One of the hallmarks of truly outstanding content is laser like relevancy. It needs to feel like you’re reading your audience’s mind.  It’s not easy to do though.  But it’s worth it. 

Only GREAT content is king.  Just the other day I was reading an article on Medium.  The author made some good points about the future of content. He brought into question the challenges that Facebook and YouTube had in 2018 regarding trust.

In my company’s case, we have a basic reposting schedule… … if a piece of content goes on any social platform today, it gets automatically reposted in 30 days and 180 days.  … if an email has an open rate of 30% or higher, it is automatically broadcasted again 6 months later.  Result: one article can yield 80 or 90 repurposed pieces over the next 6 months.

We have an ecommerce client that runs a lot of traffic from Facebook. He recently sent us a report of some of his results from our content.  Turns out that he’s getting about a 22:1 return on investment.  To put that into context, for every $1000 investment he’s getting back $22,000 in sales.  Pretty amazing.

I will tell you one undeniable fact… Someone who has interacted with even a few pieces of content is a MUCH better lead than someone who knows nothing about you.  This means your sales conversion will go up. It also means your sales cycle will shorten.

So, you are monitoring KPIs. That’s great.  But it’s also a danger… because you need to see passed the numbers, too.  Not all KPIs are directly observable or measurable. And these may be the crucial ones for your business. So, how do you know what to measure? Let me tell you a story… 

Great content that does not get published is pointless content… And I see this happen all the time.  Let me tell you about a client...

Do you struggle to kick off your content marketing each week or month? If so, you might find this tip useful. It’s what I use to create 150 or so content pieces per month. 

GaryVee offers some solid advice about this exact thing. In one of his podcasts he talked listeners through a couple of important numbers: "If you only get one percent organic reach on Facebook, and if you've got a thousand fans, only 10 of those fans are even going to see a particular piece of content."

The super signature allows you to get sales pitches into your daily emails without frustrating people, which is no mean feat. But just having a super signature is not enough. You need to create a call to action in the super signature that makes people “want” to click on it.

We popped over to his Youtube channel and we sorted the content by most popular. Then we saw that there were a whole range of videos for a few of his products that get abnormally high views. So we used that data to influence the content he produced for the next month. Looking at data is absolutely a great way to influence what content you create.

You won’t believe how many times I get asked how I do my own PR. The good news is that it’s easier than ever before. This is because a lot of the social platforms will show you what's trending. A big part of PR is using the existing momentum of trending topics.

Within each target audience, you need to go to the next level and articulate the various personas. Once each has been documented, you can decide which content pieces match up with which persona.

“How can I get a better return from my content to Facebook ads?” This is a good question. There are a few ways to do this, but the key way is the following.

The majority of one or two line results have not been answered with any thought. You are looking for survey results where you have one, two, even three instances with a survey response where the respondent is pouring their heart and soul into the answer. You're looking for depth and breadth. You're looking for emotion. You're looking for the one page response where others are responding with one or two sentences.

There are a few things going for that piece of content, most notably the celebrity profile of Elon Musk. The other part of it is everyone talks about how he's a PhD physics candidate. They talk about Tesla and Spacex, and so forth.

Before and after pictures are a powerful tool. Infographics are also great for showing instead of telling. These ideas help elevate the content quality in a big way.

How do you get your customers to give you a testimonial or review? It could be anything from donating a dollar of each sale to charity. You could kick off a competition. It can be a range of different things. You can get creative with this.

And the client was saying: “Look, I prefer to go with you because what you would do for us that I love is that you don't really need to speak to me. You don't really need to interview me. You don't have to come out to see me. You build a system that makes it extremely convenient for me.”

How do you build an email marketing plan? And how do you build a plan responsible for 3.2 million emails per month? Here’s how we do it for our client…