{"id":1982,"date":"2017-02-02T13:03:35","date_gmt":"2017-02-02T13:03:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/2017.london.wordcamp.org\/?post_type=wcb_session&#038;p=1982"},"modified":"2017-08-30T15:59:14","modified_gmt":"2017-08-30T14:59:14","slug":"showing-roi-how-to-create-a-content-marketing-report","status":"publish","type":"wcb_session","link":"https:\/\/london.wordcamp.org\/2017\/session\/showing-roi-how-to-create-a-content-marketing-report\/","title":{"rendered":"Showing ROI: How to Create a Content Marketing Report"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>How do you know if your content marketing strategy is doing you any good?<\/p>\n<p>In this talk, we&#8217;ll discuss how you should be measuring the performance of your content. We&#8217;ll look at the stats you should be following, the tools (WP and beyond) that can help you track them, and how to set them up. By the end of the talk, you will have a clear understanding of what it takes to create a content report.<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<section id=\"slides\" class=\"session--slides\">\n<h2>Slides<\/h2>\n<iframe src='https:\/\/www.slideshare.net\/slideshow\/embed_code\/73276021' width='604' height='495' sandbox=\"allow-popups allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-presentation\" allowfullscreen webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<p>https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/pulse\/question-content-marketers-hate-ilia-markov<\/p>\n<\/section>\n<section id=\"video\" class=\"session--video\">\n<h2>Video<\/h2>\n<div id=\"v-KZSld3L4-1\" class=\"video-player\"><iframe title='VideoPress Video Player' aria-label='VideoPress Video Player' width='604' height='338' src='https:\/\/videopress.com\/embed\/KZSld3L4?hd=1&amp;cover=1&amp;loop=0&amp;autoPlay=0&amp;permalink=1&amp;muted=0&amp;controls=1&amp;playsinline=0&amp;useAverageColor=0&amp;preloadContent=metadata' frameborder='0' allowfullscreen data-resize-to-parent=\"true\" allow='clipboard-write'><\/iframe><script src='https:\/\/s0.wp.com\/wp-content\/plugins\/video\/assets\/js\/next\/videopress-iframe.js'><\/script><\/div>\n<\/section>\n<section id=\"transcription\" class=\"session--transcription\">\n<h2>Transcription<\/h2>\n<p><b>MC: \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/b>Welcome to track B, everyone. \u00a0We&#8217;ve got three talks in the morning. \u00a0Our first talk is with Ilia Markov who is from Bulgaria, from Sofia, and he&#8217;s 100\u00a0per\u00a0cent remote for his work and he&#8217;s going to talk about content marketing, I\u00a0will not talk too much about that as he is obviously going to be talking about that. \u00a0Our talks are going to be half an hour long and a\u00a05-minute Q&amp;A at the end so if you think of any questions, jot them down and at the end we&#8217;ll come along with the microphone and ask you about what you have to say, and then there will be a\u00a0little gap, and then we&#8217;ll move on to the next one. \u00a0I\u00a0am sure you know the drill. \u00a0Guys, how is it going up there? \u00a0Everything hunky dory? \u00a0With that, I will say enjoy the talk.<\/p>\n<p><b>ILIA: \u00a0\u00a0<\/b>Good morning, everyone. \u00a0I\u00a0hope you&#8217;ve had a\u00a0chance to have tea or coffee. \u00a0I\u00a0am excited to talk a\u00a0little bit about content marketing and how you can measure the performance of your content marketing and what you need to do first, please don&#8217;t worry about taking too many notes, these slides should already be uploaded to this URL so you can access them. \u00a0There is another link at the end of the slides if you don&#8217;t manage to catch it now.<\/p>\n<p>Let&#8217;s start with this. \u00a0Why does it matter to measure your content ROI? \u00a0Why should you even care about it? \u00a0Isn&#8217;t it just great to be putting out great content, writing blog posts, producing White Papers C-books videos, whatever, you know, all that is content. \u00a0Something that you should always remember is that content marketing is not just about blogging or V-logging or producing any kind of content. \u00a0It is business strategy that can help you grow your company and your business. \u00a0With that, you have to think strategically about it, you have to measure the performance in order to know what&#8217;s going on and looking for ways to improve it and make sure it is working for you. \u00a0This maybe because I&#8217;ve always heard this attributed to Peter Drucker, who is a\u00a0big American authority on management, but apparently it is not 100\u00a0per\u00a0cent sure the quote is by him, but it is a\u00a0great quote nevertheless. \u00a0You need to measure what you&#8217;re doing, otherwise there is no other way to manage it.<\/p>\n<p>Just to let you know, we&#8217;re going to cover today, so in the first part I\u00a0want to talk about how to make content part of your overall business strategy and how to align doing the report and measuring your performance with that. \u00a0In the second part I&#8217;ll talk a\u00a0little bit about how to set up a\u00a0report and give you an example of one customer I\u00a0work with, and how I\u00a0did it for them. \u00a0In the end, I\u00a0want to talk a\u00a0little bit about how to actually calculate the return on investment of your content marketing efforts.<\/p>\n<p>Before that, to tell you a\u00a0little bit more about myself, consider myself a\u00a0content marketer, I work with many SaaS company, that&#8217;s my main focus, but I\u00a0have worked with companies from all different spaces in the industries. \u00a0I\u00a0recently started curating weekly newsletter on content marketing, so if that&#8217;s something you&#8217;re interested\u00a0in I&#8217;ll let you know and you can check it out.<\/p>\n<p>I\u00a0love Southampton FC, if there are any football fans here in the room, I&#8217;ve been to games all over the country, actually. \u00a0That&#8217;s how dedicated I\u00a0am. \u00a0I&#8217;ve travelled all over the UK to watch the saints.<\/p>\n<p>Let&#8217;s get to it.<\/p>\n<p>First, how make content part of your overall strategy. \u00a0It is really important to remember, you know, something that the thing that\u00a0I started with, that it&#8217;s content is not just something that lives on its own. \u00a0It should be part of your\u00a0&#8212; of how you organise and run your business. \u00a0It should sort of, the goals you want to achieve for your business. \u00a0Think strategically about those goals. \u00a0People often want to generate traffic to their website or their blog and that really shouldn&#8217;t be your business goal, because like your goal is not to generate traffic; your goal is to generate revenue. \u00a0So traffic can be something that you strive towards as a\u00a0performance indicator, just to see how well you&#8217;re doing, but it shouldn&#8217;t be the end goal. \u00a0The goals for content can really depend on what you&#8217;re going for with your business. \u00a0So if you have someone, maybe yourself, doing sales, you know, the end goal of content can be generating leads so the person doing the sales can take the leads and, you know work towards turning them into customers.<\/p>\n<p>I\u00a0told you I\u00a0work with a lot of SaaS companies and the main goal for them is to get people to start free trials, because that&#8217;s what generates revenue. \u00a0Customers who complete the free trial become paying customers and that&#8217;s the way revenue for SaaS companies is coming from.<\/p>\n<p>When you have idea about your goals, it&#8217;s important to come up with a\u00a0framework of indicators that will let you track the performance on those goals. \u00a0So, you know, you have to think strategically about what metrics show progress on your goals. \u00a0The most popular ones that I&#8217;ve seen in my practice, in my experience, it&#8217;s usually traffic, or things like shares and comments, you know, when we&#8217;re talking about traffic, lots of people keep track of organic traffic or traffic that comes from their SEO strategy or Google and other engines. \u00a0Shares and comments are always a\u00a0good indicator of how people are engaged with your content. \u00a0You might be getting a\u00a0lot of visits on your website, but if people are not sharing that content, they&#8217;re not commenting, that means that it&#8217;s probably doesn&#8217;t engage them as much.<\/p>\n<p>Another good way to track your content are the leads you generate, and of course the conversions, and I\u00a0will talk a\u00a0bit more about these two, in the next part, how to set up your content report.<\/p>\n<p>Let&#8217;s start with the few tools you can use to measure your content. \u00a0Google Analytics is sort of straightforward, it is growing over the years so it is now a\u00a0pretty complicated tool, but everyone knows it, it is free and easy to get started and it is easy to integrate with WordPress. \u00a0Woopra is another tool which allows you a\u00a0very detailed level of analytics. \u00a0It allows a\u00a0free plan, so you can also integrate it with WordPress in an easy way and I&#8217;ll show you in the following slides, it is great for creating and tracking what people are doing when visiting your website. \u00a0Google Search Console is something you should be using for measuring SEOs, it is also great for analytics and all the other tools, and it is great to see how you&#8217;re doing in terms of SEO, what keywords you&#8217;re tracking, ranking for, how many clicks you&#8217;re getting and things like that.<\/p>\n<p>Finally, if you want to build, in the example and that&#8217;s what I&#8217;m using, Google Sheets is another free tool, and there&#8217;s another analytics you can use on Google Sheets to pool data from Google Analytics and build an impressive report that gets all the data that you need in one place.<\/p>\n<p>When we&#8217;re talking about the report, I\u00a0would say the most important thing is to think about your content through a\u00a0funnel. \u00a0So create a\u00a0funnel, just for your content marketing, that, you know, lets you imagine how people go from &#8220;never heard of you&#8221; to &#8220;I\u00a0want to pay you money.&#8221; \u00a0And just think about the stages that it takes for someone who is completely oblivious of your brand, before he or she becomes customer.<\/p>\n<p>Most often, those stages that are C are, you know, first someone is just the new traffic that you get to your website, that is someone who is like unaware of your brand. \u00a0Then someone becomes a\u00a0lead usually when they give you your e-mail. \u00a0Then, as you have some interactions with them, and they show some interest in what you&#8217;re providing as a\u00a0service or product, they become a prospect, and then finally you turn them into customers when they start paying you for that product or service.<\/p>\n<p>So, when you&#8217;re creating a\u00a0funnel, going back to the KPIs I\u00a0was talking about earlier, think about what is the KPI to use to tie to that particular step in the funnel. \u00a0In the case of the traffic, it could be sessions, you need visitors, how many returning visitors you have, that is something that shows engagement.<\/p>\n<p>In the case of leads, it could be the e-mails you collect, because every e-mail is a\u00a0lead and that could be done using goal conversions. \u00a0That&#8217;s something I&#8217;ll show you in a\u00a0second. \u00a0For prospects, it can be pricing page visited, or how many trials have been started, and then finally for customers, it is how many sales you get.<\/p>\n<p>For someone between a\u00a0prospect and a\u00a0customers, that doesn&#8217;t mean they go out of your content funnel. \u00a0They&#8217;re still in the content funnel and you&#8217;re still using content to turn that prospect or lead into a\u00a0customer. \u00a0There&#8217;s a\u00a0lot you can do at that stage to, you know, push that person into turning them into a\u00a0customer so it doesn&#8217;t end at the point where they give you their e-mail. \u00a0The content can be used after that as well.<\/p>\n<p>As I\u00a0said, Woopra works great for funnels. \u00a0It is great to set up in a\u00a0visual way, and it collects a\u00a0lot of information about the people who come to your website so you can use that to really build a\u00a0profile of what people are doing on your website, and use that data to take other action. \u00a0So if you know someone has visited your pricing page, for example, but hasn&#8217;t started a\u00a0trial, and you have their e-mail, you can send them an e-mail saying: okay, why don&#8217;t you try a\u00a0free trial? \u00a0Maybe you saw your prices, but they&#8217;re still like the two-week free trial, like you can do. \u00a0And it allows you to really get deep, get really deep with your customers, and to specific actions with them.<\/p>\n<p>When building your report, it can start really simple, just as a\u00a0custom dashboard, those screenshots look really grainy. \u00a0Build a\u00a0custom dashboard in Google Analytics if that&#8217;s all you need at the moment, it allows you to collect all the most information, the most important data you need on there. \u00a0So here, for example, I\u00a0have all the sessions, just the SEO traffic, because that particular client I\u00a0was working for needed, they were really looking, SEO. \u00a0Then, on the right-hand si we have goal conversions so we knew how many leads we generated during that period. \u00a0So we put that on a\u00a0custom dashboard in Google Analytics and we were looking at it.<\/p>\n<p>If you want to build something more robust, more complex, you can use Google spreadsheets with that add on I mentioned, and do as much as you want. \u00a0Here we were pulling data from Google Analytics, putting it in a\u00a0spreadsheet, and doing a\u00a0lot of extra analysis with that.<\/p>\n<p>Just some of the things that I\u00a0think are important to consider when you&#8217;re doing your report, attribution is one of the important things because you want to know and you want to have a\u00a0good idea of how you count where a\u00a0particular customer is coming from, so you should know, for example, someone might have seen a\u00a0blog post, and an ad on Google if you&#8217;re doing Google ads, and you want to have an idea for yourself of how you are going to attribute that, that sale. \u00a0Did it come from your content or the ad you placed on Google? \u00a0Setting up guidelines, analytics and Woopra, and of course, you know how to measure your data in a\u00a0way to avoid issues with the data spikes if you get like a\u00a0viral post, or something like that.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t know if like you have an idea for UTM links but basically it is adding certain parameters to the link you&#8217;re using, which gives you information about where that visitor count came from. \u00a0There&#8217;s a\u00a0lot of information online on how to use UTM links. \u00a0You can just research that. \u00a0Unfortunately we do not have that much time to go into that much detail, but for example, here, this example just shows several different types of banners and calls to actions that we used on a\u00a0blog, and by using the UTM links on them we were able to see which one works best. \u00a0For example, here we have text links so just simple links that we placed within the blogs, and they work much better than all the other call to actions that we were using. \u00a0So banners were getting very few clicks, and so on.<\/p>\n<p>Setting up goals in Google Analytics, again, it would probably be easier to do it if you go online and research, but just to show you how to do it, just go to the admin set up, and your goal, give your goal a\u00a0name. \u00a0For example, in this case we had an e-mail course, so people who signed up for the course, we counted this e-mail course conversions, and we had a\u00a0&#8220;Thank you&#8221; page where people ended up after they signed up for the e-mail course, and we said the URL of the &#8220;thank you&#8221; page, as the destination. \u00a0So every time someone landed on that page, because the only way they could reach that page was through signing up for the e-mail course, every time they landed on that page, it counted as a\u00a0goal conversion. \u00a0And those were the goal conversions on the custom dashboard earlier.<\/p>\n<p>Finally in this section, looking at thinking again strategically about how you look at data. \u00a0This is a\u00a0simple comparison between two periods for that same client. \u00a0So the first one, you know, it&#8217;s the beginning of 2015, the first half of 2015, and the second period is the second half of 2015. \u00a0If you just look at that, it doesn&#8217;t look so great. \u00a0I mean, it is the quarter, the traffic is almost 26\u00a0per\u00a0cent down, you know, most things went down. \u00a0But when you look at the data more closely you see that there was a\u00a0sudden spike in at the end of the first period, and that&#8217;s when one blog post went viral on Hacker News, and basically they got a\u00a0huge spike in data.<\/p>\n<p>So for this particular client, something that we did was to start to look at traffic at three month averages, with, you know, looking back three months and taking an average of the three months, which kind of flattened out the spike a\u00a0little bit. \u00a0So it gives you a\u00a0better idea of how you report and how you look at data. \u00a0And it shows you that would still show as a\u00a0spike in traffic, but not as big as what we saw just by looking month to month.<\/p>\n<p>Okay. \u00a0And just to wrap up at the end of this, let&#8217;s discuss a\u00a0little bit how to actually calculate return on investment. \u00a0It really gets down to knowing two numbers. \u00a0One is the cost of acquiring a\u00a0customer, and the other one is the lifetime value of that same average customer.<\/p>\n<p>To find out your CAC, or cost of acquiring a\u00a0customer, here&#8217;s a\u00a0simple calculation, quite simplified really. \u00a0So let&#8217;s say that in the last month you got four clients, and you spent \u00a31,200 on producing content, 800 of that was spent on getting four posts written by freelancers, and it took you 10\u00a0hours to edit those, get them on your blog, source images and all of that. \u00a0I mention that here because it is really important to add up, you know, and to calculate everything that you put into producing content, even if it is your own time, because otherwise it is time you can spend working for clients and generating revenue for yourself. \u00a0So think about everything that goes into producing a\u00a0client, even if it is your own time.<\/p>\n<p>Finally you spent \u00a3100 on tools, hosting. \u00a0There really isn&#8217;t a\u00a0reason to spend more than \u00a3100, and even that is probably quite high.<\/p>\n<p>You spent \u00a31,200 to gain four clients, so each client cost you around \u00a3300 to get. \u00a0Then calculating lifetime value is quite similar, it is just the average deal size you get from a\u00a0customer, but it really depends on the industry that you&#8217;re operating in.<\/p>\n<p>So if you&#8217;re doing something like SaaS, or product size consulting, or something like that, it is just the average rate you get from your clients. \u00a0So you take all your clients you know how much each one pays you, you take the average of that, and just then you just multiply that by the average time that you keep a\u00a0customer. \u00a0So if it is three months, you just take the average monthly, multiply it by three, and so on. \u00a0If you&#8217;re doing something like freelancing and you&#8217;re building websites for clients, just looking historically, look at what is the average that a\u00a0client has paid you for that service and then compare the two.<\/p>\n<p>Obviously, if you&#8217;re generating less than you&#8217;re paying, that&#8217;s not a\u00a0great thing. \u00a0If you&#8217;re getting more from customers that you paid to acquire them, that&#8217;s better, but if you just generating \u00a31 above that, you know, that&#8217;s probably not so great.<\/p>\n<p>A\u00a0good rule of thumb I&#8217;ve seen used is getting three times the cost of acquiring a\u00a0customer, because at that level, you know, you have enough to produce the product or the service, and actually make some profit for your business, as well.<\/p>\n<p>Most of that stuff, so more details, and you know the screenshots actually looking as they should be, you can get at that post, that&#8217;s the client I\u00a0was referring to. \u00a0That&#8217;s a\u00a0link, so you can just click it if you access the slides. \u00a0And before I\u00a0finish, I mentioned the newsletter that\u00a0I was talking about. \u00a0So if you are interested, you know, I tried to collect only the most actionable resources on content marketing, so not like people talking in general, but actually guides and detailed tutorials on how to get stuff done, how to set up goals, write an e-book, produce a\u00a0video, stuff like that.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s it from me. \u00a0Thank you very much for your attention. \u00a0I\u00a0will be happy to answer any questions now or after we finish outside, so feel free to come speak to me, and I&#8217;m also happy to take any comments or criticism. \u00a0Feel free to use my Twitter handle as well and just Tweet me what you thought of that, and if you have any additional questions. \u00a0Thank you very much.<\/p>\n<p>[Applause].<\/p>\n<p><b>ELLIOT: \u00a0<\/b>Very good. \u00a0Okay, have we got any questions? \u00a0You were tentative, weren&#8217;t you? \u00a0We&#8217;ll go here.<\/p>\n<p><b>FROM THE FLOOR: \u00a0<\/b>Hi, I&#8217;ve had an issue with the traffic spikes which have been caused by spam referrers, things like fake Google and Motherboard, and various other weird names. \u00a0Have you seen that issue, and what&#8217;s your advice? \u00a0I\u00a0think you can do filters and that kind of thing?<\/p>\n<p><b>ILIA: \u00a0\u00a0<\/b>Yeah, I&#8217;ve seen that. \u00a0I\u00a0have not dealt with\u00a0it personally, but I&#8217;ve seen it affect websites. \u00a0I\u00a0guess, in the beginning, it is kind of hard to just, especially if you&#8217;re running a\u00a0site that gets a\u00a0good amount of traffic, it is usually hard to find out about it before it is too late, but I\u00a0would say the best way to deal with it is just filtering, and I\u00a0think Google Analytics allows for that. \u00a0I&#8217;m not exactly sure how it is done, but I\u00a0would suggest just researching online and getting it done.<\/p>\n<p><b>ELLIOT: \u00a0<\/b>Thanks for that. \u00a0Hands up if there&#8217;s another question. \u00a0I&#8217;m sure there&#8217;s somebody brimming, needs a\u00a0little confidence push. \u00a0There we go.<\/p>\n<p><b>FROM THE FLOOR: \u00a0<\/b>Like many people I&#8217;ve found online, I\u00a0have a\u00a0problem using Google Analytics with Woo Commerce. \u00a0It doesn&#8217;t track the same revenue. \u00a0I don&#8217;t know if you&#8217;ve ever used Woo Commerce with Analytics, or with anybody in the room has used it successfully, and if this problem is overcomable.<\/p>\n<p><b>ILIA: \u00a0\u00a0<\/b>I\u00a0haven&#8217;t used it personally, but I&#8217;ve had to use Google Analytics with other tools that were tracking sales internally for a\u00a0company. \u00a0My suggestion would be to find out like what&#8217;s the source that you trust the most\u00a0&#8212; so maybe it is Woo Commerce, I\u00a0would guess\u00a0&#8212; and just use that as your baseline. \u00a0So if you have to put that up data about visits from Google Analytics but compare that to your sales, like the revenue you get from Woo Commerce, and just decide on what you will be using going forward as the most accurate source of data.<\/p>\n<p><b>FROM THE FLOOR: \u00a0<\/b>I\u00a0think there&#8217;s a plugin extension that helps with that, and also there&#8217;s an analytics e-Commerce setting you can track different stages of the checkout to measure those things, and if you go to MeasurementsSchool.com, there&#8217;s a video to explain how to filter that.<\/p>\n<p><b>NEW SPEAKER: \u00a0<\/b>Thank you. \u00a0I&#8217;ll grab you afterwards.<\/p>\n<p><b>ELLIOT: \u00a0<\/b>We&#8217;re very ahead of schedule, so don&#8217;t feel shy if you &#8212;<\/p>\n<p><b>FROM THE FLOOR: \u00a0<\/b>It is a\u00a0little bit of a\u00a0technical question, but are you concerned in any way that Google Analytics and Woopra are Javascript based hacking tools and at this point in time a\u00a0lot of people are using extensions or a\u00a0browser to simply block all those tools, and your report doesn&#8217;t really represent real traffic?<\/p>\n<p><b>NEW SPEAKER: \u00a0<\/b>I\u00a0think that might be the same problem, it is the Javascript office that might be the problem.<\/p>\n<p><b>ILIA: \u00a0\u00a0<\/b>Of course that&#8217;s an issue that should be addressed, and I&#8217;m sure that people at Google HQ and Woopra are thinking hard about it and how to overcome that. \u00a0But, you know, even with that, you&#8217;re still getting\u00a0&#8212;\u00a0I mean even the data you&#8217;re getting in Google Analytics, if you&#8217;re running a\u00a0large site with lots of traffic, you&#8217;re still getting an\u00a0example, getting the full data. \u00a0So even when you have people blocking the trackers, you&#8217;re still\u00a0&#8212; the data you get from the people who don&#8217;t block the trackers, it should still give you enough information about what users are doing, and how they are\u00a0&#8212; you know, what their behaviour is.<\/p>\n<p><b>FROM THE FLOOR: \u00a0<\/b>I\u00a0work at a\u00a0large organisation in content marketing, producing content, mainly. \u00a0My organisation won&#8217;t let me see the analytics, won&#8217;t let me have a tracking campaign of my own. \u00a0I\u00a0am not allowed to give out coupon codes at events when I\u00a0speak. \u00a0How can I\u00a0do guerrilla tracking of my effectiveness?<\/p>\n<p><b>ILIA: \u00a0\u00a0<\/b>Honestly, I don&#8217;t know. \u00a0But one of the ways is just\u00a0&#8212; so one thing I do is after these events, like the reason why I\u00a0ask people to Tweet me, for example, it gives me an idea of how engaged the audience was. \u00a0And I\u00a0have had really good comments from people on Twitter, especially. \u00a0The other thing I\u00a0do is I\u00a0look at the analytics on slideshare to see how many people actually open the slides after the conference. \u00a0So there are some hacks, some shortcuts, but I\u00a0don&#8217;t think you can do content marketing meaningfully if you&#8217;re not looking at analytics. \u00a0So my suggestion would be to go and talk your boss or something like that.<\/p>\n<p><b>FROM THE FLOOR: \u00a0<\/b>A\u00a0little bit of an easier question here. \u00a0How did you get started, and why did you choose content marketing over something else?<\/p>\n<p><b>ILIA: \u00a0\u00a0<\/b>So, I\u00a0got started with content marketing because I&#8217;ve been blogging for a\u00a0long time. \u00a0I\u00a0was that person at the beginning, content marketing, and got it started by freelancing at first, just started with writing, and then from writing, you know, I had to learn how to write in a\u00a0way that produced results. \u00a0And then, how do you set those results? \u00a0So then you get to the point where you get to decide what the results should be, so you get to the strategic level. \u00a0So it is a\u00a0lot of, I would say a\u00a0lot of reading, a lot of research online, reading online, subscribing to a lot of blogs that talk about that, and then doing it, starting writing, then editing, then doing the technical stuff, SEO, and all that, setting a\u00a0blog, landing pages, funnels inside your analytics tool, and then getting to the strategic level where you decide how to move the pieces and how to arrange them.<\/p>\n<p><b>FROM THE FLOOR: \u00a0<\/b>Hi, do you have any experience with guest bloggers and how to leverage\u00a0&#8212; or their followers?<\/p>\n<p><b>ILIA: \u00a0\u00a0<\/b>They can work really well, but they have to be invested in writing for you. \u00a0And they&#8217;re mainly people who will reach out and will say, &#8220;Can we write a\u00a0guest post?&#8221; \u00a0Usually if you say\u00a0&#8212; like it really depends on how you set up the relationship, so what we did with that same customer, we had guidelines about guest blogging, so we asked people to write between 1,500 to 2,000 words to get it published, like really new, not published before. \u00a0Not something just rewritten from their own blog, or something like that. \u00a0That can work really well. \u00a0People who have large audiences, they will really go out of their way to promote their content because they&#8217;ve already put all the effort in producing it for you, and usually, if it is something that is long and detailed and new, they need to put a lot of effort to produce it. \u00a0So they will go out and promote it to their audience.<\/p>\n<p>You can also run just a\u00a0topical campaign about guest blogging, something we did with the same customer was we ran remote work monthly campaign where we asked about I\u00a0think it was 20 people or so to produce guest posts on that topic of remote work, and how they do it for themselves. \u00a0You know, they were mostly remote workers and people who run remote companies. \u00a0And that had, you know, that generated in itself, we had a\u00a0Twitter hashtag and people were using it when they were sharing their content, so it generated good level of popularity.<\/p>\n<p><b>FROM THE FLOOR: \u00a0<\/b>Do you see any difference in the analytics between long posts, short posts, what type of average number of words in a\u00a0post do you think works really well and also posts with videos? \u00a0Do you see any difference in engagement between those and posts without? \u00a0Or what sort of things do you add, in terms of actual content, to make posts more viral?<\/p>\n<p><b>ILIA: \u00a0\u00a0<\/b>Right. \u00a0There&#8217;s always a\u00a0difference between long posts and, you know, especially short posts and really long posts. \u00a0There&#8217;s always a\u00a0difference. \u00a0There&#8217;s also lots of research done that&#8217;s been published online that you can see that long posts perform generally better. \u00a0For most competitive keywords, what ranks on the first page of Google is usually between 1500 and 2500 words. \u00a0But it really depends. \u00a0It really depends on the niche you&#8217;re working in. \u00a0It really depends on what you&#8217;re doing, it depends on your audience and what they&#8217;re expecting. \u00a0My guess is if you&#8217;re creating something for teenagers, they probably won&#8217;t respond that well to a 2500 post. \u00a0Video might work a\u00a0little bit better. \u00a0So just suggest, you know, I\u00a0can think of blogs that have three or 35 posts in total, each of them is 5,000 words long, and they do really well, and then I\u00a0can think of someone like Seth Golding, who writes 200-word posts and he is performing phenomenally. \u00a0So it really depends what you want to achieve.<\/p>\n<p><b>FROM THE FLOOR: \u00a0<\/b>Hi, I work with a lot of small independent high street businesses, and they&#8217;re quite often interested\u00a0in blogging and getting up in the rankings. \u00a0The big challenge, I\u00a0guess, is what you&#8217;ve just outlined, which is to get higher up on the rankings you need two-and-a-half thousand words, etc. \u00a0What&#8217;s your advice for small businesses? \u00a0Because if they&#8217;re busy during the day and they don&#8217;t necessarily have the time to write this length of content, so is there a\u00a0hack for the small independent high street business?<\/p>\n<p><b>ILIA: \u00a0\u00a0<\/b>Actually, I\u00a0think content marketing works great for small businesses. \u00a0One of the reasons is that very few of them are doing it. \u00a0So it is not that noisy. \u00a0For example, if you use content marketing in digital marketing, that&#8217;s space is incredibly noisy, everyone is pumping out content, but for small businesses it is not so noisy. \u00a0The people who run the small businesses are usually experts on what they do, so they have a lot to share with their audience, and it could be a\u00a0way to generate a\u00a0lot of new business. \u00a0In terms of time, yes, I\u00a0know people are very busy, but everyone needs to be doing some kind of marketing, and it is a\u00a0way to do it in a\u00a0very cheap and scalable way.<\/p>\n<p><b>FROM THE FLOOR: \u00a0<\/b>I\u00a0totally get what you&#8217;re saying. \u00a0To give an example, I worked recently with a\u00a0wine shop, and they have amazing, incredible expertise. \u00a0They do struggle with time, because they&#8217;re so busy. \u00a0One of the hacks they came up with was just reposting their newsletter and making sure that was\u00a0&#8212;<\/p>\n<p><b>ILIA: \u00a0\u00a0<\/b>Can you speak up? \u00a0I\u00a0can&#8217;t hear you very well.<\/p>\n<p><b>FROM THE FLOOR: \u00a0<\/b>Sorry, one of the clients I\u00a0worked with recently was a\u00a0wine shop, and they&#8217;ve got incredible expertise. \u00a0They&#8217;re just busy literally, you know, staffing their shop during the day, and I\u00a0guess one of the hacks they came up with was, you know, they produced a\u00a0newsletter for clients and they&#8217;ve started posting that out on their blog. \u00a0I\u00a0was just, I\u00a0guess, looking for other useful practical tips you might have, because I\u00a0think the expertise is definitely there; it is just about the okay, what can they be doing on a\u00a0practical level to do it? \u00a0Because honestly, I\u00a0know what you&#8217;re saying about the two and a\u00a0half thousand words and the expertise, and people are not doing it, but I\u00a0don&#8217;t think they have the time.<\/p>\n<p><b>ILIA: \u00a0\u00a0<\/b>Yeah, I understand. \u00a0That&#8217;s a\u00a0very valid question. \u00a0I\u00a0would say the first thing is, once they see it works, they&#8217;ll find the time, I&#8217;m sure. \u00a0The trick is to get it to work for a\u00a0little bit. \u00a0So one piece of practical advice I\u00a0can give you is just get them to record a\u00a0video or even like a\u00a0short audio clip, and get someone to transcribe it. \u00a0I\u00a0mean go to someone who speaks very good English to transcribe it. \u00a0The costs can be very low to get that done. \u00a0There are even services that you can send the clip and they send you back the transcription of that clip, get it published. \u00a0Set up that whole structure that I\u00a0was talking about earlier, just to show them how it can work, how it can generate sales if they&#8217;re selling online, and do that.<\/p>\n<p>The other thing, get them to record some videos and put them online. \u00a0And I don&#8217;t know if there&#8217;s anyone in this room who has not heard of Gary Vee, he is a\u00a0famous American entrepreneur, but he actually started in wine. \u00a0So he was recording videos, doing reviews of wines, comparing different styles of wines, talking about, you know, what glasses to use for wine and things like that, and that&#8217;s actually worked really well for his business, and he used video content marketing exclusively, and I\u00a0think his business went from just the wine business went from 5\u00a0million a\u00a0year to 30\u00a0million a\u00a0year, or something like that.<\/p>\n<p>So just show them, you know, find easy ways to do something small, get started with something small, prove that it works. \u00a0Show them how it can work, and then I&#8217;m sure they&#8217;ll find the motivation themselves.<\/p>\n<p><b>ELLIOT: \u00a0<\/b>So show us videos of you drinking wine. \u00a0Thank you very much for all those. \u00a0It was just as useful to get all the Q&amp;A as the talk, so thank you very much. \u00a0[Applause]<\/p>\n<p><b>ILIA: \u00a0\u00a0<\/b>Thank you.<\/p>\n<p><b>ELLIOT: \u00a0<\/b>I\u00a0forgot to mention at the very start, we&#8217;ve got this fantastic transcription team here, who are tapping away for us all to read as well, and [applause]\u00a0&#8212; and it is also being filmed. \u00a0So in a\u00a0month or so, I imagine, or maybe new few weeks, depending how keen the team are, it&#8217;ll all be on WP.TV. \u00a0So we have a\u00a0little break now, and then we&#8217;ve got a\u00a0really good talk coming up in this track at 10.50, where we have the VP coming over to talk to us about the plugin directory and how they can be transferred to the new WordPress directory. \u00a0So I\u00a0reckon that will be a\u00a0good talk. \u00a0I&#8217;ll see you at 10.50. \u00a0Make it a\u00a0bit early, obviously, so we can keep it efficient. \u00a0Thank you.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>How do you know if your content marketing strategy is doing you any good? In this talk, we&#8217;ll discuss how you should be measuring the performance of your content. We&#8217;ll look at the stats you should be following, the tools (WP and beyond) that can help you track them, and how to set them up. &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/london.wordcamp.org\/2017\/session\/showing-roi-how-to-create-a-content-marketing-report\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Showing ROI: How to Create a Content Marketing Report<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12556652,"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_wcpt_session_time":1489830000,"_wcpt_session_duration":3000,"_wcpt_session_type":"session","_wcpt_session_slides":"","_wcpt_session_video":"","_wcpt_speaker_id":[1726],"footnotes":""},"session_track":[446812],"session_category":[],"class_list":["post-1982","wcb_session","type-wcb_session","status-publish","hentry","wcb_track-track-b"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p833Rb-vY","session_date_time":{"date":"18\/03\/2017","time":"09:40"},"session_speakers":[{"id":"1726","slug":"ilia-markov","name":"Ilia Markov","link":"https:\/\/london.wordcamp.org\/2017\/speaker\/ilia-markov\/"}],"session_cats_rendered":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/london.wordcamp.org\/2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sessions\/1982","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/london.wordcamp.org\/2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sessions"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/london.wordcamp.org\/2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/wcb_session"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/london.wordcamp.org\/2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sessions\/1982\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3559,"href":"https:\/\/london.wordcamp.org\/2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sessions\/1982\/revisions\/3559"}],"speakers":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/london.wordcamp.org\/2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/speakers\/1726"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/london.wordcamp.org\/2017\/wp-json\/wporg\/v1\/users\/gospodin_i"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/london.wordcamp.org\/2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1982"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"wcb_track","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/london.wordcamp.org\/2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/session_track?post=1982"},{"taxonomy":"wcb_session_category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/london.wordcamp.org\/2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/session_category?post=1982"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}