Creating Content That

ConvertsKnow Your Personas and Solve Their Problems

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SID Life

Agency Life

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Adjunct Professor

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Creating Content That Converts

Why Marketing, Communications & Sales Must Work Together

Defining and Building Personas

Content Audits

Content Strategy 101

Test and Learn

Measurement

Case Studies/Takeaways

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We’re All In This Together

Marketing, PR, Communications & Sales must all be in alignment

But How?

Regular meetings

Attend each other’s meetings

Decide on personas

Share content creation processes and ideas – Brainstorm!

Coordinate campaigns and content around sales cycles

Align KPIs and measurables

Showcase your salesperson’s expertise

Make resources easy to share and easy to find

Have fun – We’re all in this together!

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Personas, Personas, Personas

What is a persona?

Who here has defined buyer or audience persona(s)? Why?

You can’t be all things to all people . . . you just can’t!

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Personas, Personas, Personas

Buyer personas provide structure and context for your

company, making it easier to map out content, allocate your

team’s time and resources and achieve alignment.

Learning about your ideal customer – goals, plans,

challenges, etc. – helps you set a strategy aimed at

attracting the most valuable visitors, leads and customers to

your business.

HubSpot's Make My Persona Tool

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Personas, Personas, Personas

Start broadly and think of your target audience(s)

Then begin to get granular - major elements to define for your personas

Location - Where do people from this persona live?

Age - What is the age range of this persona?

Gender - What is the gender of people in this persona?

Interests - What are the interests of people in this persona?

Education Level - What is the education level of this persona?

Income Level - What is the income range of this buyer persona?

Relationship Status - What is the relationship status of this buyer persona?

Favorite Websites - Why type of websites do people in this persona frequent?

Buying Motivation - What is this persona’s reason for buying your product?

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Personas, Personas, Personas

Now it’s time to research and put it all together!

If you have an established online presence you can begin to

gather some of this with tools such as Facebook Insights and

Google Analytics Audience Reports.

If you don’t have a heavy online presence, you can use tools to

analyze your competitors with tools like SimilarWeb and

Compete.

You can, and should, also use traditional methods such as

surveys, market research, focus groups, interviews, etc.

Package all the info you have gathered and plug into the “Build

My Persona” tools and there you have it….your first buyer.

persona.

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Sample Personas

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Sample Personas

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Sample Personas

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Content Audits

Step 1 - Define Your Goals

Step 2 - Take an Inventory of Your Content

Step 3 - Catalog Content

Step 4 - Collect and Analyze Data

Step 5 - Draw Up An Action Plan

Step 6 - Test and Learn!

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Define Your Goals

No matter the goals, make sure they are SMART!

Specific, Measureable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound

Specificity means answering who, what, when, which and why

You must measure metrics that matter to your bottom line

Your goals must also be realistic

Relevance refers to focusing on something that makes sense to

the overall business goals

You must hold yourself to a deadline and a specific time frame

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Inventory Your Content

What content affects your SMART goals?

Take inventory of where it lives and who “owns” it

Is it on your website? Brochures? Flyers?

For online content you can use tools that let you submit

your sitemap to help analyze important web pages

Content Audit Tool

Content Inventory Spreadsheet

Content Audit Template (Google Doc)

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Catalogue Your Content

Lifecycle or buyer’s journey stage

Content type (blog post, press release, landing page, etc.)

Content format (video, infographic, etc.)

Number of words

Date of publication or last modification

Author(s)

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Examples

Content Inventory Spreadsheet Content Audit Template (Google Doc)

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Collect and Analyze Data

This can be a lengthy process

You must find a way that works for you to sort this data

Pair the content audit with Google Analytics and social

media data

What stands out?

Ex: High traffic, but high bounce rate. Content is interesting,

but not enough to keep them on your site or convert.

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Draw Up An Action Plan

What to keep – High performing, relevant

What to update – Articles on trends, stats, etc.

What to delete – Anything that’s not performing or

outdated

Then begin to draw up your NEW Content Strategy based

on your goals and all of the conclusions that you have

drawn from your analysis

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Draw Up An Action Plan

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Content Strategy Action Steps

Reuse your content

Rewrite your content

Refresh your content

Know your personas

Structure your content with a content calendar

Update your CTAs

Use videos and images

Always look at analytics and website health to determine

what’s effective

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Content Strategy Action Steps

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Content Calendars

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Test and Learn

Don’t be afraid to let things “breathe”

Don’t rush to judgements, but also don’t be afraid to

react in real time

Gone are the days of “set it and forget it”

Constantly A/B Test your content

Keep using the formats/campaigns that work

Scrap what doesn’t, but make sure to learn from those

tests to better optimize things in the future

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A/B Testing

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Measurement and KPIs

What matters to the company’s bottom line?

What matters to each business unit?

Use visual models or WIG charts

Consistent communication to show how individual work

aligns with KPIs and goals

True performance improvement often isn’t the KPI itself,

but the spaces between them and the process

improvements discovered

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WIG Boards

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Case Study – Portland Trailblazers & Sq1

The Portland Trail Blazers NBA team ran new mobile-first ad campaign to attract

fans and increase ticket sales, resulting in 14X return on ad spend.

THE GOAL – Driving Ticket Sales

THE CONTENT –The advantage of ads in Instagram Stories is that they provide

an immersive, full-screen visual experience. The ads focused on selling an event

and not just the game using carousel ads, photo ads, video ads, and leads ads.

THE STRATEGY - The ads were targeted to a Custom Audience based on past

ticket purchaser data (2,000 single ticket buyers), and then to a lookalike

audience based on similar ticket purchaser characteristics.

THE RESULTS – 56X return on spend for Instagram Feed Campaign

33X return on ad spend for peak ads in IG Stories Campaign

14X return on ad spend for all Instagram Campaigns

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Case Study – Omega Fi

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Since 2016, Omegi Fi’s blog focuses on the reader to develop a shared emotional

connection. Via an “escape-velocity approach” the team began to produce 12 blogs a

month and have to date, published more than 300 new blogs.

THE GOAL – Drive website traffic and secure quality leads.

THE CONTENT – 300+ keyword rich blogs, which equals about 5x’s the amount of they

produced in the previous 5 years combined.

THE STRATEGY – This content-rich approach is helping produce revenue for the brand

and building a demand generation engine that will persist for years to come as a

measurable business asset.

THE RESULTS – New rankings on 375 additional keywords

Keyword rankings shot up 11,700 spots on search results pages

Organic search lead source accounts for 25% of digital sales

Organic traffic converts at a higher rate than other lead sources

Don’t Forget

We’re all in this together!

It all begins with personas

Audit your content and mine the gold

Use content calendars

SMART Goals

Test and learn

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Thank You!

@TODMEISNER #RaganContent

todmeisner@gmailcom

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