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In today's show, we go over how you can create your first authority content marketing campaign.
Authority Content Marketing is a series of content pieces that are specifically designed to increase your authority positioning.
This is type of campaign is a hybrid of our style of our authority marketing, and content marketing which has been exploding in popularity.
Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.
So, in this podcast episode and post, we show how you can use content marketing to position yourself as an authority in your market.
And as with anything you hope to achieve in life, creating a plan to meet your goals most often results in the best possible outcome.
For example, when creating this first authority content marketing campaign, there are 6 steps to follow in order to give yourself the greatest chance of success.
Six Steps of a Authority Content Marketing Campaign
You need to decide what you are trying to achieve with your marketing campaign, and no, saying you want more business isn’t enough.
Be more specific. To give you an idea of what we mean, read the following data:
According the Ascend2’s 2015 Content Marketing Trends Summary Report, the following were the objectives behind most content strategies:
- Improvement in customer engagement.
- An increase in lead generation.
- A more heightened brand awareness.
- An increase in revenue from sales.
- An improvement in lead nurturing.
- An increase in traffic on a website.
- An improvement in customer retention.
- An improvement in search engine rankings.
…and in today's show, and this post, we talk about another reason: positioning yourself as an authority and influencer in your market.
At the Traffic & Conversion Summit, noted marketer Frank Kern stated:
Positioning, most importantly positioning yourself as an authority, is the single most important thing you can do increase your perceived value to the market place.
Increasing your perceived value leads to many benefits which impact every part of the sales cycle.
For instance, once you develop authority, you no longer have to chase sales leads and prospects. People find him because of his positioning and once they do, they will stop looking.
People that are seen as authorities also have a higher value position, and are therefore expected to have higher rates.
Another benefit is “trust.” You trust opinions and advice are trusted by clients.
No longer will you devise a plan that will help one of your clients, only to have them question every step, and in the end, only do certain parts.
So, now that we know the objective of this authority content marketing campaign, let's move on to Step 2.
For some businesses, webinar attendees or repeat customers impact their financial bottom line more than other elements.
Others find different conversions more important.
It’s up to you to define what your personal objective is in order to hit your target.
What conversions do you need?
Otherwise, you will be tossing stuff at the wall, hoping something sticks.
So, determine what the key conversions are, or what gives you the best return on your investment, and then build content which promotes that end.
For this authority content marketing campaign, the conversion we want is the ability to get our content in front of them again.
So, we'll track two types of conversions, people that opt-in to our email list and people that we've tagged with our Facebook pixel.
Pixels allow us to follow up with people who have visited our website in general, specific pages on the site, a sales pages, etc.
The key is that pixels allow you to make TARGETED offers to individuals based off of pages they’ve visited.
For example, we run ads to promote blog posts on getting leads from Facebook. Then, we retarget the people who read the article with a specific lead magnet for…Free Custom Facebook Covers.
It’s much more powerful than making them a broad offer… it allows us to solve a SPECIFIC problem for them.
Who is your ideal audience? Whom do you want to read your content?
Defining your audience is crucially important when it comes to creating an authority content marketing campaign.
After all, how could ever hope to reach them if you don’t know who you’re aiming for?
To help you visualize this person, create a persona for your ideal client.
List out their demographic and psychographic traits. Brain dump as much information as you can think of from the research you’ve done so far.
Give this person a name, and grab a photo online. You can grab an actual human avatar from uifaces.com or build one yourself using any number of online avatar builders, such as Mad Men Yourself and Face Your Manga.
Design a dossier. It doesn’t have to be fancy, but it helps to have a 1-page printout that you can reference when brainstorming with your avatar.
Write a story as your ideal customer avatar. Imagine that you are them, journaling about discovering and using your service. What did they do before using it? What are they thinking while they are using? What are they really trying to accomplish with it? What do they do after your done? When will they come back again?
A real estate broker; for example, might create a persona of a married couple, aged mid to late thirties with children. Those personas then become what you build your content around.
Once you have defined your audience and established your personas, start creating content that will benefit them.
You want to become the educator & advocate for their success.
Make sure your content is always useful and informative to ensure likes, shares and interest.
One of the hardest things to do, when publishing on a regular basis, is to come up with new ideas.
Keep a notebook, or your phone, with you everywhere you go. I specifically use the Todoist app.
- Write down story ideas from people you run into
- Write down story ideas from conversations you have
- Write down story ideas from things you see
- Write down story ideas from movies you watch
- Write down story ideas from other blogs you read
- Write down story ideas from news you hear about
- Write down story ideas from conferences you go to
- Write down story ideas from successes you see
- Write down story ideas from mistakes you make
- When you don’t know something, learn it. Then write about it.
In addition, keep in mind that it’s best to create content that you can use over and over.
For example, an article that can be turned into a PowerPoint, podcast episode or free report is more valuable than one that can only be used once.
Keep this and your audience in mind when creating any new content.
Once you have created your content, get it out there.
Some tried and true methods to get some exposure and things like guest blogging, posting on social media, blog commenting and linking out to other blogs in your niche.
But here are some lesser know ways to get more exposure for your Authority Content Marketing Campaign:
Ask an Influencer for a Killer Quote
Before publishing your new piece of content, reach out to an influencer or influencers in your industry. Tell them the topic of your content and ask if they would be willing to provide a point of view.
You can reach influencers at scale with BuzzSumo.
Mention Your Expert Sources When Sharing
Once your content is published, share it on social media and mention the people you’ve referenced. These can be part of the snippets you use from the previous section.
The people you mention will see that you’ve mentioned them and some will re-share.
Direct Message Influencers on LinkedIn So They Read, Share, and Link to the Content
Getting into an influencer’s inbox is very powerful, but not always possible.
With LinkedIn, you can get in an influencer’s inbox even if you don’t have their email address. However, you need to have a connection with them on LinkedIn first.
So, with your connections, work your way up the chain. Connect with the connections of influencers. It’s easier to become a connection with an influencer if you’re a 2nd degree connection.
Contact People Who Have Linked to Similar Content
Find people who have linked to similar content, and contact them introducing your new (and better) content.
There are multiple tools that allow you to find links to a website or URL. Two of the best are Ahrefs and Open Site Explorer.
Identify content similar to yours. Copy the URL from these items and paste them into Ahrefs or Open Site Explorer.
You’ll get a list of pages that have linked to these items. These will be your targets.
Add a Link to Your New Content from Your Most Popular Archived Content
Go to your analytics program of choice and look for the most popular pages on your website.
Don’t look at the all-time most popular pages because those can be skewed to older content.
You want to highlight the content that is being heavily trafficked right now. So, look over the last six months or even the last month.
Submit to Content Communities
There are a number of sites that allow you to submit your content so their established audience has the opportunity to see it.
The competition is strong on these sites, but if your content is exceptional (which you should always shoot for), you’ll likely attract some attention and get some good traffic.
Sites to submit content to include:
• Blog Engage
• BizSugar
• Triberr
Also, be sure your content will reach your target audience. To do this, utilize the platform they frequent the most.
For example, if your audience is big on social media and likes videos, create video content and post it on YouTube and Facebook.
If they like perusing blogs, create blog posts complete with valuable, interesting information.
Once you have launched your authority content marketing campaign and are seeing returns on your investment, evaluate the effectiveness of your strategy.
Do this by answering questions like:
- Were your conversions effective, or do they need tweaking?
- Did your audience share your content or act on it in anyway?
- Did your content’s message resonate with your audience?
- Did you achieve the objectives you defined before starting your marketing campaign?
When you answer these questions, and look at the numbers you achieved in terms of conversion rates, it will become clear that you either have hit the nail on the head in regard to your marketing strategy or reveal the fact that your authority content marketing campaign needs work.
Don’t worry, though, if you determine you do need to tweak some things. This isn’t the end of the world. Consider your overall strategy a living document that can be revised as many times as necessary to achieve the results you want.
Creating an effective authority content marketing campaign doesn’t have to be difficult.
In fact, if you follow the steps listed above, you will greatly increase your chances of creating a successful marketing campaign that achieves all you had hoped for and more.
