How To Create Content Your Audience Will Love In 2019

Retention Tactics with Content:

  1. What works already - look at Google Analytics returning and direct traffic
  2. Content onboarding - Slidedeck by @anum at CTA Conf 2016.
  3. Notifications - PushCrew + thread on inbound.org. Also try "fake" email notifications to targeted segments.
  4. Publish regularly. Panda Monthly. The Skimm. Whiteboard Friday.
  5. Community Content to scale up. Blooming effect. +1 discussion => +2.7 contributors => +4 weekly active users. +150% sitewide comments => +75% direct traffic

Conversation is great content - releases cortisol (focus) and oxytocin (trust + feel good).

You don’t need expensive special software - see @tomcritchlow “Intentional Communities” post here:

  • Disqus
  • Muut
  • (Even try) Facebook comments… Wordpress… that doesn’t matter.

What matters is how you structure the content… the conversation…

Types of conversations:

  • One-to-one
  • One-to-many “broadcast”
  • Many-to-many --> online community, UGC.

90% of our most engaging threads are POLS content:

  1. Process sharing - how should I? How do you?
  2. Opinions - Polls. Closed questions. Why.
  3. Lists - Recommendations. Ideas.
  4. Stories - Experiences. Background

Two private types (harder to scale in public. Better in private email threads, Slack etc.)

  1. Critiques
  2. Collaboration

Golden Rules for Community Content

  1. The conversation is the content
  2. The comment is the conversion

Gut check (with community content) - will your content work in a bar.


Personalization

Personalization is not *|Firstname|*

Personalization framework:

  • What message to
  • Who (which segment/list/group of people)
  • Why action

Your marketing is only as good as your data

How do we describe people - with data.

  • How do they introduce themselves? Job title, interests, name, location etc. (get ideas AND Facebook ads and Clearbit)
  • How does your business describe them? Lifecycle, events, lists, last seen etc.

Get this data all in one place - gather all everything you have on everyone. Then use to create advanced, hyper-relevant, personal lists and segments.

Build a common segmentation plan - same segments everywhere.

Use Hull.io.

Then send your messages.

  1. Write to people’s identities - who they really are! (What you might call personas)
  2. THEN use merge tags like *|Firstname|*

Scaling personal email at inbound.org

Create your segments once. Re-use them everywhere.

Ed Fry

Prev 'Ed of Growth at Hull, working on all things content, acquisition & conversion. Conference speaker, flight hacker, prev. employee #1 at inbound.org (acq. HubSpot). Now at Behind The Growth

If you've questions or ideas, I'd love to geek out together on Twitter or LinkedIn. 👇