Host: Alex Valencia, WDW
What marketing strategies are you applying to your content? In this webinar, Alex Valencia, owner of We Do Web, let’s you in on a few of the strategies and processes for content marketing:
- Checking the performance of your current content, such as with Google Analytics
- Repurposing your current content, such as with e-books
- Automating your social media syndication
- Linking your online forms to an email marketing sequence service, such as Infusionsoft
- Sharing content to build relationships in the industry
You are the one building your customers’ journey. Make sure you know who you are targeting and what they want to know.
Transcript:
Alex Valencia:
Thank you for attending and watching another episode of We Do Web Content’s webinars and tips for marketing your law firm through content marketing. Today we’re going to be talking about your content marketing plan working for you.
I got an interesting email from Ryan Dice this morning on stopping all blogging and seeing what happens. There was a great and interesting post by Buffer that did a test on why they were going to discontinue blogging for about a month, two months, and see what the results are. And you’ll learn on this presentation a little bit more about why they did it and how it can be useful to you, save you some more time and increase engagement on your current content and more.
So today we’re talking about, Is Your Content Marketing Plan Working for You? And this topic was inspired by Pam Neely who wrote 12 Signs You’re Wasting Your Time in Content Marketing. She had a great post through Scoop.It, and I had my staff look into it immediately and say, “okay, how can we target this to attorneys?” Because we write so much content for attorneys and we’ve been writing for years. And a couple of the other options that we’ve been giving you our attorneys are things like email marketing, automation sequences, ways of converting the traffic that you’re currently getting on your website.
So let’s begin. Is your content marketing working for you? So stop wasting your time on content marketing. Now that doesn’t make any sense coming from a content market company. But let’s ask ourselves these questions. “Can I track and measure my results? How many times am I using my content or repurposing my content? Is my social media syndication automated? Am I using Facebook ads or Twitter ads to syndicate my content? Am I using email marketing and automating it? Do I share any content besides my own? Am I testing how my content is performing on a regular basis? Have I created a persona for my ideal clients, and am I working toward creating content for that persona?” And this is a great one, Yvette did a presentation at some of the bar associations on this one on three different personas, and you can find that on our slides share page through We Do Web Content. Next one is, “Have I developed a journey for my potential clients? Do I have a clear strategy in mind for my content? Is my content organized all in one central database for easy access?” Now, not everyone can afford that, it’s very difficult to do, but there are ways to do it with spreadsheets in some of the project management tools that are out there.
“Do I have anything to share for the hundreds, thousands of hours I’ve spent on my content market?” So we know how time consuming, how cumbersome creating content, how thinking up topics, but all of it has to have a strategy, it has to be a plan. Just like when you’re going to the gym, you don’t just show up and say, “I’m going to do this today.” There has to be a plan and end goal. So what’s your content marketing plan and end goal? What do you want to see? Is it just traffic? Do you want to convert that traffic? Do you want them to download an ebook? Do you want to start an email marketing sequence? Do you just want them to pick up the phone and call? Which is a lot of the times is the situation on legal websites. Let’s continue.
Tracking and measuring results. So if you’re not using the services like Google Analytics or Omniture or some of the other tracking devices for your content, for your website, you’re missing out. Also for email marketing, it’s important we use Infusionsoft, for our newsletters, for the campaigns that we use and develop. It’s very important to see who’s opening what, who’s not opening, and what kind of progress we’re making so we can continue creating content that people are using that are making them purchase something. So you can’t always know what works unless you’re tracking your content marketing effort.
Now the second point is reusing your content. Developing content is not the easiest thing. It goes through tons of research. It goes through keyword research, as well. Goes through development. It goes through quality assurance. And it goes through writing, developing, posting, looking for images for it. I mean, it’s a ton of work. So once you’ve created a base content, and I think this is where Ryan Dice and Buffer were going is, we’ve created so much content, what are we doing with it now? I have 30 blog posts on child brain injury. Wouldn’t I be able to turn those blog posts into an ebook? Of course, now you’ve created an awesome call to action for someone who’s visiting those child injury pages and giving them the opportunity to say, “Hey, I like this information on the right side, I see this awesome call to action, download my eguide or ebook on the 10 most severe child brain injuries.” That is an automatic opportunity for you to gain a client and create an email follow up sequence to nurture that client.
Now you can, like I said, combine the block series into long form articles as well. You can turn high traffic popular posts into infographics, we’re doing that for some clients right now. You can chop up every post or article into a handful of interesting tweets or Facebook content. I mean, there’s tons of things you can do with the content that you’ve already developed.
Automating your social media syndication, now this one, it’s a tough one, but it’s the easiest and most cost effective way of doing it. I’m a big believer in social media should really be done by the person managing the social account because your engagement is huge, it has to be. There’s really no way for you to engage with your audience if you’re not doing. It’s hard to hire someone to do that for you. It’s easy to hire someone like us through syndicate and create the content for it, but the engagement is difficult and I think it’s important for you to do it. I think beyond automating your Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus through something like Hootsuite or Jetpack that’s on WordPress makes it very easy to do, and you can also customize the content that’s being delivered.
But it’s also important that you’re getting that content in front of your audience and specifically targeted audiences. With Facebook and Twitter make it very easy to target to syndicate your content through the social media channel. Set up something like Hootsuite or Jetpack through WordPress so you can make sure you’re staying social and at least having a presence. At the minimum, have a presence on social. This isn’t new news. I mean, this isn’t new information for you. It’s not the golden ticket, but you need to do it. I’m just giving you the simple steps on what you need to do to develop your content marketing strategy, what you’re currently doing with your content, the things that you should be doing with it to get it out there.
I love this. Using email to your advantage in automating it. I mean, what a better way to set it and forget it and continue creating campaigns that are wowing your customers, that are potentially bringing you new sales or opportunities that you may have missed by not doing this. Your contact forms on your website should all be connected to some sort of email marketing sequence, whether it’s Infusionsoft, Constant Contact, MailChimp, HubSpot, I don’t care who it is you need to be doing. You should at least at the minimum be doing a newsletter just to stay in touch and we can go and talk hours about the content that you should be delivering. Set up drip campaigns with relevant content to follow up with people who order your book or fill out your contact forms.
Also, create triggered emails that send when a client completes a certain goal. So if you’re a social security or personal injury firm and you’ve just retained a client, these people should be getting a shock and awe email packet saying, this is what you need to expect. Throw some videos in there. If you want to create videos, create these kind of videos. Put them into a landing page and show them this is what you should expect from a law firm. It’s going to take such and such timeframe for us to develop your case. For Social Security, if there’s a denial, they should be receiving an email denial. These are things that you need to be thinking about and putting into place. This is something that you should easily be able to implement. If not, I know an awesome company that can help you with that.
So the benefits of sharing others’ content. So this is a big one because I can go on with this. A couple years ago I did a presentation with David David Emerline who wrote “Absolutely Amazing.” I read it probably about three times. But in the book it talks about company, social presence, culture, a little bit of everything, but it really talks about how to socialize through social media, how to really become an influencer, how to get under other influencers, and it’s building that trust. You don’t just walk into a cocktail party and say, “Here I am, buy from me.” Or, “Here I am, come hang out with me.” You have to ease your way in. Build trust, start talking to people, compliment people. “Hey, looking awesome in that new suit dude.” Same thing for social media. “Great job. Like that article. Excellent. You mind if I share it with my people?” “Yeah, of course you can share it.” Now you have someone that you can go back to and say, “Hey, you know that article you wrote a couple months ago? I wrote something similar. I think your audience might like it.” Now this person believes that they have trust in you. That’s how you manage and share content. You work with them, you curate new content from others even if they’re some of your competitors. They’re giving good information, there’s no reason you need to recreate the wheel.
So regularly test your content’s performance. Don’t just watch how your content performs for the first weeks, post it. Constantly return to old content that once performed well and give it a tune up. So we’re doing that for a couple of our clients now. We’re reviewing the top landing pages for six months to a year and saying, “Okay, what are the conversion rates on these pages? What’s the bounce rate? How much time are they spending on here? These are pages that are ranking and are driving a good amount of traffic to the website. What can we do to tweak them? Can we put a call to action on there like an ebook? Can we do a free consultation? Can we put a video on there? What can we do to tweak these pages and make them better?”
Long form content seems to be performing really well. So if you have other pages that are similar in content and aren’t getting as much traffic, but they’re getting a good amount of traffic, consolidate them into one long page and redirect everyone to that one page. It’s better for the user experience and it’s better for the search engines.
Developing a persona for your ideal clients, and I think this is important, and Yvette does an amazing job with this, with her research with attorneys. You have in people coming in and looking for information, they want to get educated, and then you have the people that are ready to buy and hire an attorney. You want to make sure you’re creating content that’s delivering to these people, and that goes into long tail searches. The person hiring a personal injury attorney in Atlanta is probably ready to buy, as opposed to someone that’s saying, “What if my child slip and fell at Publix and we didn’t go to the hospital or we didn’t contact an attorney?” They’re looking for information and to be educated, and hopefully you have a chat or some kind of information that they can pick up the phone and call.
So when developing a persona to describe your ideal client helps you get into their head and better understand what they’re looking for from your content. So when you understand who you’re producing content for it’s easier to create exactly what will attract those ideal clients to your website. Use social demographics as a way to find your reader. So if you’re socially syndicating your content, there’s ways and insights for you to see who’s liking, who’s coming to your page, who’s opening up your ads. Deliver content to those people.
So use content to develop a journey for your potential client. Once you know who you’re writing for, you need to know what you want them to do after they found your content. What call to action do you want them to follow? Some examples are, filling out a website contact form or free consultation, making a purchase, requesting your ebook. If you need an ebook, we can help. But again, this is a project that you want to go ahead and get on. It’s easy. They’re time consuming. But they’re opportunities that’ll help you convert the clients that are coming to your website. You can’t just set a website and forget it. SEO’s very expensive. I’m a big believer in organic content. It takes its time. So if you can’t afford services like that, at least create the content. Pay per click, if you know your target market it’s a good way to pay for good targeted traffic. Same thing with social, good opportunity for you there to pay for traffic for a targeted segment of people.
So defining a clear content marketing strategy: clients may come to you at all stages of the marketing cycle, creating content for every step from the moment a client may seek your content, “What do you do after a car accident?” to when they’re ready to come at questions to ask a person of your lawyer before you hire. Organize your content in a logical manner so your client knows how to navigate the information they need at the time they need it. So your navigation is a very important tool on your website. It’s important that it’s set up, categorized and organized correctly, so it’s in a silo. So everything is under the category that it should be, where it’s easy to find for the user, as well as the search engines.
This is something that we do here. I mean, we’re a content agency, so we have to have a centralized database for everything, but it’s important that you have it too so it’s easy to find the content that you’ve developed so you can create other content around it or you’re not duplicating content. So avoiding inadvertently duplicating content topics by logging your content into a central database. Spreadsheets are great, this is also a great opportunity for you to look back at well-performing content and see the potential to update or revise it. So it’s easier to find this way.
So really measuring your content marketing success is very important. Now, I want you to look at yourself and ask yourself this question, whether you’re marketing director at the… Creator of a content marketing system as I do, there’s not a thing I would change about my content plan. If that’s you, congratulations. If not, let us help. Let We Do Web Content give you a crash course in content marketing. Let us help you. If you’re ready to get started, please contact us. I know it’s a cumbersome and time consuming effort to do this, but we are here to make it as simple and easy to follow. Contact us today.
Info at WeDoWebContent.com or 888-521-3880. Thank you for watching. I look forward to hearing from you. The best of luck with your content marketing strategies and all of your efforts. Have an awesome day. Cheers.
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Alex Valencia is an influential entrepreneur, marketer, speaker, podcaster, and CEO of We Do Web Content, one of Inc. 5000’s fastest-growing businesses in America. His agency implements game-changing content marketing strategies and produces top-ranking web content for law firms, medical professionals, and small businesses nationwide.