Content's Role in Retail

Copyright © 2013 PM Digital. All rights reserved. This information is deemed PROPRIETARY and CONFIDENTIAL by PM Digital. Unauthorized use or disclosure is prohibited. 1

CONTENT’S ROLE IN RETAIL

PRESENTED BY:CLAY CAZIER

JULY 25, 2013

2Copyright © 2013 PM Digital. All rights reserved. This information is deemed PROPRIETARY and CONFIDENTIAL by PM Digital. Unauthorized use or disclosure is prohibited.

Intro

What is Content Marketing?

Content Marketing Best Practices

Content Marketing in Action

Outro

AGENDA


WHAT IS CONTENT MARKETING?


“Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience

– with the objective of driving profitable customer action.” - Content Marketing Institute

DEFINITIONS

Keywords should no longer be the primary focus of eCommerce sites – audiences are the focus, with content and keywords naturally following

“Content” includes:

– Copy on retail landing pages (like categories & sub-categories)

– Unique product copy, rating & review information

– Targeted blog posts & articles (living both on & off retailers’ sites)

– Media (photos & videos living both on & off retailers’ sites)

– Infographics & whitepapers

– Social media posts

– Mobile apps

– Email newsletters

– Hosted events

– Local profiles

Eighty-six percent of B2C marketers are using content marketing… on average, B2C marketers use 12 tactics to achieve their content goals.


SURVEY INFORMATION


BEST PRACTICES


The goal: understand and engage target audiences to produce a desired outcome.

Engaging target audiences is achieved through content – text articles, images, video and other forms of media.

With goals in hand, a Content Strategy is typically composed of three parts:

1. Audience (Persona) Analysis

2. Linguistic (Keyword) Analysis

3. Content Calendar / Plan

Followed by:

4. Content Development

5. Content Marketing / Distribution

6. Reporting

CONTENT STRATEGY, DEVELOPMENT & MARKETING

Audience Analysis

Linguistic Analysis

Content Plan

Content Development

Content Marketing

Report & Analyze

Typical Goals:• awareness• leads• sales• retention


The goal: identify themes important to a retailer’s most valuable consumers and use that information to direct the focus & language within a content calendar.

Answer questions like:

• Who is my most valuable customer?

• What are their interests and preferences?

• What are their common needs, problems and questions?

• What channels convert them?

• Where do they go while on my site?

• What are their triggers to buy?

Best ways to start defining audiences:

• Existing housefile, sales & analytics data– Data enhancement services may be necessary

• Customer (and missed-customer) interviews

• Census.gov, BLS.gov & PewSocialTrends.org

CONTENT STRATEGY – AUDIENCE (PERSONA) ANALYSIS


CONTENT STRATEGY – LINGUISTIC (KEYWORD) ANALYSIS

The goal: with audience information in hand, keyword research can direct the language to use in communications.

Google Adwords is a good start but try:• www.google.com/trends/ • www.facebook.com/advertising/ • www.twitter.com/search/

Don’t stop with research – map top phrases to their place in the buying cycle, your site’s current content, organic rankings (or lack thereof).

• Example: you may have educational, “how do I” content, traffic and rankings but may find your content focused on differentiation (deep-funnel) falls short.

This will help create buy-in by mapping spend to potential impact.

Linguistic Analysis is a research study of the language used by target audiences.

http://www.google.com/trends/

http://www.facebook.com/advertising/

http://www.twitter.com/search/


The goal: with audience analysis and linguistic data in hand, retailer’s marketing, PR and/or creative teams can produce content that fills targeting gaps.

CONTENT STRATEGY – CONTENT CALENDAR & PLAN

A content calendar is crucial in achieving your goals. It will help ensure:

• your team is on track & accountable

• your messaging is consistent

• your messaging is relevant

Holiday/Event Target Audience Channel Content Type Content Idea Desired Action MetricWeek of May 21

Sunday, May 19, 2013Monday, May 20, 2013 Discount Shipping Starts Edward & Ingrid Website + Social PromoTuesday, May 21, 2013

Wednesday, May 22, 2013Thursday, May 23, 2013

Friday, May 24, 2013 Victoria Day (Canada) Adam Affl uent Website WhitepaperSaturday, May 25, 2013

Week of May 28Sunday, May 26, 2013

Monday, May 27, 2013 Memorial Day Edward Empty Nester Twitter ContestTuesday, May 28, 2013

Wednesday, May 29, 2013Thursday, May 30, 2013

Friday, May 31, 2013 Most kids out of school Ingrid the Influencer Offl ine EventSaturday, June 01, 2013

Week of June 4Sunday, June 02, 2013

Monday, June 03, 2013 Product X Launching All Website + Social ArticleTuesday, June 04, 2013

Wednesday, June 05, 2013Thursday, June 06, 2013 D Day, WWII Edward Empty Nester Blog Photo Essay

Friday, June 07, 2013

Place dates vertically - on the Y axis. Highlight holidays or event dates relevant to your audiences as “must market”.

Label the X axis so you can record the target audience, channel, content type, content idea, desired action and measurement for your content.

Use sub-sheets to document specifics behind each piece of content, like the author, target keywords and call to action.


1. Less is more - aka quality over quantity

2. Listen to consumer conversations before and after your content is developed and distributed

3. Be personable and authentic, not a corporate talking head

4. Content conveying exclusivity or behind-the-scenes information is quite engaging:

• Interviewing internal specialists is a good place to start – those in R&D, product development/selection, sales & analytics. If you go to marketing or PR teams, ask for case studies or testimonials.

• Internal specialists can:

– identify common questions/problems your consumers are trying to solve

– call your attention to photo or video documentation opportunities

– be the subject of an interview

– lead an online Q&A effort

– point you to a friendly third party for their take on your products/services

– add commentary to content already distributed

– add a local perspective

• Create this “special” content while the primary content is being produced

CONTENT DEVELOPMENT – BEST PRACTICES


5. Use your content calendar but be ready to capitalize on trends (aka borrow relevance)

6. Play to your strengths – this must be considered in addition to what your audience likes (eg it’s hard to just be a dynamic video blogger)

7. Creating new content internally isn’t always necessary:

• Consider re-purposing content of one media type/channel into another

– Slideshare is great for sharing many otherwise “internal” documents or converting text content into presentations.

– Email newsletters are a great place to re-purpose text or image content

• Crowdsource content

8. Know what “success” is – establish goals to be tracked and measured before you publish.

CONTENT DEVELOPMENT – BEST PRACTICES


How have your audiences found & consumed your content?

– Organic (SEO) rankings

– SEM impressions, click through rate & quality score

– Unique visits (aka traffic)

– Page views per visitor

– Bounce rate / average time on page

– Inbound link quantity & quality

– Video views / duration

– Social shares (LinkedIn, Google+, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.)

– Social fans & followers

– Social mentions & comments

– Unlikes & unfollows

MEASURING SUCCESS – AWARENESS & CONSUMPTION METRICS


Is the investment in content marketing justified?

– Revenue generated

– Increased leads (from online forms & trackable phone numbers)

– Increased form submissions (subscriptions, registrations & requests = database growth)

– Improved conversion rate

– Increased average order value

– Increased download count

– Growth of RSS (blog) subscribers

– Increased email open & click-through rates

MEASURING SUCCESS – CONVERSION & ROI METRICS

The best way to measure success will be to use site analytics (e.g. Omniture, GA, Coremetrics)

Social and awareness data can be manually tracked or measured through tools like SimplyMeasured.com, Spredfast.com or MOZ.com


CONTENT MARKETING IN ACTION


CHALLENGE:

Gain SEO visibility and introduce the xxx “USA” brand to the US market

Establish US relevancy for the US site (www.xxxusa.com) rather than the UK site (www.xxx.com). Previously, the UK site owned all SEO visibility for the brand in the US

Capture non-brand visibility and gain competitive share of voice (rankings and traffic) in the US market

Increase SEO traffic and sales in the US market

SOLUTION: • Resolved SEO challenges with extensive technical

solutions (ex. removing duplicate content and implementing technical tagging to establish the US site as authoritative for the brand in the US).

• Conducted research study of the US women’s shoe market resulting in a change to the nomenclature of the site taxonomy and site content (changed from British English to American English).

• Authored and integrated content targeting the US-based consumers.

• Researched and secured links from high quality, relevant sites to create new connections to the US site (off-site authority building).

RESULTS:Technical optimization performed during the initial strategy shifted the brand relevancy from the UK site to the US site within the first 6 months of execution. • 82% YOY growth in organic non brand search

traffic • 99% YOY growth in organic non brand search

revenue

IMPROVING NON-BRAND ORGANIC – CASE STUDY


CHALLENGE:

Gain SEO visibility and introduce the xxx “USA” brand to the US

Establish relevancy of the US site (www.xxx.com) vs. the UK site (www.xxx.co.uk) in the United States. Previously, the UK site owned all SEO visibility for the brand in the US

Capture non-brand visibility and gain competitive share of voice (rankings and traffic) in the US market

Increase SEO traffic and sales in the US market

SOLUTION: • Resolved SEO challenges with extensive technical

solutions (ex. removing duplicate content and implementing technical tagging to establish the US site as the authoritative site for the brand in the US).

• Conducted research study of US plus size consumer behavior resulting in a change to the nomenclature of the site taxonomy and site content (changed from British English to American English).

• Researched and secured links from high quality, relevant sites to create new connections to the US site (off-site authority building).

RESULTS: Technical optimization performed during the initial strategy shifted the brand relevancy from the UK site to the US site within the first 90 days of execution. • 335% YOY growth in organic search traffic • 128% YOY growth in organic search revenue • Grown from zero page-one rankings to the 6th

largest share of voice of page-one rankings in 12 months.

IMPROVING NON-BRAND ORGANIC – CASE STUDY


GUEST BLOGGING – CASE STUDY

Google RankKeyword Position Change

From 10/1 /12 – 4/1/13Keyword #1 +68Keyword #2 +3Keyword #3 +9Keyword #4 +2Keyword #5 +6

Results

The PM Digital team’s guest blogging activity for this leading

retailer greatly improved keyword rankings in Google.


CONNECTING TO AUDIENCES WITH ON-PAGE VIDEO CONTENT


USING CONTENT TO CONNECT WITH A “DEEP” B2B AUDIENCE


CONNNECTING WITH TWO AUDIENCES USING TWO APPROACHES


CONNECTING AUDIENCES TO TRADITIONALLY DRY SUBJECT MATTER


CONTENT MARKETING VIA SOCIAL MEDIA – CASE STUDY

Webpage To Drive Facebook Traffic

Content Rich, Engaging Facebook Page

Book Recommendation Engine

Scholastic engaged the team to create an integrated initiative to connect and build a community of teens: Developed “This Is Teen”

Facebook page, and web page to drive traffic

Conceptualized Facebook-only contests, polls, author chats, and other fan engagement methods

Developed Facebook tie-ins with author and book events

Implemented a geo-location game

Developed Book Recommendation Engine

Results Lifetime Likes: 1591%

increase in 4 months Post Views: 674% increase

in 4 months Post Views: 427% increase

in 4 months


Macmillan was planning a book launch and interested in big ideas to create an engaging social experience that would generate demand

The team developed an interactive teaser game / app to hype the upcoming launch of the book: Design of The “GLOW App” Landing Page Development of content to highlight key

plot points and generate viral buzz around the impending book launch (September 2011)

Conceptualization, creation and implementation of the interactive quiz, poll, discussion board and game

RESULTS Close to 11,000 likes in 6 weeks Over 2,000 Active Weekly Users and Over

6,000 Active Monthly Users 20-30 comments per day Over 200,000 points earned in the Glow:

The Mission Game

CONTENT MARKETING VIA SOCIAL APP – CASE STUDY


A self-contained game/challenge to drive site traffic by promoting NEJM’s multimedia assets and content

The Image Challenge presents a medical image and asks visitors to make a diagnosis.

• Supported with an email campaign with the theme “Watch. Listen. Learn.” which highlighted all of multimedia assets

IMAGE CONTENT MARKETING


TAKE AWAYS


Overwhelmed? Here’s where to start, strategically:

1. ID your goal(s)

2. ID problems & questions your audience would like solved

3. ID what human & content resources are already in place

4. Develop an editorial calendar telling “stories” conveyed through various content types

Here’s where to start, tactically:

1. List consumers’ problems in real language (do interviews, if possible)

2. Align with keyword research

3. Assign topics to internal specialists (use a “carrot”)

4. Use your blog (e.g. solve consumer problems with “How To” or “Behind the Scenes” posts)

All of this pre-supposes a website that has already been cleared of technical issues like accidental generation of duplicate content. Ideally, indexation issues have been solved and you’re even thinking about content’s authorship.

TAKE AWAYS


THANK YOU

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New York, NY 10004

www.pmdigital.com

Clay Cazier is Vice President, Natural Search Strategy for PM Digital. His resume includes more than 14 years of web development and search engine optimization experience, including successful ventures in travel, legal and many retail markets.

Clay’s role at PMD is to provide the strategic foundation, best practices and business support needed to craft ROI-positive campaigns for PMD’s clients. Fueling his passion for helping clients are skills that range from HTML/PHP coding and affiliate site development to social media outreach and blog marketing.

[email protected]

http://blog.pmdigital.com/author/claycazier

@jclayc

(212) 405-1923

mailto:[email protected]

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Date post:	20-Oct-2014
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