the transaction is obviously there.
They want to spend money with your product,
because they feel like there's a value there.
But they are really feeling-- the reason why people
go to small business is to build a community,
and to go outside of just that singular transaction,
and build a long-term relationship.
So build that into everything that you're doing.
RACHEL STERLING: And we've talked ad nauseum here
in the community about how just because you've
made something doesn't mean people
are going to come find it with the exception of your parents
or your kids or whatnot.
So if you've created an awesome piece of content--
let's say I've created this awesome series of poses
for my yoga studio, and I want to make sure
that I get the largest amount of traction with it.
What do I do?
How do I actually make sure that people see the content
that I've created?
KEITH HERNANDEZ: The biggest misconception
about social media marketing is that it's organic
and you don't have to pay for it.
The reality is you do have to put a little bit
of distribution behind it.
And I'm not saying you have to spend hundreds of thousands
or millions of dollars.
But you do have to be specific about how
you're going to get it outside of your social sphere.
Because it would be great-- it's always
encouraging when I get my mom liking my Facebook comments.
It feels great.
RACHEL STERLING: And I bet your mom has a huge network.
KEITH HERNANDEZ: Yeah.
And it gets out there, yeah.
But you do you have to step outside of your social sphere.
And the best way to do that is putting a little bit of pay
behind it.
RACHEL STERLING: OK.
So if we're talking about budget, then-- if you've
got budget, how much of your budget
should go towards creative production versus promotion?
KEITH HERNANDEZ: Great question.
And I think the old way of doing it from the Mad Men era
is you spend 95% of your time thinking about the creative,
thinking about the strategy, the execution,
and you have five minutes left in the meeting, and you go,
oh, crap where are we going to put this?
RACHEL STERLING: We'll just buy some TV spots,
and we'll be done.
KEITH HERNANDEZ: And let's all go home.
Let's get some martinis.
But the reality is, you need to think
about it about a 50-50 balance, and think about the creative,
but also think about how the distribution is
going to work for it.
So an image that might work really well on Instagram
might not work really well on Pinterest,
so you might want to think about creating multiple images there.
The beautiful thing now is that the overhead
on buying great photography, it could just be using your phone.
I think there's a lot of great people
that are just using their phone to take these pictures.
RACHEL STERLING: Well, let's say you don't have a lot of money.
Are there any best practices around the appropriate time
to distribute content?
KEITH HERNANDEZ: Yeah.
I think you have to look at your audience
and look at what they're doing.
At Buzzfeed, we started to see that what
we call our snackable content-- the smaller pieces,
those lists-- work really well during the daytime.
And the reality is, because people are looking at this
before they're going into a meeting.
They have five minutes between the meeting,
and they just want something funny or interesting there.
What we found is longer form content
starting to work between the hours of 6:00 to 10:00,
that prime time hour, because people are multitasking.
They're watching their favorite Sunday shows,
but they're also reading a longer form article,
or they're watching a video in between
those commercial breaks.
RACHEL STERLING: So you should keep that in mind.
If you're thinking about doing any sort of content
distribution, you should think about
that in terms of what type of content am I creating,
and when will people best respond to the content
that I'm putting out there?
And either it's going to be when you release the content,
or if you can put some budget behind promoting it,
it will be when you actually allocate that budget.
KEITH HERNANDEZ: Yeah.
I think the release of it, especially with organic,
has less of an influence.
It's more about when you put the money behind it
and when you experiment.
And I would say try a couple of different things.
Something that we do a lot with our brand partners
is try three to five different time
zones, three to five different ways
of writing the headline just to see which one is sticking,
which one people are actually connecting with
and liking and sharing.
RACHEL STERLING: Well, let's talk about what
connects with people, and let's bring up success.
I found this to be an interesting statistic.
According to the Content Marketing Institute,
77% of businesses use content marketing, but only 37%
think that they are doing it effectively.
How do you know when your content marketing
strategy is working?
KEITH HERNANDEZ: It's tough.
We're not living in the days where
people are going to bring in a coupon and tell you,
I found this in the newspaper, and I want to buy your product.
It's a little bit more of a soft look.
So what we see-- we use something
called Social Lift as our indicator
that something is really working and taking off.
And this is an internal tool that we look at
to see if people are sharing it above and beyond just reading
it themselves.
And so when we see that something is taking off
and people are sharing it and that word of mouth
is happening, we start to put a little bit more weight
behind what we're doing and seeing it work.
RACHEL STERLING: And one of the things that's
really great about the Google Small Business Community
is that you almost have the ability
to post anything that you're working on in the community,
and you can get real time feedback before you even
go wide with it.
Let's say you write a blog post, or you
have an idea for photo series or whatnot--
you could upload it to the community,
get feedback from people, test out
a couple of different headlines, and then
you can actually go put it out there, and buy media, and feel
confident that you know that you've
pressure tested your idea.
KEITH HERNANDEZ: Especially with the small business community,
the best people are your peers, working with them
and understanding what's working for them.
What I've seen-- I have a friend that owns a small coffee
shop in Boston.
And he on his Instagram feed will put coffee shops
around the world, and he'll call them out,
say how fun they look, mention different things
about the personalities that have built those out.
And he gets reciprocal feedback of love from those people.
So really, what you want to do is lift everybody
in your category, everybody that's
doing what you're doing, because that's the strongest way you
can build out a community.
RACHEL STERLING: So he's not selling coffee.
He's just basically saying, I saw this great coffee shop.
And then those other coffee shops are saying, hey,
this guy is great, too.
And so if I was in, let's say, Turkey,
and I went to a local coffee shop,
and I saw that there was this coffee shop in Boston,
I might go seek it out when I went to Boston.
KEITH HERNANDEZ: Absolutely.
And I think that's the fun thing.
The reason people get into the particular small business
that they're getting into is because they
have a passion for it, because there's something about it
that they just can't stop thinking about.
So my friend Ben got into coffee because it's just
been his life passion to understand how the coffee
growers are getting paid, how they're getting subsidized,
and how he can bring a really good cup of coffee
to somebody in a city, and somebody else in Singapore
or Tokyo can do the same thing.
RACHEL STERLING: Let's end our conversation on action.
For all the folks that are watching
at home, or on their phones, or wherever
they're consuming content-- they're small business owners.
They're interested in content marketing.
What are the top three pieces of advice
that you would give to a small businesses who is starting out
on content marketing?
KEITH HERNANDEZ: The first one would be learn and adapt.
We at Buzzfeed create anywhere between 300 and 500 pieces
of content a day.
RACHEL STERLING: Yes.
I'm aware.
I probably read or watch 150 of them a day.
KEITH HERNANDEZ: Amazing.
But that's not always the case.
A lot of these are not what you would call home run pieces.
But what we want to do is have purposeful learning
in what we're doing, and take that learning
to better the next time around.
So my suggestion would be to try multiple different things,
have fun with it, and experiment,
but learn from those mistakes.
Learn from when you didn't connect,
or it felt too sales-y or too marketing heavy,
and learn and adapt for that.
Another one would be to start small.
There's no reason to put a heavy budget into something
and go out big if you're a small business.
Start small.
Take those small steps and incrementally grow,
because that will feel natural to your community
that they're going to be part of it.
Another big one is to build your community into it.
Reward the people that have been with you for a long time.
So if you have a member, or if you
have a local that comes to your restaurant every single day,
feature them a little bit.
Shine a little bit of the light on who your best customers are,
and you'll start to see, again, that reciprocal
love that happens through that.
RACHEL STERLING: You want to have your customers be
brand ambassadors for you.
KEITH HERNANDEZ: Absolutely.
RACHEL STERLING: And the best way to do that is to make them
love your brand, and you do that through content.
KEITH HERNANDEZ: Yeah.
And the final-- and I think this is
the most essential-- is build your personality
into the brand.
You're at an advantage over some of the big companies
out there who are struggling to figure out-- in a social media
world where it's so much about personality,
how do we make our big brand human?
The reality is small businesses are human.
They're run by you.
They're run by your passion.
So use that to your advantage, and make it real and natural
so people really understand who you are behind the business.
RACHEL STERLING: Keith, thanks so much for being here.
KEITH HERNANDEZ: Thank you.
I had a blast.
RACHEL STERLING: And thank you so much for watching.
As always, you can catch all of this information in g.co/gsbc.
Until next time, I'm Rachel Stirling.
Thanks for joining us here in the Google Small Business
Community-- the place where you get the help you
need to succeed on the web.