Welcome to the first edition of Intelligency’s Weekly Digital Roundup! Bringing you the lowdown on the vast world of Digital and noteworthy things to pay attention to.

iOS 15’s new privacy features

iOS 15 has been unveiled at the most recent Apple conference, and one of the big features that has been unveiled is “Hide my email” this basically allows users to create a random email address which has a rule to forward any emails sent to their primary email address. This is important because open rates are now being curbed and some emails are no longer forwarded to primary email addresses, shifting the focus to now be on how many users clicked the link within the email.

Why email marketers are calling Apple’s iOS 15 update ‘a proverbial nail in the coffin’

British government in talks about reforming GDPR and Data Protection

Planned GDPR reforms are looking beneficial for Advertisers, the government does not intend to use a “one-size fits all” approach for Data Protection, suggesting that different sized companies should have more tailored regulations. Another standout reform is on the subject of Cookies, the propositioned reforms have suggested that Analytic and Measurement cookies may be approached in a different way. The Internet Advertising Bureau has endorsed the reforms. 

GDPR: How brands could benefit from ‘common-sense reforms’

John Mueller on WordPress themes

Google’s John Mueller has confirmed that changing a theme within WordPress can affect rankings within SERPS, as the theme has an effect on the way Google sees and ranks your website.

Google: Changing WordPress Themes Can Impact Rankings

Facebook VIP list revealed by Wall Street Journal

Facebook have recently had a number of documents and internal conversations leaked due to a Wall Street Journal article. The investigation delved into Facebook’s Cross Check whitelist where 5.8m “newsworthy”, “influential or popular” or “PR risky” accounts reside. These accounts are not subject to enforcement, which means they can post content which deliberately violates the guidelines set out by Facebook with little to no consequence, unlike the other 2.95billion users on the social network.

Facebook: some high-profile users ‘allowed to break platform’s rules’

Instagram shop update for businesses

Instagram has introduced adverts into their “Shop” tab which means you can introduce targeted, sponsored posts to consumers to sell your products which just merge into the rest of the shop tiles which the end user will see.

Instagram Introduces Ads Within Its Shop Tab

There is always a danger with brands on Social Media that they can very easily talk about themselves and nothing else. Businesses that post updates solely about their products or services and don’t engage with content or ideas that may sit off their own website are missing a trick. Social Media in its purest form is simply an online community. Very much like reality, if you walk into a bar with your friends and only talk about how amazing you are, it’s likely you won’t be asked back next time round. There is little complexity or technical skill required to get Social Media right, sometimes simply being willing to talk openly is all that is required.

Before ever setting up your Facebook Page, Twitter handle or Instagram account, think about what the purpose of the channel is and what type of content you want to create. Of course, ultimately it’s to sell your product but maybe it’s doing so in an indirect manner. Think about how you want your brand to be perceived and do any of the below objectives fit in with your strategy:

• Informational: Are you doing a public service and providing readers with knowledge and experience based on your own expertise? This might be how-to content or moodboards, anything that makes life easier for the reader to undertake a task
• Entertainment: Perhaps you want to yield a more casual relationship with your audience and want to use content to entertain them. That might be circulation of viral videos, funny blog posts or engaging imagery. Chances are you want to position your brand alongside an emotion
• Practical: There’s nothing wrong with having a less exciting and more pragmatic strategy. Many social media accounts are simply there for customer service, so the content might be things like frequently asked questions, support tutorials or webinars

Whatever objective or theme of content your looking at, your social media should probably accommodate a little of everything. Make sure when you put together a content plan, that it’s not just for your blog or on-site content, but also includes your social media. However, producing that much content on a regular basis will either be time consuming or you will exhaust all content opportunities available. With that point and the fact that no one likes people who talk about themselves, it’s important you look to curate content.

What is curating content?

Content curation is a polite way of saying ‘I found some good content I didn’t produce that I want to distribute to my audience’. It is a crucial part of every social media strategy as it reduces the frequency of self-promoting content and it ensures that the channel is vibrant and broad in the types of content being shared. A brand that is happy to share other peoples content shows self-confidence and openness with the community as well as also cleverly ensuring its readers don’t go elsewhere to consume content. If you don’t bring the content to the audience, they will go elsewhere to get it.

How does content curation work?

What this doesn’t mean is you should go and start sharing your favourite football teams recent championship win on your business page. Instead, it’s trying to find relevant content for your audience that has been executed in a manner that is appropriate and engaging. Try to ask yourself the following questions when looking at a piece of third-party content:

• Is this appropriate for my brand? Does it fit in with our brand guidelines and values? If it doesn’t, then you probably shouldn’t share it?
• Is this going to deliver value to my audience? Will it provide any value to the three pillars of informational, entertainment or practical content? Is it something you’d produce yourself?
• Is this content safe to use? Does it send readers to a competitor site? Does it send users to a site that has been critical of your brand/trade in the past? Will your audience be sensitive to the content?

So why doesn’t everyone do content curation?

Quite simply, curating content involves thinking about the content you want, finding it and then sharing it in an appropriate way that it doesn’t look like you’re just stealing it! This process can be time consuming, especially when you really need to be managing a social media community on a daily basis. That being said, it is worthwhile undertaking as it will extend your organic reach, provide you with free and effortless content and engagement and it will position your brand in good stead.

How do I curate content quickly?

The easiest way to curate content is to use Twitter. Twitter is a goldmine of content and it’s easy to use search facility means you can pretty much find the right item straight away.

1. Open up Twitter.com
2. Use the search functionality to find competitors, thought leaders, trade publications, influencers, suppliers, high profile customers that you know are relevant to your audience
3. Create a Twitter list
4. Add the accounts you found in step 2 to this Twitter list. You know have a dedicated stream of people you can monitor for content
5. Open up Hootsuite.com and create an account if you don’t have one already. Hootsuite is a social media management platform for scheduling, managing and reporting on your social media content. It’s free to use and then handy to manage all your social media accounts from one app.
6. Add your social media accounts to Hootsuite
7. In the “Streams” tab click “+Add Stream” and then Twitter
8. Select the “Lists” tab
9. Select the appropriate profile and then select the list you created in step 3. This will add a stream of all the content from this list for you that you should monitor on a daily or weekly basis to help find new content. Look for content that has received a good level of engagement already as a barometer of success. But remember, the longer you leave it, the more likely your own audience may have engaged with it already.
10. In the same “+Add Stream” tab, click the “Search” tab
11. You can now add a number of search queries that you’d like to track for content. Be quite specific as you run the risk of having too many results.
12. Click “add stream”

You now should have two columns that will provide you with already set up searches that you can look through on a daily basis. Get used to checking these streams to find new content to curate and start to openly retweet content you liked or save the link and add your commentary. This is a very simple and quick way of digesting a lot of information and finding some great content to curate quickly. Just always make sure to credit the author of the content either through retweeting, sharing or providing a credit note. If you try pass the content as your own, you will only invite negative sentiment towards your social media presence.

It’s one thing to put together a great timeline and structure for your content as we discussed in our how-to create a content plan blog post, it’s another to actually come up with what that content is going to be. Brainstorming content ideas as a group is usually everyone’s first point of call, but this can often lead to decisions being made on how creative or exciting a concept is. Likewise, if ideas are left to an individual, it’s very easy to get biased content that may tend to focus on one theme. A great content plan isn’t one that is creative, unique or exciting, it’s a plan that caters to the needs of the audience (the readers!) and has enough variety and purpose that it will entice them back.

A good place to start when you’re devising content ideas is to avoid brainstorming and first look at the target audience. You need to assess what type of content do they engage with, what are their needs and how do they discover content. Tailoring the content to the audience, rather than your own objectives (e.g. sell products, generate leads, show off how amazing you are) will ensure you’re relevant. This exercise need only take up to an hour and can ensure you set down the correct objectives before spending hours/money on reams of content.

Who are my audience?

This should always be the first question before you put pen to paper. Assess your business objectives and explore if there’s a typical user profile e.g. is it largely female based? is it young or old? is it in the UK or globally? Dive into Google Analytics and look at the demographic data yourself. Look at how users explore your site, what pages do they spend more time on, what searches do they come through to your site on? There is a wealth of data for content teams in Google Analytics that is very rarely tapped into. If you don’t have that information available, look at company records for clients/customers – who do they tend to be? If perhaps your audience isn’t a direct customer, but industry thought-leaders, go find them. Who regularly commentates on industry news? Who or what content gets shared regularly about your industry on social media?

How do I find out what content my audience engages with?

A big error many content teams make at the start is assuming that the audience will engage with a certain type of content. If your audience is young then an academic whitepaper or corporate press release will likely fail to engage, whereas video content may succeed against shorter attention spans. If your audience are hardcore powerusers in the industry, then they may be more open to reading 700+ word blog posts, but if they want to digest information quickly then you need to consider word length or the format you deliver it in. Again, look at what’s being shared on social media, go on Twitter and search for the relevant industry terms and hashtags. Look for content that has high social shares and look for those that don’t, you’ll quickly be able to assess what content works best.

How do I create useful and original content?

It’s very easy to create the exact same content as everyone else, so you need to differentiate what you create by asking yourself – ‘how is this any different?’. Obviously, always look to see if your ideas have already been done before – it may save you time and effort crafting something you believe to be truly amazing that’s actually been done several months ago. A great way to hunt for original content ideas is to explore message boards, subreddits, LinkedIn groups for industry communities. They tend to be populated by users who really excel and enjoy whatever that industry is, and as such tend to be good sources of inspiration. Spending 30 minutes looking through a message board and sorting by ‘most read thread’ will quickly give you an idea of what your audiences engages with. It will help you find common questions for FAQs and Buying Guides and it will also show you the tone and language the audiences uses with each another. Reddit is a fantastic outlet for content ideas and finding discussion topics you can pick up on. A melting point of discussion, debate and humour – there’s a subreddit for nearly every industry imaginable and due to the ranking functionality of comments, you don’t even need to sift through to get some ideas.

What content ideas should I be thinking about?

Once you have an understanding of your objectives, audience, the type of content they engage with and ensuring you’re not just replicating old work, it’s then time to have a brainstorm for content ideas. Don’t get sucked into producing ideas for the same type of content. Your plan needs to be broad and variety, with that in mind, here are some good ideas for content types:

Buying Guide

If you’re offering products on your site, buying guides are invaluable content for conversion, SEO and user experience. A buying guide can help reassure a novice that a certain product is right for them, or at the very least give them some direction on what to buy. Buying guides can be split out by numerous variables e.g. by price, by skill, by colour, by trend or theme and by season. They are great to produce as they can easily be repurposed for email, direct mail or social media.

FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions not only make for informative reassuring pieces of content that help SEO and Social Media, but they can also alleviate customer service teams. If the answer to a question is already on the site, you will save time and money if that question doesn’t need to go through to your call centre. FAQs are easily created and allow you to very quickly answer often very specific questions that only need a small amount of content for, so don’t warrant their own content piece.

Whitepaper

Often associated with academic and research content, a whitepaper is quite simply a posher way of packaging up some research and data and delivering to an audience. The tone is often more academic and the content more detailed and professional. Whitepapers are a good way of drumming up interest and engagement with mainstream press or leading industry thinkers – both help to improve your credibility and stature in the industry. However, if you intend to create a whitepaper, you need to ensure that your committed to high standards of research and data analysis/collection.

How-to

There are endless permutations and opportunities with how-to content. Look across your service offering or product range and start to think about where would the audience need help. These guides can be focused on a specific activity utilising your product e.g. how do I put up shelving? or they can be centered around actually buying the product itself e.g. how-to buy for fathers in their 50s this fathers day. Either way, how-to’s are a great way of developing regularly and useful content. Furthermore, if you have the time and patience, there’s a great opportunity to utilising video content.

Jargon-buster

Many industries are awash with jargon, acronyms and myths that confuse the reader. A jargon-buster can simply be a list of these terms explained, or you could decide to invest more time into it and pick one term every week or month and dig a little deeper to explain.

Jargon-busters are particularly useful for internally linking back to across the site in order to help the user understand your content.

Opinion piece

If there’s a particular issue or discussion points that you feel you have the gravitas and knowledge to discuss, then an opinion piece is a good way of generating traffic to your website and brand recognition. Opinion pieces generate thought leadership in the industry but beware, if done incorrectly or too controversially, they can have the opposite effect. Make sure that you back up your points with references, evidence or even other articles that share your opinion.

Product review

A simple product review helps generate thought leadership and trust with the audience and can be used to circulate across Social Media. As a rule of thumb, picking products that are fairly minor or small is probably a waste of time. Aim for larger ticket items as they are more likely to require some additional content to help persuade your customer/reader. Be careful not to make every review an amazing one as this can look disingenuous. Equally, rather than slating a product, simply comment who the product might be better for or not.

Listicle

An easy and quick way to create some content is a listicle. Following a simple format, you create a numerical list and tie it back to a topic e.g. Top 5 places to visit before you die. Listicles should be short and sweet with a fun tone of voice. They work very well on blogs and allow you opportunities to add imagery to the post quite easily. They also perform quite well on Social Media as it allows you to open up the discussion for suggestions.

Now you have a content plan and content ideas, the next step is to go out and start creating that content. If you want to find out more about content strategy or content production do get in touch with us for a informal chat about how we can help.

Creating high quality content for a brand website is always one of the most neglected tasks for businesses. Too often, content has been rushed to get the website live but never refreshed. Alternatively, many sites boast news and blog sections that are rarely updated and have simply become press release archives. Content remains the life blood of any site – it will define how customers perceive your brand and it will persuade them whether they should convert on your site or elsewhere. With that in mind, as part of our content planning and creation services, we’ve put together a quick guide on how to build a great content plan:

Why bother with a content plan?

For SEO, content remains one of the most important ranking factors for ranking highly in Google. If you site has remained static for several years and hasn’t been updated, Google may decide the information on their is out of date and irrelevant. A site that shows it’s being regularly updated, gaining organic links back to articles, being shared across social media and leveraging internal links, will likely fare better.

For Social, without a content plan, your activity will likely just be random noise without any objective or purpose. A strong content plan for Social Media identifies the needs of an audience, explores their interests and marries them with your own business objectives. Supplementing your tweets and Facebook posts with engaging, useful and creative content ensures it carries more credibility and usefulness with your users.

What is a content plan?

A content plan is very simply an organised calendar of proposed content ideas for you (or your agency) to create. It provides you with a foundation to work from and think about what content you want to produce. Secondly, by organising it in a calendar format, you can then begin to align various content themes to seasonality. For example, a Gift Guide might be better suited just before Christmas rather than February!

, a good content plan goes further than being just a list of ideas and timings. A robust content plan should not only align to seasonal events, but to your keyword strategy and seasonality around search volume. It should look to break down into distinguishable themes that each have their own objectives and audiences. Is your content meant to garner thought leadership or is it simply to drive traffic to a sale?

What is content?

Content is a term often thrown about casually by those in the marketing industry, but really it encompasses a huge variety of ways a user or customer consumes information. Traditionally, content is most often associated with old fashioned web copy. However, it’s important to distinguish this is just one variety of content and each type of content has it’s advantages and disadvantages as listed below:

What should I create my content plan in?

Something like Google Sheets or Excel are perfectly fine for quickly putting together a content plan. Google Sheets is a good idea as it will allow multiple users to collaborate and edit the document without needing to keep resaving or create new versions. You can simply hide columns or rows when you’ve passed dates as not to lose what you had planned in – which could be useful for next year.

What should be in the content plan?

This is really up to you and what your objective for the content is, but it shouldn’t just a list of content ideas. Try to breakout either via rows or columns the below elements for each piece of content:

• Date – when do you plan to create, approve and publish the content?
• Calendar alignment – how does this content align to other events in the calendar e.g. seasonal, PR activity, Social plans, Sale periods
• Description – provide a topline description of the content
• Type – what variety of content is it – use our examples above
• Keyword targeting – are you specifically trying to target a keyword set for SEO? We will come to this shortly
• Responsibility – who is creating the content and who is approving it?
• Audience – who is this content for? Feel free to break down into detailed demographic/audience data or perhaps just New/Returning customer
• Channels for distribution – how do you intend to get people to see this content e.g. post on Facebook, email to customers, PR to influencers
• Internal linking opportunities – within the content can you internally link to either past relevant content or pages on the site. This will help SEO value and help you think about how you connect this one content piece to your wider content strategy
• Assets – do you require any specific assets for the content e.g. video, imagery, access to a key-stakeholder in the business

What is calendar alignment?

Calendar alignment is making sure that your plan is aligned to other activity that may be happening in the business or externally. You want to ensure that when your content is published, that is is amplified as much as possible and comes at the right time. Look to match-up content so it launches to seasonal events so that it makes sense to your audience. Utilise keyword research to understand the searching patterns of your customers so that your content drops just at the right time. For example, January is notoriously busy for painting/decorating as many customers go through Christmas spending more time at home, and want to start the new year with a new look. Therefore, ensure your January content (and December) is about providing them with help and inspiration on how to achieve this.

Additionally, work with other teams in your business e.g. Sales, PR, Social, Email and try to align you content to their plans. If you can ensure that your promoting a sale within a piece of content, you may be able to amplify their activity and start to show that your blog post is driving revenue.

What is keyword targeting?

If you’re creating content for SEO purposes then you need to ensure that your content works as hard as possible to reflect what your customer is searching for. There are plenty of Keyword Research tools out there to try, but Google’s own Keyword Planner is free and easy to use. It will help you find out how many searches a keyword is getting so you can best know which keywords to target. It’s important not to focus on just one keyword however, but instead look at the bigger picture. Users search differently and are at different points in the sales funnel, so you need to make sure if you’re selling paint for example, that you target not just “paint” but also something like “black radiator non-glossy paint”. Both long and short tail keywords are important.

Vitally, use something like Google Trends to see when search volume peaks and troughs throughout the year. If you’re launching content when the least amount of people are searching for it, you may be missing a trick. Try to align the timings of content around peaks or in the build up to, so you can make sure it’s timely and relevant to both your customers and search engines. A simple hour using Google Trends to look up peak periods for your core keywords can have a huge impact on the success of your content plan.

But I don’t have time to do all of this!

We can appreciate that the above is fairly resource intensive, but when executed correctly, it can drive significant traffic, improve brand reputation and greatly improve Organic Search performance. If you want some help in either just putting a plan together or perhaps that and the production of all your content, speak to digital marketing consultants like us and we will be able to provide an easy, professional and cost-effective solution without long term contracts.