A matter of degree

Photo credit: https://www.pexels.com/photo/close-up-shot-of-a-person-holding-a-diploma-and-a-graduation-hat-12752021/*

 

I  got this question from someone on LinkedIn: "If I might ask a question, how do you feel your PhD has helped you in your content writing?"

I'm not a degree snob. In truth, you don't need a PhD to produce content. Some people manage quite well with no degree at all.

The reason I completed the degree back in my early youth is that I thought I'd make a career in academia. Several years of adjuncting disabused me of that notion.

Here's the gist of the answer: 

It helps in ways most people don't appreciate because they think about content marketing as just applying SEO tricks (plug in the keywords, use the right tags, follow a template, and put in a clickbait headline).

You get boring, predictable, and disappointing content when that's all you've got. Even if the information is accurate -- and it frequently is not -- it is not going to be a pleasure to read.

Aiming for high quality content takes more than formulas. And that's where the skills related to earning a PhD are relevant:

🗃1. The ability to do research to find out what you need to know about the industry, product, and the customers who use it to present a clear and accurate account rather than fudging things.
🔍2. Obsession with tracing quotes to the original source
This is very important in an industry in which people tend to copy each other and lose the context and the year of the stat, presenting old information as if it's current.
🗺3. Vision combined with practical planning
Completing a PhD doesn't just take a big idea but organization, persistence and an understanding of how to break down a huge project that last years into smaller steps. You have to do the same when planning a content marketing strategy and content calendar.
📚4. The best models for content in your head
I have a lot of literature in my head that I can draw on to make interesting connections and offer memorable phrases that resonate.

*Yes, I used a stock photo to represent a graduation. I didn't attend any of my own since the 8th grade. 

You can download and read my dissertatio here: CUNY Academic Works

Learn more about what I've done as a content marketing specialist, particularly for B2B tech, here: Experience and Testimonials To book a free phone consultation, use this Calendly link 

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Visit WriteWayPro.weebly.com  Like and follow on Facebook and on LinkedIn 

Where HubSpot messed up

                                                       Photo by Kai Bossom on Unsplash

As I mentioned in What Edison can teach us about SEO, the first rule of writing is following through on what you promise in the title. If you fail to do that, you're guilty of bait-and-switch, or what is commonly known as clickbait.

                                                      Photo by Justus Menke on Unsplash

The promise the reader is not just about the topic covered but the approach and extent promised in the title. Consequently, if the title promises to explain a concept in 300 words, how long should it be? Just 300 word, not 500, and certainly not over 1800 words. Yet that's just what HubSpot did with its article entitled What Is an API? The Answer in 300 Words or Less.

That's Application Programming Interface (API) which connects many functions across many forms of business.

In truth it's a very thorough article that's been updated more than once to grown more comprehensives since it was first published in 2013. However, the promise of the title is not "Everything you need to know about an API" but a super-short overview that can be read in under a minute. For the current length, the article is described as a seven minute read.

What HubSpot should have done in this case is retain whatever short form the article may originally have held and then offered a link to the longer form with a CTA introduced along the lines of, "That's APIs in a nutshell. If you want to understand more about how they work for marketing, take a deep dive into the subject here."

Merely saying, "Here's a brief definition of an API, followed by some key information on how to make one work for your business" as a transition to the extensively detailed explanation that appears under the same title doesn't cut it as following through on the expected KISS (keep it short and simple) content.

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CRO is Like Basketball 

Most Memorable Brand Slogans 

CRO is like basketball

free image from https://www.dreamstime.com/photos-images/basketball-hitting.html

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the term for what marketers do to determine which versions of landing pages or sites yield the best conversion rate. The conversion itself depends on the specific goals in place, the call to action (CTA).

The conversion for an e-commerce site is usually completing a purchase. But it can also be just getting that customer to take the first step on the purchase journey. In such cases, the goal may just be having the prospective customer indicate some level of interest and establishing some kind of connection.

That’s why you have to be clear on your metrics for CRO. It can count as a conversion to have the customer sign up for a subscription to a company newsletter, put in a request for a quote, or even just sharing an email address by signing up for an account.

The way CRO works is like finding the techniques a basketball player can use to get more of the balls he throws into the basket. He’s not taking more throws but throwing more effectively to achieve his goal and score points for the team.

 
That doesn’t assure that they will win every game, but it will tilt the odds in their favor.

How to calculate CRO

You calculate the conversion rate by dividing the number of conversions generated by the number of visits to that page, whether it’s a home page, landing page, or blog post. That means that if you have 10,000 visits, out o f which you have 150 conversions, you have a1.5% conversion rate. If your optimization results in getting 200 conversions out of the same number of visits, you’ve achieved a 2% conversion rate.

Given that it is a percentage, a high conversion rate is not a function of a larger number of visits but of more of those visits translating into conversions. That’s what it means to optimize the rate, getting more value out of your existing traffic. It’s not about generating new visitors but out of getting more of the ones you draw to convert.

Phases of conversion rate optimization

CRO involves testing various attributes, from colors to picture placement, to button shapes, to the steps involved in checkout. The first phase in the process of CRO is the research and hypothesis phase, in which the particular attributes that are correlated with better conversions are identified. They are then subject to A/B testing to discover if the site with them does indeed perform better with a lower bounce rate than the one without them.

Why conversion rate optimization is important

Before CRO was adopted as a data-driven practice, the only way to discover if something was promoting or hindering conversion was to set up your site that way and wait a while until you had results. You would then have to guess what needed tweaking, and through trial-and-error may have finally arrived at an optimized site. So while you may have arrived at the same point in the end, it would have only been achieved at the cost of lost conversions for all those months of trying to figure out what are the bottlenecks in your conversion funnel. Now A/B testing tools make it possible to discover the most effective way to set up your website by working through different versions to get data on what works more quickly.

Conversion rate optimization best practices

In general, conversion rates improve when visitors have to do less work to find what they want. That means that sites designed according to CRO best practices typically include a clean look like that allows them to easily navigate to where they want to go, obviously placed and colored specific call to action buttons, and no jumping through hoops for the contact information that provides leads and builds connection, whether that is a phone number, email, or live chat. All those contribute to expediting the customer's buying decision.
Benefits of CRO

Applying CRO makes your sites work better to achieve your goals, and that brings several benefits:

Better bang for your marketing bucks
When your landing page delivers more conversions, you get better returns from your ad spend. CRO helps drive site visitors toward what they seek to complete the purchase journey. Having that in places on your site delivers a better return on all of your marketing investments, and you will see revenue growth as a result of more conversions.

Improved understanding of your visitor customer experience

Conversion research reveals both quantitative and qualitative data about visitor responses. It reveals which parts are sticking points that can prevent them from proceeding through their customer journey, as well as what they do find appealing in your site. Working off that information, you can better plan your content and layout going forward based on deeper insight into your target audience.

Getting a leg up on your competition

Better conversion rates indicate increased visitor engagement that can boost your traffic as well as reduce bounce rates. Because Google takes bounce rates into account in ranking, getting visitors to stick around a while on your site can improve your search engine ranking to achieve a leg up on your competition. That, in turn, allows your site to draw more visitors that will convert at a higher rate.

Related posts:

Make your content as accessible as possible

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What Edison can teach us about SEO

Think marathon rather than sprint when planning content marketing

What Edison can teach us about SEO

en.wikipedia.org

 

No, Edison didn’t invent search engine optimization. But he did make a habit of tinkering around until he found what worked. You have to do the same to optimize your SEO.

Are we really going to talk about Edison? Yes. The first lesson of SEO is that the title

must match the content because it is the promise you make that the content has to deliver. 

You want to build an audience by giving them content that they find so good, they share it.
Clickbait always disappoints and so would only be shared by those who don’t really read

the content. 

Why SEO is important

People put a lot of trust in what comes up as a result in organic search precisely because it
comes across as information they seek rather than ads people paid to have shown to them.
While it’s easier to get fast results when you pay for ads, a solid content strategy that

incorporates SEO will offer a greater ROI over time.

What people get wrong about SEO

The biggest mistake people make when deciding to implement SEO is thinking of it as a

formula that can easily be applied to any site to boost rankings instantly. SEO doesn’t

work like that.

You don’t just read up on some SEO tips, apply them, and expect surges of traffic overnight.
As is always the case of seeing results from content marketing, you  have to allow six months to see measurable results from working through necessary tweaks

to titles, keywords, tags, etc. 

Improving it involves understanding what brings people to your content, what they’re

looking for, and how they’re phrasing their searches. That can inform your strategy

for creating content that is is is both relevant to your brand and to your audience’s

concerns, so the context within your work is important. 

Understanding SEO in context of your content

As someone who has blogged for fun since 2005, I’ve written about a variety of topics that

interest me without any though of popularity or monetization. Google Search Console

reports give me valuable insights into SEO by showing me not just which posts gets clicks

but which queries bring them to people's attention.

My post on Edison is far and above the most popular post on that blog, as you can

see from the top five shown below. The other four have something in common with

the Edison blog; they reference famous people. Those names are key component

of some of the queries that bring people to my blog. That was one insight derived

from studying Search Console.

Lightbulb* interest persists

Google doesn’t just provide me with the statistics here; it shows me what brings people to a post with emails that offer updates on performance, as well as the queries people type in that drives them to my site.

The latest one offered this insight:

How do people find you?

Top growing queries

Compared to previous month

how many times did edison fail before inventing the lightbulb

+18 clicks (web)

how many tries did it take to invent the lightbulb

+9 clicks (web)

how many tries to invent the lightbulb

+9 clicks (web)

Top performing queries

Query

Clicks (web)

how many times did edison fail before inventing the lightbulb

35

how many times did it take to invent the lightbulb

13

how many tries to invent the lightbulb

11

I wrote the blog on Edison back in 2015 when my curiosity was piqued about the myth of a thousand attempts to get it right after visiting his lab and home in New Jersey. Clearly many
others share that curiosity, and it is their query that drives traffic to the blog, delivering SEO
results that far exceed what I could get on social media.

Keep your content updated

Another thing to remember is this: the lightbulb’s development certainly didn’t
end when Edison filed for a patent on the bamboo filament version. It continued
to evolve over time, and your content has to as well, to stay relevant and rank well.

Accordingly, in 2020 I added several updates to the blog. They ranged from warnings about the Edison sites having closed to visitors and offering only virtual tours to more details about the evolution of the lightbulb until Edison’s patent, including the work of Lewis Howard Latimer, who was obliquely referenced by Joe Biden in the summer.

In 2022, I added a reference to the HBO series, The Gilded Age because the seventh episode
makes a point of bringing up Latimer in connection with Edison. The problem with that is
that show is set in 1882 when Latimer was still working for Edison's competitor. Though
he did come to work for Edison, that was in 1884. He also was working in the New York
office, primarily on patent issues -- not in the Menlo Park lab where the tinkering took
place.

Google is constantly adjusting its algorithms, so you have to constantly adjust your own
content to keep it optimized. SEO is not an ultimate destination but constantly evolving
journey of discovery.


*Note on "lightbulb" as one word. I opted for that here because it is AP style; however, writing it as two words is also correct.

Related:

Make Your Content as Accessible as Possible
7 Ways to Grab Customer Attention in Subject Lines
CRO is Like Basketball
Think Marathon Rather Than Sprint When Planning Content Marketing
Most Memorable Brand Slogans

Visit WriteWayPro.weebly.com  Like and follow on Facebook and on LinkedIn

Do you think this level of content is beyond your budget? Think again. Poor quality content not only fails to deliver the ROI you get from high quality content; it can actually harm your brand by demoting the the site ranking you've invested so much in building up.

What you really can't afford is poor quality content. Hire a seasoned pro to craft the right message for your organization and your demographics. Learn more here and book a free consultation call.

Think marathon rather than sprint when planning content marketing

Photo by Steven Lelham on Unsplash

Done right, content marketing will deliver an ROI measured in terms of the LTV of a customer. 

But it’s a marathon -- not a sprint.

What makes content marketing  distinct from other forms of marketing is that its primary goal is to engage your target audience’s interest rather than lead immediately to a call-to-action to buy.. The content can take many forms, and part of planning an effective strategy is selecting the medium that is most likely  to capture your audience’s attention. 

For example, a kitchenware seller may send out recipes or blogs that offer advice on healthy substitutions to make guilt-free desserts. But it can also use video content effectively to demonstrate techniques in cooking or offer a downloadable app that converts cooking  measurements from ounces to grams or milliliters.  

Even infographics can be tailored for such a seller. For example, it can show the shift in demand and supply chain issues to explain why you may find shortages of certain key ingredients and suggest possible substitutions for recipes.  

What all the approaches described above have in common is that they position the brand as a credible source of information within its own defined niche. Over time that leads to a deepened relationship with your audience. 

Content marketing goals

Some B2C marketers have trouble defining their content marketing goals, though it generally falls into one  of the top six for identified a  Content Marketing Institute survey: 

            Creating brand awareness (84%)

• Educating audiences (75%)

• Building credibility/trust (65%)

• Nurturing subscribers/audiences (49%)

• Generating sales/revenue (48%)

• Building a subscribed audience (38%)

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Seeing  you consistently address their  interests rather than just promoting yourself  makes them feel more connected to your brand. As a result, they will be more inclined to buy from you than from brands that have not invested in earring their trust. 

Seeing  you consistently address their  interests rather than just promoting yourself  makes them feel more connected to your brand. As a result, they will be more inclined to buy from you than from brands that have not invested in earring their trust. 

 Like SEO strategy, content marketing is a long-term strategy that can take six months or even longer to demonstrate significant lifts for your targets. However, truly solid content marketing that your audience really appreciates can sometimes even deliver more immediate ROI. 

The right way and wrong way to approach content marketing

So how do you know if you’re doing it right? You look at others who are putting out great content and those who can’t break out of the self-promotion mold even when they claim to want to do content marketing.

The point comes across clearly in my own experience in managing the content and advertising for a bridal magazine in which the hairstylist got it right and the photographer got it wrong. She gave readers tips that they could use, while he wrote about himself and his approach to photography. 

The results were clear. The photographer was disappointed that  the article didn’t generate sales instantly even though many people told him they saw it. The hairstylist was thrilled that the article brought her more customers than any advertising had ever done. 

Granted, women get their hair done more frequently than they hire photographers, but that is all the more reason for the photographer to recognize that he cannot expect immediate sales.  His real error was in squandering the opportunity to do content marketing right. 

The photographer failed to  offer the audience anything of value to them because he was so intent on self-promotion that he refused to put himself in the shoes of his audience and consider what they would want to learn. The hairstylist, on the other hand, instinctively understood what content would appeal to her audience and was rewarded for giving it to them. 

In the case of the hairstylists, the business leads came in right away, which is somewhat unusual. Typically, though, such a strong response only develops after a series of articles or videos build up a following.

Related:

7 Habits of Highly Effective Marketers

Make Your Content as Accessible as Possible

What Edison Can Teach Us About SEO

7 Ways to Grab Customer Attention in Subject Lines

CRO is Like Basketball

Do you think this level of content is beyond your budget? Think again. Poor quality content not only fails to deliver the ROI you get from high quality content; it can actually harm your brand by demoting the the site ranking you've invested so much in building up.

What you really can't afford is poor quality content. Hire a seasoned pro to craft the right message for your organization and your demographics. Learn more here and book a free consultation call.

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