Ahava Leibtag, a 2020 inductee into the Healthcare Internet Hall of Fame as an Innovative Individual, has 20+ years of experience in content. She has consulted with some of the world’s largest firms to attract and grow their audiences. Ahava is the president and owner of Aha Media Group, LLC, a copywriting, content strategy and content marketing consultancy. She is also the author of The Digital Crown: Winning at Content on the Web and loves a great logic puzzle, a long game of Apples to Apples and anything that has chocolate. You can connect with Ahava on Twitter at @ahaval.
A content marketer has to contend with constant, lightening-fast competing messages. No matter what field you serve, your audience has thousands of other messages competing for their attention and action.
This may feel overwhelming, lead to fatigue, and exhaust you to the point of not trying.
Couples with marital troubles are often told to spice things up in the bedroom. Why is that? Well, it turns out that people get bored with even the most fun activities. You see, we as humans are programmed from a biological and emotional perspective to seek out new challenges and experiences in almost every part of our lives. For example, experts on the aging process often encourage senior citizens to take up new sports or play puzzle games like Scrabble to keep their mental muscles agile. Likewise, we can all stand a little variety in our activities and surroundings to keep us as engaged and entertained as much as possible.
On the flip side, when things are too different people tend to become uneasy or even fall apart. Change to a part of a routine is necessary to keep it interesting, but completely change the routine and you risk experiencing way too much chaos as fear of the unfamiliar sets in.Continue Reading
Aren’t these the client questions you receive most often about social media? When my clients ask them, I explain that social media is about building relationships with customers. All the different tools — Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc. — are the distribution vehicles you choose to get your message across. When you choose the right delivery vehicle for the right message, you can ensure your success.
After refueling on orange Jell-O (in chic martini glasses) and Cheetos, Content Marketing World participants were ready to hear about “7 Content Ideas to Blow Up Your Small Business in 12 Months or Less.”
Marcus Sheridan, CEO, River Pools and Spas, (wearing an orange shirt and looking, in his words, like a creamsicle on steroids), compares content marketing to a modern-day David and Goliath story. Using content marketing, Marcus was able to grow his business, even though the pool industry’s business model is not traditionally set up to favor people in Marcus’ position.
If you are truly an effective content marketer consultant, at least 25 percent of your job is educating your clients about the digital marketplace. Clients look to you to clarify how things really work in cyberspace, and if you are good at your job, you take that seriously.
One area where my clients have a lot of questions is with analytics. Even when they are digital experts, it’s common for me to have to explain what the different benchmarks in analytics packages really mean.Continue Reading
Mobile content is hot. There’s no denying it. Over the next 12 months, four out of five marketers intend to increase their mobile spending, according to the new “Mobile Marketing: Plans Trends and Measurability” study by King Fish Media. Just like other content marketing, mobile content should be findable, readable, understandable, actionable and shareable (See the Creating Valuable Content Checklist). So what do you need to know to make sure your mobile content is valuable and effective?
We are all looking for the silver bullet that will make our content sparkle. What if from the time of content creation we already had the benchmarks in place that we know forms valuable content?
Yesterday, I introduced the Creating Valuable Content Checklist, which I use to quantify what makes content valuable to our content consumers. Today I’ll explain the steps in each of these benchmarks. Continue Reading
“Every day, there is more and more to manage and get right and learn.”
Who said that? It’s definitely someone in content marketing, web strategy or digital communications, right? Don’t we all feel that way? Every day our jobs are getting ahead of us, instead of us getting ahead of our jobs.Continue Reading
Do you want to use analytics more often to make decisions based on data instead of instinct? To do this, you not only need to have a good understanding of analytics, but you also need to present them to your team in a way that is useful to them.
Last week we looked at why analytics programs are important for helping teams make decisions based on real facts instead of hunches. Continue Reading
All too often, I’ll ask a client a question, and they’ll readily have an answer. But when I question the answer and ask for a source, they’ll tell me, “We just know.”
I don’t have to explain why this is SO wrong, and yet we all do it all the time. Instead of finding proof for our assumptions, we base many of our decisions on what we think we know. This is a terrible way to do business: It will negatively affect our decision-making. Backing up decisions with real data is critical in digital communications, where assumptions could translate into daily mistakes because of the speed at which our customers consume information.
How can we fix this? The answer is in our analytics. The problems with analytics are most people don’t:
Important note: Understanding your analytics is only one pillar to informing your decisions. But it’s a very important pillar, because if you DO make a change, you will be able to track if that change really makes a difference in user behavior patterns. Scott Frangos just outlined a few other optimization tests you can run to get answers to your questions.
If you want to get people in your organization using analytics instead of gut instincts to make decisions, you need to sell the importance of them and show people how to use them.
There’s a classic episode of The Office where the Scranton branch has a budget surplus they can use at their discretion. Oscar, the head of accounting, is trying to explain this concept to Michael Scott, the oh-so-clueless branch manager. Michael tells Oscar, “Pretend that I’m five.” Oscar, without missing a beat, says “Let’s say your parents give you money for a lemonade stand….”
While I trust your team is savvier than Michael, most people really don’t understand analytics and struggle with some of the most basic concepts such as, what’s the difference between a page view and a unique visit? How do you calculate a bounce rate? What does it even mean?
People only care to learn about something if it will help them. So, start by asking your stakeholders what questions they:
It’s then your job to find the best metrics within your analytics to answer those questions.
Example:
Let’s say you are a wholesale online plumbing parts company, and a certain product line is being completely ignored. Your team knows these parts are superior to another product line you carry, and they want to push these superior parts. The team is exploring lowering the price, using customer testimonials and supplying extra content on this line of parts. They have questions such as these.
Question: How popular is our website? How popular are those products?
Metric: General traffic to those product pages (page views, unique visits)
Question: How are people finding out about our products online?
Metric: Search terms that help users land on those pages (keywords)
Question: What’s motivating people to buy? Are they reading the copy about the products?
Metric: User behavior on those pages (bounce rates, time spent on those pages, where users go next after those pages, shopping cart entries, etc.)
Once you answer these questions, more questions will inevitably arise such as:
Once you know the questions your team has, you can start by providing them with answers with some basic analytics– in a very easy to understand format.
Try running a few workshops like “Understanding our analytics in 10 minutes.” There are three benefits to training your team to understand the terms around analytics and how powerful they can be, including:
How to Train
Most people will not admit they don’t really understand, so hammer the basics of analytics over and over.
I recommend using real-life analogies to illustrate concepts, such as:
Once your team understands these concepts and ties them into key questions, they can start making decisions about how to push the superior plumbing products. For instance, if they know visitors come from search engines with certain keywords that the other product line is using in their descriptions, they can change the content accordingly. If they know the home page or landing pages get a lot of traffic, they can move those products up higher on those pages.
Next week, we’ll look at three more steps you can implement to achieve a strong analytics program.
Do you use analytics in your organization? Do you find some of the same challenges we discussed above? Or are you experiencing something quite different? Please share them, along with your favorite episode of The Office.
