Content Strategy & SEO: How to Win at Both

okay everybody it's robina here i don't think you can see me on screen um but you can certainly hear my voice i'm uh thrilled to introduce our next speaker um all the way from sydney um and from hubspot as well so looking at one of the other uh enterprise um offers that we've got i'm thrilled to introduce the senior marketing manager for australia in new zealand for hubspot alyssa hudson alyssa began

her career in seo and content strategy she then joined hubspot almost five years ago to manage campaigns and co-marketing for the asia-pacific region before moving into demand generation and automation in this role alyssa ran hubspot's first experiments with facebook messenger as a marketing channel and built the company's first chat bots in 2018 alyssa was appointed hubspot's pr manager for the asia pacific region responsible for media and events in australia singapore and

india now alyssa works on hubspot's global acquisition team focusing on seo for the hubspot academy where you can learn so much over to elissa thank you so much thanks hey everyone uh welcome to today's session on how to create a winning content strategy um mine is lissa i think we kind of just covered who i am what i do um but i just recently moved over to the hubspot academy team and

now i'm now focused on content strategy and seo for hubspot academy so in terms of the agenda to the day um put it into four parts kind of like four um things i like to call i guess the pillars of content strategy we're gonna start with content planning um moving on to content optimization content promotion and how to measure our results okay so let's kick it off with content planning but before

we go and start planning our latest and greatest video blog post whatever you want to call it um we want to ask ourselves one pretty simple question and that's who are we creating our content for now if you've been doing content marketing for a while now you're probably rolling your eyes at me thinking that's such an obvious question but it's something that i often see um even the most experienced content marketers

is kind of losing sight of um as they really dig into their content strategy so a common answer to a question like this i find is oh we're creating content for millennials that's our target market or um our target market is women between the ages of 20 and 40.

and while that's all good and well um it's kind of limited what we're actually looking for is something called a buyer persona and a buyer persona is like a fictional um character based on your ideal customer so you can see up here we've got finance frank human resources hannah and these kind of seem a little bit fun or whatever um but they actually do something pretty powerful and they turn that demographic

into like a living breathing person that you can actually imagine um and in practice your buyer persona looks something like this this is quite a condensed version of a buy persona but it contains our key elements so we've obviously got a demographic information up there and we've also got some psychographic information so um this person's goals and challenges the things that they care about um and yours will probably be much more

in depth and this is just a very top-line example and once we've got that by a persona that really sits at the heart of our entire content strategy it helps us understand what content we should be creating uh where we should be publishing and promoting that content and where in the buyers journey we want to be kind of serving that content up to our persona now if you don't have a buy

persona already developed um i would really recommend makemypersona.com this is a free tool that we created at hubspot and it asks you um some different questions about your target audience and splits out like a really nice uh one pager summarizing your buyer persona that you can share with your teams you can share with your freelancers if you use freelance writers or content creators just to get everybody on the same page it's

a really really useful thing to have but having a buyer persona doesn't solve all of our problems and that's just the tip of the iceberg we now need to decide what content to actually create for them and a good place to start here is going back to your bios journey and asking yourself what does your persona need help with at each stage in their buyer's journey so the buyer's journey is typically

split into three parts got awareness stage consideration stage and decision stage at the awareness stage your prospect is probably doing some very top-line research they're just trying to more clearly understand and kind of give a name to the problem that they have or the goal that they want to achieve so in hubspot's case um we work with a lot of marketers or um business owners that kind of thing so somebody a

hubspot a hubspot persona in um their awareness stage might be going online and searching things like how do i get more customers online at the consideration stage your prospect has kind of done their initial research have a bit more of an idea of the specific things they might be looking for and are now looking into some of the approaches or methods that they can use to solve that challenge or achieve that

goal so following on from the previous example here um they might be at this stage searching for something like how to use social media to get more customers or more specifically like how can i use instagram to um convert more people um into my customers then at the decision stage um this is where your prospect kind of understands what can solve their problem or help them achieve their goal um but they

need um to either purchase something or to purchase a service to help them get there so at this stage a prospect of hubspot might have loads of different um vendors um or software providers that could help them solve this problem or help them achieve this goal and at the decision stage they're looking for content that's going to help them decide which one to go with so at this stage they might be

looking for case studies and looking for online reviews all that kind of thing so at this stage you just want to be thinking about what that would look like for you and for your buyer persona but while thinking about our buyers goals and our buyers um journey we don't want to forget our own goals our own business goals in the process of doing that so what i would also recommend thinking about

is what are your business goals in terms of your content what do you want producing this content to achieve for you and your business so at the awareness stage for that kind of content you might be using metrics like traffic or subscribers to your blog um to measure the success of that piece of content or that kind of content at the consideration stage it's quite common to measure leads or marketing qualified

leads and at the decision stage it's more common to be measuring the number of customers or the dollar value of those customers in terms of revenue right so now we've thought about you know our buy persona our buyers journey our goals and kind of what content roughly we might look to produce at each stage of the buyer's journey a lot of people then start jumping right into keywords and they're like we

want to rank for this this and this keyword but here i'd encourage you to kind of take a step back and think more in terms of the topics that you want to own as a business so broad topics um and your goal here is to create kind of a sphere of influence on the internet with your content around these topics so for me as a marketer at hubspot um my topics might

be inbound marketing i want to own that as a business social media email marketing all the things that are quite closely related to our product that we help people get better at so think about what those things might be for your business those broad topics before we even get into doing any keyword research i'm going to share with you now a couple of tools that i really like to use to kind

of just get the ideas flowing again we're not really getting into keyword research stage yet we're just thinking about the kind of topics we want to own and what our buyer personas white might be um looking to learn around those topics so answer the public is a really great one you can put in your broad topic and it will spit out all the different um questions that people are typing into google

around that topic so i've put in here and it's a little bit small and hard to see by putting inbound marketing um and you can see here that people are searching things like how inbound marketing works um what is enterprise inbound marketing um what is inbound marketing youtube so there's even some clues around the type of content that people are looking to find um so yeah this could be a really good

one at this early stage for just finding uh different ideas and kind of getting your creative juices flowing the second one i really like is google alerts this is a really good to keep your eye on other content that is being created around this topic so you can set up an email alert and you will receive an email um with different content that's been published around that topic so it's a good

idea to keep on top of what your competitors are doing but also just like keep aware of any news stories or kind of trending topics in your industry around this topic so yeah that's another really great one serves a slightly different purpose but i would recommend setting up a google alert for your topic third is buzzsumo bassoon are great for understanding uh what kind of content is performing best on which social

channels um so if you invest a lot of time in social media as a business this might be a good one for you just to go on there and see you know like what kind of content relating to your broad topic is performing well on different channels for example linkedin pinterest twitter whatever that might be um so yeah i recommend doing that if social is a big kind of traffic driver for

you already the fourth is google trends now google trends is really good um when you have too many ideas and you struggle to prioritize in terms of kind of your content calendar or when to create this content so you can see here i've typed into google trends hangover cures and where to buy wine say i work for a wine merchant and i'm looking um i'm looking to create some blog content for

them now i can see by typing to google trends that people don't really start searching for either of these topics till we get kind of closer to silly season so it's probably not necessary for me to focus on this kind of content during q1 or q2 maybe i leave it to the back end of q3 instead and it's just a really good way to help you understand the seasonality of different um

content pieces or topics and then finally i think you kind of can't beat getting ideas from the humans that work within your business so chat to the people who are working on like i guess the theoretical front lines of your business your sales reps your account managers if you have them customer support if you have it and start to understand like what other common goals challenges frustrations that your buyer persona is

telling um your employees that they have you can also scour internal documents if you're a company that likes to write everything down internally um i do this on our internal wiki quite a lot um industry podcasts to take like a broader view of what your um kind of target market and buyer persona is wanting to learn about there's loads of different ways that you can start to map out or think about

the kind of content you might want to create so once you've kind of done that and started looking kind of briefly into your core topics you want to define them so you might have done some research and found that like the core topic that you thought was a good fit based on a bit of research actually isn't what you thought it was and you need to go back and think of something

else so at this stage you just want to go to uh going to want to solidify what those broad topics are that you want to own as a brand and then beneath those core topics you want to map out five to ten core problems that your buyer persona faces within each of those topics so if i use the inbound marketing example again that's my broad topic one of the problems might be

um that uh how to you know how do i convince my boss inbound marketing is worth trying or um how can i see quicker returns on inbound marketing that kind of thing that might be of some of the things that came up in my research and then you're going to want to validate that these things are worth creating content on by researching how many times they're searched for in a month and

what the keyword difficulty is so i'd recommend um using tools like ahrefs or semrush for this kind of research um they do have free versions or you can use google's own keyword planner um but what you're looking for here is to try to understand you know like whether this core problem um keywords around that or long tail phrase based keywords questions around that are receiving enough searches for it to be worth

your time now it might seem like that was a lot of work and i guess but that's actually quite surface level content planning um and i can't go through the ins and outs of everything with you today because you just don't have time but what i would recommend doing is if you if you want to kind of get really really good at this and be really strategic in your approach um i

would learn how to do in-depth content planning um using what we call a search insights report and we actually have an academy course on this on hotspot academy it's completely free to take um it'll probably take you about an hour and our head of content seo teaches you how we do this content planning process for hubspot's own blog and there's loads of templates in there that you can use as well and

it will essentially guide you through how to do in-depth content planning and keyword research step by step so really recommend take taking that course if you want to kind of take your knowledge to the next level all right so now that we've got our ideas we've done our keyword research we know what content we're going to create we need to create it and with that comes optimizing it so i'm going to

focus for the most part here on how to optimize your content for organic search and what that loosely translates to is google and for most of us and that's because seo um leaves a lot of us feeling like this um it can feel like a really dark art or like the part of marketing that like it's hard to understand but it really doesn't have to be like that especially not for content-based

seo so i know there'll be different people watching this who have varying levels of experience in seo um so i'm gonna start with like the basics like a very basic on-page seo checklist for when you're say writing a blog post what the elements you need to optimize um for whatever keyword you are hoping this piece of content is gonna rank for so the first thing is your title tag um this is

the clickable link that you see in the search results when you google something and this tag really tells google and searches what your page is about so you definitely want to optimize this for your um core keyword meta description so whilst this isn't a ranking factor for um google it does tell the reader a bit more about what your content is going to contain so in the search result under that link

you'll see a couple of lines um that's your meta description and whilst it doesn't help with your rankings it does help with click-through rate so it can actually help you drive more traffic from the search results if you take the time to write a decent meta description so your page header or also known as a h1 tag um it's essentially like your blog post title what you see when you click into

that page at the top of the page it tells the reader what your content is about um it's also um something that google considers it's not going to be as impactful as your title tag but it's definitely something that you want to be optimizing your image alt text is basically the html that describes the image so this can help you um rank for your keyword in say image search results so if

you're if you're working particularly visual industry or like your business relies a lot on like imagery and this could be a good additional source of traffic for you if you optimize that alt text well it's also important for the accessibility of your contents it's something you definitely don't want to look past and another thing that is often forgotten i find is internal linking so what i mean here is literally linking to

this new page on your website from an existing page on your website so this helps google find the page and index it um but it also helps pass link equity so this is kind of like basically authority or like ranking power throughout your website um so you want to be building links internally as well as from external sources so that's a kind of super quick basic guides to the things you want

to optimize for on-page seo um moore's has a really really good guide on this um it's just moses guide to on-page seo it's called and it goes into way more detail on each of these things and a ton of others as well so i would recommend that as further reading um if you want to make sure that your content is properly optimized so speaking of linking leads us nicely onto optimizing the

structure of your content and what i mean by this is how it is kind of arranged within your website so at hubspot we use something called the pillars and clusters model to arrange our content so that will mean nothing to you but hopefully this will help explain it a little bit better um basically what this does is organize your content in a way that makes it easier for google to crawl to

index and for authority to be passed through your site in a more efficient way so here in the middle we've got our pillar content and what that looks like in practice is basically a really in-depth piece of content about your core topic so for hubspot that might be that inbound marketing example you have a pillar piece of content about inbound marketing that's really in-depth and then all around it is there a

cluster content so these are our other blog posts about the topic of inbound marketing so they're kind of those more long tail questions or um those are the queries that we identified earlier maybe like how to convince your boss shooting by marketing how does inbound marketing work alongside paid media that kind of thing they would all be your blog posts and these blue blue lines represent hyperlinks so you would link from

your core page about your um the pillar page sorry about your topic out to your blog posts about um your subtopics and then you'd link from those blog posts back to that pillar content to create a nice cluster of content about that core topic now at hubspot we didn't used to do this um our blog quite frankly the structure of our blog used to be a complete mess and it was just

so inefficient like we were missing out on a ton of organic traffic simply because our content wasn't structured correctly um it was hard for google to find it it was like hidden deep within our site in terms of the internal linking and it just wasn't if an efficient structure for the passing of what we call link equity and authority through the site to help all of these little pages run better so

this is what it used to look like we had hubspot.com um our root domain then we had our blog.hubspot.com which is a sub domain and then we had three blogs marketing agency and sales and then we had all of this content set underneath that and some of this content had what we call a crawl depth of say like 30 which means that like um google was having to follow 30 different links

through our site before it found it essentially um it was just a bit of a mess but not very efficient and like i say we are losing out on a ton of organic traffic simply because of this inefficient structure so what it looks like now is this um so you can see we've got our root domain up here i have hubspot.com and we've got our pillar pages these big dots in the

middle so these represent our pillar content so say the orange one might be hubspot.com forward slash inbound marketing the pink one might be hubspot.com email marketing the green one might be herstor.com social media marketing and they'll be really in-depth resources about um those broad topics and then all the corresponding cluster content around it will be our blog posts that relate to that topic and they're all linking back to each other like

i said before and you see how like much more of a flat structure this is which means all these cluster pieces of content have a much better chance of ranking um because the link equity that our homepage has is being passed nicely through all of this content so if you're starting from scratch i'd recommend doing this if you're not starting from scratch it can be a bigger project you kind of rearrange

all of this um but it's something that's probably worth doing um so yeah definitely think about structure it's something that's often missed when optimizing content if all that's got you feeling like this um i don't blame you um what i would recommend is um going back to the academy and taking a lesson a free lesson that we have on learning how to create topic clusters for your website um it goes a

little bit more in depth than i just did there simply because um i don't have the luxury of time of explaining it within an hour but yeah i would recommend taking this course if you want to better understand how to do that all right another thing that you can optimize for um before publishing your content um is the featured snippet or position zero that you see in search results and this is

also known as like a answer box or a quick answer box um and what this does is it basically pulls content in from a result that is already ranking page one and it pulls it into this like position zero so up above page one um so you can see an example of that for a hubspot blog post here so ahrefs um did a study on this and found that 12.3 percent of

search queries um actually have featured snippets in their results and what i would say is for the kind of content with their talk that we're talking about here you know you're more question based preposition that kind of thing tends to be a higher percentage so feature sniffers are definitely something to work worth thinking about when you're producing um the kind of content that we're talking about today and this just proves that

like ahrefs found that the majority of feature snippets are triggered by long tail keywords and long tail keywords are exactly what we're talking about today you know how to develop an inbound or continuing strategy with paid ads that would be a long tail phrase all right so that begs the question how do we actually rank in these feature snippets how do we optimize our content to give ourselves the best chance of

this working for us so i would say it's not an exact science like there are a couple of things you can do it won't always work sometimes it will so what i would do here is go back to that keyword research spreadsheet that you did after taking the academy course in the content planning section and find the search terms that have featured snippets um so if you have ahrefs or semrush um

those tools will speed up this process for you but if you don't you can go through and just do an incognito search for each term and just make a note of the ones that you see featured snippets for and what kind of featured snippet you see like is it a table is it a quick answer box like i showed you earlier what does it look like and then for each um term

or each keyword you're going to want to analyze the content that is being pulled into that featured snippet so what is already taking that top spot and how is it structured so when you click through to that article or whatever it is that has taken that featured snippet already how is it structured is the content that's been pulled through to the feature snippet in numbered or bulleted lists is it being wrapped

in a h2 tag um are they using like structured data like tabular data um to to win that snippet just make a note of what they're doing and then you can use those findings when you're creating and publishing your own content to see if you can ranking that featured snippet and what i will say is that like it's actually a really great idea to do this for any pages that you already

have that are ranking on page one for a uh keyword that has a featured snippet so what that can mean for you is um say you're ranking in position eight on any given day for a certain thing and you're really struggling to get to the top of page one um what you can do is try optimizing for the featured snippet and if the feature snippet that already exists isn't is not doing

as good a job as you are for optimizing for that you can actually take that top spot reasonably easily sometimes so it's definitely like an audit worth doing for content that you already have okay that's enough about optimizing for um search and google and we there's no point in doing any of that if you're not optimizing your content for conversions so this is the metric that is gonna um grow the business

right so um what i would do here is ask yourself you know if i were my buyer persona landing on this piece of content and reading it or watching it or whatever they're doing what is the most valuable next step for that prospective customer um not it's not what is the most valuable next step for you probably the most valuable next step for you is to have them call you up and

say i want to buy but that's not what they're likely going to want to do at this stage so how else can you kind of guide them through that buyers journey so again this comes back to our next journey and different um stages of the buyer's journey will have different um calls to actions or conversion points um just because you know at the awareness stage someone's not that bought into buying from

you yet so you're going to want to go a bit easier on what you're asking of them so at the awareness stage a common um call to action or conversion point is to have them say subscribe to your email newsletter to get more content like the content they've already been consuming um or it might be to download a guide or an ebook to get even more in-depth resources on that particular topic

any exchange if you like an email address for the consideration stage um they're a little bit more bought in they're starting to do their research and starting to really seriously explore their options um depending on how your business works here you might want to do something that's a little bit more involved like invite them to an attending event um that could be the call to action within that piece of content it

might be to speak to sales um i would do this with caution but depending on how your business works and how your buyer journey works and your sales process works that might be the most valuable next step at the decision stage um you know here's when they're really seriously thinking about what um what product purchase what service to invest their money in that kind of thing and you could offer them a

free trial um you could offer to arrange a time for them to speak to one of your existing customers you could direct them to reviews case studies that kind of thing um what i would say is some of these are interchangeable depending on your particular scenario but keep going back to that question what is the most valuable next step i can offer someone that kind of also works for you so in

practice i just wanted to show you what some of those things might look like so at the awareness stage you know someone lands on this blog post from hubspot through google they they're looking into seo and they've realized that each snippets is something that they could be doing more of like optimizing for featured snippets so here is the next step we guide them towards um hubspot's guide to winning google's featured snippet

and hubsat academy's free seo course now these are obviously valuable next steps we know they're interested in seo they know their interests we know they're interested in optimizing for featured snippets so we offer them more value around that topic and when they go to those uh go to those uh resources we've given them we'll ask them kind of for a few details and email address so that we can kind of nurture

them further in their journey at the consideration stage um we offer this same person um a free seo assessment of their website with someone at hubspot so we might um ask them to choose the time to meet someone and that person will go through their website and offer some suggestions on what they could be doing differently to improve their seo we know they're interested in seo we know they're in the consideration

stage so they might be interested in getting a little bit more nitty gritty with um their advice at the decision stage um we might offer someone um you know we might offer someone or direct someone to our free tools you know okay you're in the decision stage you're serious about this thing um here's some tools that you can try uh on your journey to kind of achieving it um so yeah those

things will obviously look different for your business um but they're just some examples of the kind of thing we do at hubspot all right so now we're going to dig into content promotion so you've done your content planning you've done your optimization and you've hit publish now you're going to want to make sure that people see that content so the most common like channels that we see people promoting their content through

are obviously search which you've kind of already covered off in the optimization stage social and email now these are by no means exhaustive obviously there are a ton of different things you can be doing but because these are the most common ones um this is where i'm gonna start today so social media um my biggest piece of advice here is to like find the channels that work for you especially if you're

like a small team or you don't have a ton of resource you don't have to be on everything because the chances are you're going to be doing everything you know not great it's not going to work great for you because you simply don't have the time or resource to really invest in learning and testing what works so find the channels that work for you maybe run some experiments on all of them

and see which ones looking most promising or it might already be very obvious to you based on the social media marketing you're already doing i'm just going to give a couple of tips for certain channels i feel like potentially underutilized um features of each so for linkedin um there's a really good way that you can kind of segment the things you post on linkedin um to your audience using targeted updates now

this is not an ad type it's not an ad it's just on a regular post um but what you can do here is you can see this target audience drop down down here you can change it from all followers to targeted audience and target your posts based on all these different factors here so on this instance here you know we're running our own event in melbourne we don't want our followers in

the us to see that like it's just not relevant for them so what i might do here is click targeted audience and choose to target by geography i might target it just to people in victoria for example so that's a really underutilized feature but what it means is that the right people are seeing the right content and as a result your the rest of your followers are not going to be disengaged

by things that just are not for them another one instagram it can be really really difficult to kind of use instagram as a channel for conversion you know we know that like your regular posts um we'll be seeing a decline that as the algorithm has changed over the years um but one thing that seems to work a little bit differently is stories um instagram stories seem to be able to drive a

little bit more visibility for you than a regular post would um and if you're lucky enough to have over ten thousand followers i believe it's still ten thousand is the threshold um you'll probably have this swipe up feature which means that you can direct the people from your instagram stories to your website whether that's to um the piece of content that you're promoting whatever that thing might be um and that can

then act as a conversion point in itself without you necessarily having to spend any money on ads um i would uh be ams if i wasn't mentioning here that there is a bit of an elephant in the room and that is that social networks want you to stay on that platform this is especially true for facebook you might notice that if you share a link to an external website like to your

website on facebook or sometimes on linkedin that the visibility for that post or engagement on that post is a lot less than it would be if you didn't have that link in there um and that's because creative content is designed to kind of perform better by the algorithm so like for example if you produce a video um that is designed especially for facebook and you don't link out to anything else um

you'll usually find that that performs a little bit better what i would say is um this can be a great strategy for driving brand engagement and community for a team that's got a lot of resource and can do both content creation for like your website and content creation separately for like facebook say but this is something i wouldn't recommend if you doing yet anyway if you um are a smaller team or

just getting started creating content yourself and there's good reason for that um i would always lean in favor of hosting content on your website but over another social channel and that's because your website is really the asset you have most control over with social platforms you're very at the mercy of the algorithm and yes your website is at the mercy of google's algorithms um but just it's not to the same extent

and this is what i mean by that so here is the performance of a blog post published on the hubspot website over time and you will see this across every single blog post we have pretty much and probably across every single blog post that you have um you can see here that this is the initial promotional spike when the post went live it's an old one um granted but you can see

that like there'll be some social promotion in there there's email um and beyond that first bike those things decline like those things stop when we stop talking about them on those channels whereas organic search grows and grows and grows over time um which is why it's better to invest in the content that lives on your own website before you start exploring how to create native content for your social platforms i'm not

saying don't do both if you can definitely do both um but if you have to choose choose building up a content repository on your own website first because it's kind of the gift that we'll keep on giving all right email i'm not going to go into how to do email marketing necessarily we all know how to write an email and send it to our database but what i will touch on is

the importance of segmenting your email audience and by this i don't mean like oh our blog subscribers and our sales leads like that is segmentation to some extent but you can you can go so much further than that um you can optimize for things like behavior so page visits and previous conversions you know have you got a subset of people who've all visited that pillar content page that you have on your

core topic can you in your crm you mark them as being interested in that thing and add them to a list that you then send for future content that you publish to about that topic um persona type you could segment by the challenges and goals that people have um based on what you ask them in a form when they become a lead for example or their demographic info um all those kind

of things you can create lists around and choose to send those people different content that you know they're going to be interested in and you'll probably see performance gains as a result of that you can also use personal data and birthday is quite a common thing to use um in e-commerce you'll often find that you know like your favorite e-commerce brands will send you a discount on your birthday along with like

a piece of content or something like that you could also do it by current city um you know you get those um local city guides um from places like concrete playground they'll tell you what's on in your area if they know where you are um all these kind of things um getting really deep on your segmentation can just allow you to um have content that performs better for you but is also

more helpful for um your audience so yeah i'd really recommend doing that if you're not already can be a lot of work in in the first instance but it should be worth it all right so i know we skip past optimization already um but something you can do in the promotion stage is think about how you can make uh the conversion point in your content um more frictionless so reduce the friction

that people go through to kind of convert on that piece of content so what do i mean by that so imagine you're browsing facebook on your phone and you see um a piece of content or an invitation to an event or something like that for your industry you want to sign up instead of clicking through to a website page and having that uh website make you fill out a big long form

that feels super long because you're on your phone could you turn that um promotion into a facebook lead ad instead where they can fill out their details and convert right inside facebook without ever leaving because in those steps that it takes in a normal environment to convert you're going to see a lot of drop off in those stages simply maybe the website doesn't load maybe people can't be bothered to fill out

that long form on their phone whereas in facebook um with a lead ad it's all native to that platform so it feels really easy it's a much better user experience and you're more likely to see better results in the same thing you could do the same thing or same concept but with facebook messenger so um you could have someone um click through from facebook again to sign up for something or to

convert after they've read a piece of content or you could run a messenger ad and when they click on it instead open up a chat inside facebook messenger where um a chatbot asks them the same questions that would usually appear in your form um so here you can have all that data still syncing to your crm in the background so it's no different on your end but what you're doing is creating

a really frictionless experience for the person who's trying to um sign up to something from you or you know convert so you can increase your conversions at the promotional stage just by thinking a little bit more about the context that you are promoting something in like what environment somebody is in when they're seeing that um another really great opportunity to reduce friction um is you know if if you're offering um the

opportunity to speak to someone as part of your um next step in that buyer's journey or your conversion point um what i would recommend doing is instead of having like a button that says inquire now or speak to sales or something like that that pops up an email window that you then have to give your availability and wait for a call back and it's just a long drawn out process instead i

would recommend using something like hubspot meetings so this is a free tool um and what it does is someone clicks on that button and instead this page opens up and they can choose a time that suits them it syncs to your member of staff's calendar and once they convert on this both parties get an email and they meet at that time just so much easier and by doing that you'll see a

lot less drop off you'll probably find that when people inquire with you there's some people fall through the gap and never get a call back from you this is a really efficient way to make sure that it doesn't happen so we would be um wasting our time doing all of that stuff that we just talked about if we weren't measuring our results um a lot of people do produce content promote it

and kind of set and forget it but what you should be doing is coming back to this content once a month doing a content uh audit once a month and looking at how everything is performing so a very very basic level some simple questions you could be trying to find the answer to when measuring your results is what sources drove your conversions were most of your conversions and business value coming from

organic search was it from social media was it from your email marketing um you can also ask what type of content is performing best so you can start to learn you know um are your really uh long in-depth blog posts performing better than your shorter ones in terms of traffic in terms of conversions there's a ton of different things you could be looking at depending on what those goals are that you

set out in the first place for social for your promo channels whether that's social or email you'll be checking in on how engagement is tracking for each of those and for example if you're doing the same thing over and over again on facebook for six months and not looking back at how everything's performed you could have missed a real opportunity to change something and improve your results so i'll be doing like

monthly check-ins with your channels at least just to make sure that nothing is stagnating and that you're picking up on any learnings that you can then add to your strategy moving forward the biggest thing that i would advise you to do when it comes to content marketing is to implement closed loop reporting and by this i mean like understanding um someone's journey from the first time they ever landed on your website

right through to when they became a customer and what content did they interact with what um what touch points influenced um them becoming a customer the most so here you can with close-up report and you can start to answer questions like how many people um got to the next step in their bios journey after consuming this piece of content how many people turned into paying customers after consuming our content like in

what time frame did that happen and what was the dollar value of those customers and what you can start to do is understand the dollar value that your content is contributing to the business by implementing closed reporting so i do this in hubspot obviously it's kind of like out of the box in hubspot you can build really cool attribution reports that help you understand and the kind of monetary value your content

is contributing to the business um if you don't use hubspot you can probably hack together something similar with your tech stack depending on what you're using um might be a little bit more difficult but you could probably get there um but i would really recommend at least trying to do that because it's that um that kind of being able to prove the roi of your content is a thing that's going to

get you further buying to keep doing it and hopefully a promotion for you as a market manager yourself so i know that was a lot um i kind of had to blitz through that pretty quickly um but if you only remember three uh four things from today here are the four takeaways that um i think are the most important so the first is to map your content onto the buyer's journey and

don't create content without purpose don't create content without having that buyer persona in mind i see a lot of this of like kind of guess work um but if you really think about that buyer's journey and the goals that you have as a business and the goals that they have as a buyer you can start to create a really effective content strategy the second is to optimize and structure your content for

search um like i said content host on your website is a gif that keeps on giving but that's only really true if you get the search element right and the seo element right so i would really spend some time trying to learn how to do that definitely check out those academy courses i mentioned earlier the third is to be thoughtful about where you host your content um so again going back to

that host it on your website first build up that depository where you can and then also be thinking about the context in which you are promoting that content and trying to remove friction from the conversion points wherever you can and the fourth is to implement closed loop reporting i think if you're already producing content you're already doing content stretching you don't have this this is probably where i would start go back

and do a kind of an audit of your existing content after you have implemented closed loop reporting so yeah that's everything for me i'm not sure if we have some time for questions i'm gonna hang out in the chat channel for a little bit if anyone does have questions i'll probably be in there for like 20 minutes or so so yeah if we don't have time for questions i will be in

there thanks melissa that was a really solid presentation plenty of great takeaways not just those final four but throughout um i'd just like to draw your attention again going to the hubspot academy so many great resources there obviously alyssa highlighted a couple that were relevant to her presentation but pretty much if there's any marketing uh questions you have and you're like i need to learn a bit more the hubspot academy is

a very extensive library of courses and whatnot um what we'll be doing next is emily primavera from south australian tourism commission it's coming up next again if you have any questions please direct them to alyssa in the discord chat alyssa there's feedback coming through the webinar platform thank you so much and we're really grateful for your time and the extra 20 minutes thank you for having me discord chat um all the

way from sydney we hope that you stay safe and that uh covert remains on the western suburb side yeah you too thanks for having me thank you so in the meantime to our attendees take a couple minutes go get a fresh coffee go to the toilet and we'll be back with emily primavera from south australian tourism commission talking about the advertising that they've been doing uh to support the book the mayor

and also throughout the coroner virus period thanks