How To Create Content Your Audience Will Love In 2019
18th Oct 2016- CRAP - The Content Marketing Deluge, Doug Kessler @ Velocity Partners
- Hook Model, Nir Eyal
- Traction vs Growth, Brian Balfour
Retention Tactics with Content:
- What works already - look at Google Analytics returning and direct traffic
- Content onboarding - Slidedeck by @anum at CTA Conf 2016.
- Notifications - PushCrew + thread on inbound.org. Also try "fake" email notifications to targeted segments.
- Publish regularly. Panda Monthly. The Skimm. Whiteboard Friday.
- 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:
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:
- Process sharing - how should I? How do you?
- Opinions - Polls. Closed questions. Why.
- Lists - Recommendations. Ideas.
- Stories - Experiences. Background
Two private types (harder to scale in public. Better in private email threads, Slack etc.)
- Critiques
- Collaboration
Golden Rules for Community Content
- The conversation is the content
- The comment is the conversion
Gut check (with community content) - will your content work in a bar.
Personalization
Personalization is not *|Firstname|*
- 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.
- Write to people’s identities - who they really are! (What you might call personas)
- THEN use merge tags like *|Firstname|*
Scaling personal email at inbound.org
Create your segments once. Re-use them everywhere.

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. 👇