“Does SEO make anyone feel warm & fuzzy?”

Lindsay Trinkle Visits #DGM2 Class @_GAAtlanta

As we begin the second half of our 10 week Digital Marketing class, we welcome another great guest speaker from the Atlanta digital world. Our first speaker blew the doors off of market & customer segmentation, setting the bar high for our remaining three guest speakers. Tonight, Lindsay Trinkle, whom I met at The Village and is now at Write2Market, where her aim is “to help entrepreneurs find their voice and tell their stories,” put down some fantastic information about content.

Here are the high points from Lindsay’s 49 minutes of content magic entitled “CONTENT: How to make it better”:

• What is content?
• the art of communicating with your customers and prospects without selling. – content marketing institute
• what separates us from salespeople
• blogs, white papers, video, social media
• Social Media is content marketing, not just a channel of content distribution
• Some statistics on content marketing:
• Content marketing generates 3X as many leads per dollar spent as traditional marketing tactics
• 7/10 readers prefer to learn about a brand via content, not ads, especially millennials
• 65% of people are visual learners, so use visual content, infographics
• 82% of consumers trust a company more when leadership – mainly the CEO – is active on social media and blog
• 70% of consumers “feel closer” to a company when they consume that brand’s content marketing
• Content marketing is not selling. Content marketing is creating a relationship with a prospect that makes them feel closer to your brand
• Content marketing builds credibility & trust
• Content only matters if it matters to your customer/user

Lindsay’s Content Ratio Rule of Thumb:

• 60% educational posts
• Example: moz – read it and think, “wow, this company actually cares about me”; they never pitch their product in their eBook; they just tell you how to do SEO better, which builds trust.
• 20% conversational posts
• This one is tricky; this is where the “CEO is on social media” thing comes into play; your brand must be personified, humanized in some way for it to be relevant and trustworthy; put a human face to the words; focus on the team (e.g., “We’re going to SXSW!”) adding a human element, face, name, job function; “conversational” isn’t the accurate word, since we’re not engaging in discussion, but rather just more “human”, talking about the people of the brand and what they’re doing.
• 20% promotional posts
• posts that actually talk about your product, brand, or services; tips on how to use the products, etc. Keep this to a minimum; never over 20%. Don’t work this into every other post. Keep this separate. Your instinct is to create a great educational post, and then put a call to action to get an offer at the bottom. Don’t.

• This rule of thumb is hard to define when you’re putting it into practice.
• The point of white papers & eBooks is to put them behind a form and do lead gen. WPs no longer than 15 pages, or else it’s an eBook. Both are PDFs, just formatted differently. Put it behind a marketing automation tool.
• If they’re interested in your content, then they’re interested in what you have to offer.

Great tools for visual content creation:

• canva
• piktochart
• easel.ly
• Hemingway app

• SEO, linkbuilding, blah blah blah yada yada yada: focus on creating content that connects you to your audience.
• Re-purposing content is wonderful, but you have to be creative about it.

Next class, we’ll be joined by the one and only Van Baird, of Relational Equity, the most interesting Insurance salesman in the world, as he brings his own version of digital marketing: ““Shut Up & Listen!” Using digital for Referrals, Retention, Revenue, Relationships and Other Words That Start with R.“