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How to Set Up and Use Twitter Lead Generation Cards in Your Tweets for Free!

Posted by danatanseo

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz, Inc.

Working as an in-house SEO Strategist for a small business forces me to get “scrappy” every day with tools and techniques. I’m constantly on the lookout for an opportunity that can help my company market to broader audiences for less money. In the past I’ve written on how you can add video overlays to your YouTube videos using Google AdWords and generate traffic back to your site without spending a dime. (P.S. This is still working, so if you haven’t done it, read this post then get on over to AdWords and get your video overlays rockin’).


Learn how to add Lead Generation Cards or LGCs to your Tweets!

What is a LGC?  LGC = Lead Generation Card (specifically in Twitter)

A LGC in Twitter is a form that can be attached to your Tweet that allows your followers to directly send you their contact information with the click of a single button in Twitter. Here is an example of what a LGC looks like:

Here is a Tweet containing the LGC:

Tweet with a Lead Generation Card Attached

Here is what appears when an end user clicks “View details:”

Tweet with the Lead Generation Card Expanded

Notice how the box is pre-populated with your recipient’s email address, enabling them to click the Call to Action button and beam their contact information to you in a single click. Ooohh, Aaahhh…Très Nifty! 

“But wait!” you say, “I don’t have any budget to pay for Promoted Tweets!”

Great! Neither do I! We have that in common!

The beauty of Twitter LGCs is that you can add a LGC to a regular non-promoted Tweet and it doesn’t cost you a single solitary penny.


It’s Free…that’s right….I said the F-word.


Caveat – You can’t compose and publish the Tweet from your regular Twitter admin home page. You have to compose and send the Tweet from inside Twitter Ads. Here’s how you do it:

  1. Log in to Twitter
  2. Click the Setting Icon and select “Twitter Ads” from the drop down menu [Screenshot below]

3.  Click on the “Creatives” Tab in the top Nav Menu in Twitter Ads and Select “Cards”

Twitter Cards Drop Down in Twitter Ads Nav Menu

4.  Click “Create your first Lead Generation Cards” – Bonus: You Can have an unlimited number of cards! 

Create You First Lead Generation Card

Here’s what the form looks like:

You’ll need to make sure you have the link to your Website’s privacy policy handy. Plus you’ll need to have an alternative URL where end-users can visit a page to find out more about you and/or your offer. Other than that, all the dimensions you need or right there on the page. Very easy.

5.  Once your card is set up, click the “Tweets” tab, just to the left of the “Cards” tab. [Screenshot below] You can also get there by selecting “Tweets” in the “Creatives” drop down menu in the Top Nav.

6.  Click the blue “Compose Tweet” button located in the upper right corner.

7.  Leave the default delivery setting set to Standard. Compose your tweet & Click the last icon on the right just below your “Tweet” box (when you scroll over it, it says “Attach a Card to This Tweet”) 

Select a Twitter Card to Accompany Your Tweet

8.  Select the card you would like to attach to your Tweet.

9.  Send your Tweet!

That’s it. Now you can grab your favorite beverage, sit back in your chair and just watch the cash roll in. Okay, maybe not, but you did just manage to attach a lead generation mechanism to your Tweet without spending one red cent!

Now, once you have cards set up in your Twitter Ads account, the steps are even easier. All you will have to do in that case is log in to Twitter. Click “Twitter Ads” from your settings menu. Click “Tweets” under the “Creatives” drop down in the top Nav. Click the blue “Compose Tweet” button. Write your Tweet, select the card and voila!

But wait, there’s more!

So, you might be thinking, “Great! But how do I get notified that someone filled out a Twitter LGC? What do I do with that info?”

Along with getting free LGCs, you also get access to some pretty nice analytic data for Tweets sent from your Twitter Ads account. So, here’s how you track and download your leads:

  1. Navigate back to the “Card” Tab under “Creatives.”
  2. Next to the card corresponding to the leads you want to access, mouse over the white area right below the card’s URL [Screenshot]

Card Tracking Panel in Twitter Ads

Notice how when you are just looking at the page, it appears that there’s nothing there? [See my big blue question mark?]
Hopefully Twitter will address this problem with their UX, but there really is something there. Scroll over that “seemingly blank” area, and “boom!” there is a set of four icons – select the right-most one :

This will create a .csv export of all of the leads generated by that card, together with the date they were collected, the user’s Twitter ID, Name, Twitter handle and, most magical of all, their email address. (Insert harp music and glitter here).

3.  Upload these into your favorite email program (we love Mailchimp!) or CRM and have at it!

For those of you who are visual learners, I’ve created a step by step video that walks you through the whole process:

There you have it. You’ve just successfully set up your Twitter Lead Generation Card and are ready to start raking in free leads from Twitter! Now I want to hear what your creative ideas are for implementing this and using it for your business. How do you think using Twitter Lead Generation cards along with your Tweets can augment your marketing program? I’d love to see them in the comments!

P.S. After this was written I received some excellent questions in the comments regarding two important points that need to be included in this post. The first one is that you have to sign up for a Twitter Advertising account in order for the “Twitter Ads” selection to appear in the drop down menu of your account settings. You can do that via this link: https://business.twitter.com/start-advertising The second one is that this is only currently available to people who live in the United States, Canada, the UK and Ireland. Thanks to travelcarma and Daniel_in_la for bringing this up in the comments!


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Why I work at Devana

 One of the sure ways to know you love your work is to ask yourself whether you love Sunday nights. I love Sunday nights! They make me full of positive anticipation for the next morning at work. And why is that? Because I have a feeling I am going to be among my own people. […] Continue reading →

The World of Link Opportunities Beyond Bloggers

Posted by JamesAgate

There is an awful lot of controversy going around for things like guest posts, with techniques being proclaimed dead and blogs being decreed toxic, but the fact remains that if you handle blogger outreach in the right way, you can get a tremendous amount of value from blogs.

Targeted audiences, run by passionate and receptive bloggers; these types of opportunities shouldn’t be discounted. If you take a step back from your link profile, it is very likely to be heavily weighted towards blogs, whether that be as a result of guest posts, editorial mentions, competitions, or just about anything else.

However, while all of the above add value (broadly speaking), they point to a link profile that looks skewed toward just one type of website. Links from blogs can be overcooked, and the reality of being an SEO in 2014 is that it is always wise to diversify the ways in which you get links—irrespective of which color hat you think you wear. You need to be proactive about what your link profile looks like.

We’ve probably all recently seen instances of overly harsh penalties, websites that looked whiter than white (especially in relation to competitors) getting spanked. I’ve seen instances of sites getting hit that didn’t even look like they cared all that much about SEO, and yet someone at Google arbitrarily decided they had fallen afoul of guidelines.

Do I think Google is crazy? Sometimes, yes. But I’m not here to complain, because frankly it’s their playground, so I guess we all need to learn to live in it and determine ways to make the most of it—or face the consequences.

My point is we all have to think carefully about the things we do (even if they don’t at first appear to impact SEO) and what knock-on effect that is likely to have.

This especially applies when it comes to content generation and building links. It is easier to get bogged down in the day-to-day and think you are diversifying your link profile because you have a variety of blogs or because you are using different means to connect with bloggers, but from a bot’s point of view those links probably all look quite similar.

Here are just some of the wealth of link opportunities that are out there in almost every market:

  • Resource pages
  • Forums
  • Directories
  • Professional organizations
  • Events
  • Submission-based
  • Press

The sad thing is that at least one person reading this can probably find one instance of each of the above links being mentioned by someone at Google as “unnatural.” That being said, all of the above, if done right, are highly defensible and would pass the litmus test of “would I still want this if Google didn’t exist?”

Targeted acquisition

The problem (actually, the opportunity, because it means fewer people will bother) is that there isn’t usually a surefire step-by-step to finding these types of opportunities; the process can be quite serendipitous. I know that sounds like fluffy nonsense but there is no substitute for really getting to know a client and their market. This is why we often save this kind of activity for several months into an engagement: That is when some of the really golden opportunities seem to appear—after a few conversations with your contact, some research for a content piece, etc.

It is also likely that opportunities are limited in certain markets. There’s nearly always another link opportunity out there, but to be brutally truthful this process isn’t going to be easy, and it isn’t going to be one of those things where you can suddenly make it rain links.

In most cases we have found markets to be a series of rabbit holes with niches, sub-niches, sub-sub-niches,etc.—the internet is HUGE, and if you are just focusing on “Keyword” + “Write for us” in your link prospecting, then you are leaving a world of opportunities on the table.

Resource pages

This type of opportunity is likely to form the foundation of any proactive “blogless” link building campaign because there are so many resource page opportunities out there.

You can really shoot for the stars with this technique, though and we’ve secured placements on government, academic, and top-tier websites like About.com. I must stress that this isn’t always an easy sell, because these types of websites don’t link to just anyone so you’ll need to adjust your expectations accordingly particularly if your business or client has only a small amount of value to offer outside of its usual commercial enterprise. It probably doesn’t surprise you that these types of websites care very little for link-baity stuff. 🙂

A common mistake is to adopt the mindset of “I have made this guide on {keyword}, it is really {useful | interesting | identical to everything else on your resource list} and so should be included on your page because it will be good for {your audience | me}”. You either need something completely new that brings diversity to that resource page, or you need to sell the webmaster on the asset you are asking them to link to.

A common approach we adopt is to utilize an existing client asset and then look for multiple angles depending on the type of resource page you are targeting. If you think about, a governmental website, they want to help local citizens, so content about things like public safety is of interest to them. However, there is no incentive for them to link if they’ve already got three guides to the issue you are talking about. If you can find one governmental site that has a section on a specific public issue, though, you can use that in your pitch to another website, offering them a reason to link (because it rounds out their offering to their local citizens).

In terms of finding these kinds of opportunities, there are two main ways we do this:

  • Digging through an existing link profile (the client’s or a competitor’s) and extrapolating the tactic from there
  • Surfacing (often) hundreds of opportunities using a combination of prospecting phrases that include a variation of resource, help, further reading, and the keyword

Forums

Who would have thought a type of link usually reserved for the spammer could be valuable?

Well, a number of our clients enjoy mountains of traffic from targeted forums; in fact, in some cases they are the biggest referrers.

Naturally I am talking about the client adding value to the forum, or in most cases (this is easier if you don’t have the client industry expertise and the client doesn’t have the inclination) encouraging conversations about the client within the forum. Tread carefully, as most forums don’t take all that kindly to marketers poking their noses in, but with a modicum of client participation you may be able to join a conversation and highlight a piece of content on the client’s site. By doing so, you might just “turn on” the forum to the wealth of useful content you probably already have there.

Our participation in forums is often content-led, and it is a very low-volume tactic, as there are often only a handful of worthwhile forums in the industry you are looking at.

Directories

A recent study found most web directories are dead, and I wouldn’t disagree that most are simply live so they can charge for removal of links. Leaving this type of directory aside, there are a wealth of industry directories and localized business directories that real people actually use. These are the types of listings where you can get phone calls. Regardless of what you think of directories as a link type, that to me is a defensible link that is worthwhile irrespective of whether it is going to have an impact on your rankings.

The US is a gold mine of link opportunities like this, with directories for cities that are relatively easy to get listed on and can actually generate calls and new business. If you are in the travel industry, for example, where people who don’t know the area need to book a car service from the airport, they might use a site like SantaMonica.com to find a provider. There is that perceived credibility of being listed in what is an authoritative site in the area.

How do we go about finding them? The Link Prospector tool from Citation Labs is very useful in surfacing these types of opportunities if you use a combination of local and niche-specific phrases. If you don’t want to subscribe to the Link Prospector tool, then it is easy enough (albeit less automated) to do generic searches that include a combination of keywords or geographical locations and the directories themselves often show up. I actually prefer the manual method, as it allows for more serendipitous opportunities to present themselves.

Professional organizations

There won’t be all that many, but as with directories you want to be thinking in terms of niche and location as well as a combination of the two. Especially in the US, there are a wealth of opportunities with local chapters of organizations that you or your client could join.

There is often a cost involved with joining these professional organizations (at least the worthwhile ones), but the credibility associated with it and often the other business benefits for the client hugely outweigh the cost.

We’ve been frequently surprised at how often a client is already paying a subscription fee for a membership that entitles them to a listing but they’ve simply never claimed it! These are very quick and easy wins, granted the impact isn’t necessarily going to be life-changing.

To find these kinds of organizations, again the Link Prospector tool is very useful if you need a quick and easy way to find these opportunities. You might find this list useful (albeit a little user unfriendly to navigate) as many trade publications have a corresponding association. Not always, but hey, it is still a useful resource if you want to find out about trade press.

Events

I strongly suggest you read this blog post on Link Building with Local Events by Kane Jamison from 2012. There is very little I can add to this specific topic that Kane hasn’t already covered, but a few specific points are worth repeating:

First, why would we want these links? Well, you are likely to be getting links on domains that are otherwise hard to get even a citation from, let alone a link, websites like well-respected news outlets. Similarly the links are geographically specific, there is nothing more difficult than obtaining links from blogs within a certain geographical area, because the pool is often really small. So when it comes to “blogless” link building, it is nice to add that local element to your profile, and event-based link building can really help with that.

Secondly, think about the whole process when it comes to event-based link building, because there is more to it than just the “submission to the event section.” You need to consider how you structure the event pages on your website as well as selecting the right ticketing provider (e.g. Eventbrite) for maximum SEO-related benefits (and frankly to ensure a seamless experience for any attendees).

Finally, consider all the angles for leveraging your event for link building goodness, from typical search queries that uncover submission opportunities to looking for footprints within event widgets.

Submission-based

This is an excellent way to maximize the reach of content either through finding or repurposing for a new audience. This guide, whilst painfully cringe-worthy in its analogy to food, is a mostly useful guide to repurposing your content.

I am talking about worthwhile submission-based link opportunities here, though, whether that be making a presentation from a guide to go onto Slideshare or just submitting a podcast to the relevant directory. This is less about the resulting link (Google knows these aren’t exactly tightly editorially controlled), but you can effectively plug into an audience that you didn’t already have access to.

I still get milestone notifications of a guide I wrote for eHow nearly five years ago. I’m actually a little embarrassed about the content so really must get around to updating it but that has had over 10,000 pageviews since it launched. I accept that’s not viral traffic, but it was an extract of a longer piece on my site, and I linked my guide in the section beneath. My guide has subsequently had just over 4,000 visits since the eHow extract was published, which is almost certainly a lot more eyeballs than it would have gotten just sitting on one of my websites.

Eric Ward is a big proponent of submitting content to different places; many of the Link Opportunity Alerts that you find in his LinkMoses newsletter service are submission-based, but often niche-specific and have a large audience or carry some real credibility.

Press coverage

Is doing PR a challenge as an SEO? Absolutely. It isn’t always an option, because if your client has a PR department or existing agency you might just end up crunching toes. On the flipside, however, we as SEOs are often far better at actually getting the link than a PR exec might be. We’ve achieved coverage for clients on TV networks, offline magazines, radio interviews—lots of great things that any PR agency would be proud of, and that started as a way for us to build some links!

The thing we have found is that most press opportunities present themselves and you have to be a bit reactive (or real-time) rather than proactively seeking coverage. We have also found some success in looking at how and why clients (and their competitors) have been covered in the past. Go into this with an open mind—I couldn’t believe when we found one of our clients had received coverage for the release of a product brochure; my initial thought would have been “who actually cares besides the owner of the business that our client has released a new product brochure??!”… turns out the trade press cared, and would happily cover it. In situations like that you find an asset which even the best of us would have dismissed as little more than sales fodder that can actually be used effectively to garner links.

Incidentally, I would be interested to hear your experience gaining press coverage with services like HARO. We’ve probably had 4 successful pieces of coverage from HARO pitches, and while you could argue our targeting was off, our pitch was poor, or the client wasn’t a good fit, we’ve got coverage for those exact same clients through all sorts of other means so it truly baffles me when I see other people cite HARO as though it’s a push-button way of getting publicity. Maybe we’re doing it wrong, or maybe it’s just inundated since all SEOs on planet Earth started using it. Who knows?

A walkthrough

It is often easy to illustrate a point with an example, so I wanted to do a quick runthrough of what we might do if we were to handle link building for Ontraport, a small business CRM provider. These guys aren’t a client, and were selected at random after going through a list of a few of our providers (we use them for email auto-responders among many other things) I thoroughly recommend their software, but I digress.

Let’s look at the assets they already have that we might be able to work with…

  • http://ontraport.com/ The software itself is likely to appeal to small business owners, seeing as it has been designed with them in mind. From a link building point of view, we might struggle given that there isn’t a free version of the tool, but as a “suggested tool” on a small business website we might have an angle. The better angle here is that the company is itself a “small business” success story (or at least sort of small; they’ve featured on the INC500 list and Forbes Most Promising Companies).
  • http://ontraport.com/women/ This one is buried in their footer, I actually found it digging through their link profile, but it is a sign-up page to join an online community for women in business. Ontraport’s COO is a woman named Lena Requist and she wanted to create “The Professionistas” to be a community within the wider Ontraport community. It is such a great idea, and is likely to be a valuable asset for any link building campaign.
  • http://ontraport.com/community-meetups/ This provides details on all their forthcoming in-person meetups. Loads of potential link building angles here.
  • http://ontrapalooza.com Their annual event which seems to work a bit like MozCon. I saw details of the event last year but didn’t actually attend, and there are opportunities aplenty with a large-scale event like this.

Here are just some of the opportunities I came up with after little more than 10 minutes of research:

  • The founder of Ontraport did an interview on Mixergy a while back, how about reaching out to BusinessInterviews.com?
  • SBA.gov helped me find an office that supports female business owners that is local to Ontraport and that office has a resource page.
  • The National Association for Female Executives has setup a page to help guide female executives in their career here. Perhaps Ontraport’s Professionista community for women would be a good addition for any women looking to strike out on their own as a means of furthering their career?
  • Their forthcoming in-person meetup in Santa Monica is likely to be of interest to the Santa Monica Chamber of Commerce in their business event listings: http://members.smchamber.com/events/
  • The Annual Ontrapalooza event I mentioned was held in Santa Barbara last year, so how about telling local residents about it and getting a link in the process? You can submit event details to the Santa Barbara Independent events section (granted most listings are aimed at general public but there are some specialist events in the calendar).

Conclusion

Ultimately you need diversity in the link building that you do. Many of the tactics described above are low-volume, high-value so are worth investing a bit more time in. Can you build a process around them? Yes, but it is likely to be more of a framework or alternatively very industry-specific because there are so many nuances hence why I haven’t provided a step-by-step.

I don’t think that you should consider blogger outreach or links from blogs to be dead, but as with anything in SEO, there is such a thing as too much of something good. Hammering away at one tactic because that’s what’s cheap or in your comfort zone is only going to get you so far.

I’d love to hear thoughts in the comments below, particularly success stories with “less common” types of links.


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Is Your Content Strategy Guided by Audience Intent (or Just Keywords)?

Posted by Laura.Lippay

All too often I see content strategies that:

  1. Look at what people are searching for (keyword research).
  2. Create landing pages for as many keywords as possible.
  3. Write gobs of (often meaningless) keyword-optimized content. 

This is a typical old-school SEO strategy, but what about audience (visitor) intent?

There’s a lot of focus in SEO around optimized landing pages (as there should be). An optimized landing page has a targeted topic and keywords, a targeted page title, a clean URL, a compelling meta description, intuitive layout and navigation, loads quickly, looks amazing, and has calls to action most likely above the fold.

Content, on the other hand, is more than just optimized landing pages. Content serves a purpose. Content can give a company an advantage over it’s competitors. Content is a means of communicating and building a relationship with an audience

What is audience intent?

That core audience you’re trying to attract needs something. Maybe they’re researching the best hiking vacations around the globe. Maybe they want to know where they could go hiking specifically in Utah. Maybe they know they want to go hiking in Utah and are looking for Utah vacation packages that include hiking. Or maybe they just need to book a trip from Boston to Park City. Their intent can be very vague or very specific, and when coming up with content for a landing page you need to put yourself in the mind of your audience and consider what it is that they really want to see. The audience intent would consider:

  1. What kind of content would help to easily and satisfactorily meet the intent of that visitor? 
  2. If the intent is vague (ex: “hairstyles”), what are the various types of intents that they may have? Ex: hairstyle how-to videos, hairstyle lookbooks, short hairstyles, long hairstyles, hairstyles for curly hair, thin hair, frizzy hair, specific hairstyles like up-do’s, braids, etc.
  3. What would they consider useful?
  4. What would they consider interesting or engaging?
  5. What would they consider sharable?

The basic requirements of content strategy

A great piece of content requires all of the things a great landing page does (when the content is indeed a landing page, as opposed to other types of content like white papers, videos, guides, maps, etc.). A great content strategy, though, considers a bit more beforehand, primarily:
  • What are the goals of this content (why are we creating it)?
  • What are the goals for the business (how do we make money)?
  • What does it need to solve for the consumer (what is the audience intent)?
And after thoughtful research around the audience needs and competitive landscape, it addresses this question:
How do we build something that meets (and exceeds) user intent, while satisfying our business goals, and is better than anything else out there?
Let’s look at these considerations in real-life examples of content strategies. These examples clearly differentiate between simply building landing pages and writing copy vs. coming up with creative ways to meet audience intentions and business goals.

Content strategy example 1:
Content vs. lifestyle

The company in this scenario is currently purely transactional. 

The setup (in brief):

  • Audience: Women age 25-55, typically moms.
  • The audience need/intent: Discover smart and innovative ways to be awesome and live fabulously while being budget-conscious.
  • Content goals: Extend the currently purely transactional brand into a lifestyle brand through an extensive, multidimensional content plan.
  • Business goals: Sell product online.
Previous attempts at content by the company have fallen flat (as have similar attempts by their primary competitors). No one reads their blogs and hasty attempts at launching content pieces have been more or less crickets.
Much of this has to do with a transactional company trying to have a voice when no one is expecting them to talk. A brand without a clear voice and no authoritative experts or influencers, launching random bits of content is not a likely win situation. From an audience standpoint it raises more questions than advocacy – Why is this content here? Will there be more? Why should I consider them the authoritative voice in (topic), especially when there are many more authoritative voices out there dedicating entire websites and lifestyles to these topics?
Lifestyles in this case is the key. Producing content is very different than immersing your brand in a lifestyle:
CONTENT LIFESTYLE
Landing pages Self-expression
Articles Community
Blog Posts Culture
Videos Identity
Slideshows Associations
Guides Experience
Maps Emotion

Consider these brands embracing lifestyles through content. They’re all there to sell product, but their content attracts and engages audiences, draws them in like moths to flames. Their content isn’t based on keywords and optimized landing pages, it’s based on giving their audiences what they need and getting them excited about it in the process.

GoPro: Be inventive, buy cameras. Nike: Do sports, buy shoes.
Airbnb: Travel hip, rent places. Martha Stewart: Be crafty, buy products.

The approach proposed for this particular client in this example:

  • Client: Live fabulously on a budget, buy products.
See how that’s different from this?
  • Client: Optimized landing pages derived from high-volume keywords, buy products.
The content strategy involves weekly collections, guides, a magazine-style approach to daily content, evergreen marketing pieces and special approaches to holidays, plus acquisitions and partnerships with influential people in the space and potentially a branded “voice of the company” personality doing TV appearances and PR and promoting the content.
Of course this content strategy took several months and a lot of research. In a future post I’ll go into detail on the process and tools available for putting together a comprehensive content strategy.

Content strategy example 2:
Articles vs. awesome content

This client was an online magazine targeted at women, with several top-level categories on the site like fashion, beauty, etc. presented in one of two formats: slideshows or articles.
The setup:
  • Audience: Primarily women, primary age group: 35-55.
  • The audience need/intent: Get fashion and beauty inspiration, tips, ideas.
  • Content goals: Reach and engage more women.
  • Business goals: Page views (ad impressions).
The easy part of this content strategy was the architecture. The current architecture was so basic that keyword research alone was enough to provide some great insight into what the audience was looking for that the online magazine was providing but in no clear architectural way. There were quick wins to be had like creating subcategorical landing pages like Spring Trends and Summer Trends under Fashion Trends.
The bigger challenge: The competition. Women’s fashion and beauty is a highly competitive space online. Creating landing pages does not mean they will come. This content needed a more creative “how can we do something better” eye. From the typical SEO mindset you can think of it as “how can we create something that people will link to, share and engage with more than our competitors?”
We utilized several research avenues, primarily:
  • Market research on online beauty and fashion trends.
  • Extensive competitive research.
  • Extensive research into trends on what’s popular in beauty and fashion online and in social networks.
And we found all kinds of cool things that the online magazine could be doing to attract and engage more women. In the end the content strategy proposed features like:
  • Videos or slideshows comparing different makeup brands (example: different thick lash mascaras or long-lasting lipsticks).
  • Makeover tools.
  • Various types of “lookbooks” for things like pixie hairstyles, colorful eyeliner ideas, nail trends, etc.
  • Working with brand partners to deliver samples boxes to subscribers.
  • A series on recreating celebrity looks for less (and where to buy).
  • Local fashionista bloggers in major cities who blog on where the latest coolest fashion finds, fashion events and fashionable places to be are in that city.
  • Weekly collections/series around various topics like This Weeks Cutest Shoes (in your inbox), Must-Have Dresses, Craziest Fashion Trends, etc.

This was presented within the newly proposed architecture with cross-linking opportunities and optimization recommendations (especially around video, images and social sharing) for a complete content strategy.

Content strategy example 3:
Selling vacation packages

An airline sells vacation packages that include flights and tours of the area they mainly fly into. They have the packages on the site but they’re performing pretty poorly.
The setup:
  • Audience: Adult international travelers coming from the United States.
  • The audience need/intent: Find things to do in the area, find tours in the area, find vacation packages, plan a vacation in the area.
  • Content goals: Attract, engage and convert more people.
  • Business goals: Primary: sell flights. Secondary: sell packages.
Here are the things I looked at in preparation for their content strategy:
  1. What do searches tell us about the various types of intent the searchers have? People may be searching a specific attraction or they may be looking for hiking tours. We found at least 4 high-level ways to slice and dice intent (in addition to looking for packages): By specific attraction name, by town, by type of attraction (ex: waterfalls), or by activity (ex: bird-watching).
  2. Does the site architecture currently meet those intents? In fact, no. The architecture was somewhat random. It is difficult to find some of the things on the site based on those 4 types of intent. Some of the content that could be easily cross-sold was also buried as landing pages in the packages section.
  3. How do visitors with these intents navigate the site now? We did user testing asking visitors to find and book a specific attraction and to find and book a specific activity. Many were unable to complete the tasks, and all of them went about it in completely different ways. We learned a lot about what people expect to find and how they expect to find it that could help guide our content strategy (including additional types of intent like time of year the package is available for instance).
  4. What content assets do we have to work with? A content inventory was done with a sample size of content currently in season and live on the site, and content out of season that they currently remove from the site. Each page was “tagged” with the specific attractions, towns, type of “thing to see,” and activities that were included in the package along with package price, travel period, whether or not it includes a flight, departure airport, number of nights.

With all of this in mind, the end content strategy proposed things like:

  1. Architecture: An updated architecture with landing pages to meet the specific major intents.
  2. Navigation: A newly proposed navigation (which is slightly different from the architecture).
  3. URLs: Of course.
  4. Tools: A proposed filtering tool/system to filter anything from type of activity involved to price range to number of nights and everything in-between.
  5. On-Page: On-page content recommendations based on what we learned from user testing + adding in related content for higher engagement and search-friendly cross-linking of relevant content and pulling things like transportation options out from being a buried landing page under packages to being a module cross-linked from relevant package pages.
  6. Seasonal content treatments: Adding the ability to book packages that aren’t in season right now + how to address long term landing pages for seasonally available or annually changing content.
Rather than just creating landing pages and optimizing them based on what people are searching for, we took an approach to this content based on the various types of user intents people may have that may bring them to the site and ultimately book a package.

Remember, we’re creating content for people, not search engines  

It all goes hand-in-hand. When you create something that your audiences like, that they link to more, share more, and engage with more, it’s likely to affect search engine rankings and traffic, too. Of course this isn’t your good ol’ typical “SEO,” but its also not 1999. The best SEO is—and for many years has been—a good product, so taking the time to consider your audience intentions when creating a content strategy can pay off in more ways than one.


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