Course Description
Optimize your search visibility and website traffic using concise, high-impact content marketing strategies.
Content marketing is a long-term strategy that includes developing original, relevant content for your users and customers. It encompasses all marketing formats that involve creation and sharing of content in order to acquire and engage your customers. This course will teach you how to build your business by leveraging the content you already have, create new content for marketing, and update your search engine optimization so people can find your great content, resulting in increased leads, more sales and better relationships with your customers.
For quite some time, marketers have been touting that content is king. This is true now more than ever. With constant updates to search engine algorithms, specifically Google's, the best way to drive and increase traffic to your website is with content marketing. You can have what you think is the best content to market your product or service, but if nobody sees it, there are no results. This course teaches you to understand why people share information, how they share it, and how that benefits you.
You will learn how to brainstorm, develop and refine your marketing strategy in this class, including ideas and content for blog posts, web seminars, web copy, email blasts and much more. Hands-on activities will take you through content marketing case studies and allow you to develop ideas and content for you to immediately apply to your company.
Top Reasons to Take This Course
- Track your results properly – both success and failure
- Learn exactly what content marketing is and how to incorporate it into your business
- Learn to publish your content and incorporate SEO into your strategy so people can find you
- Increase traffic coming to your website(s)
- Learn to engage your customers with your content
- Optimize what you already have and create GREAT content with it – you don't need to start from scratch
- Develop a strategy to create content for what your customers want – not what you think they want
- Discover how content marketing can be a cohesive blend with your other marketing tactics, not competition
- Learn which channels work, why, and how to incorporate them into your marketing plan
- Use social media to communicate better in your networks, and more efficiently
Substitution & Cancellation Policy:
You may cancel or reschedule up to 21 days prior to the start date of the class at no penalty. For any cancellation or reschedule requests within 21 days, the full course tuition is still due and not eligible for refund. Any paid tuition will be credited towards a future class and must be used within 12 months.
*Partner delivered courses may be subject to different cancellation terms
Agenda
Course Outline
I. What is content marketing and why does my company need it?
- Definition
- Don Draper vs. Seth Godin
- Share of mind
- Thought leadership
- Lead from wherever you are
- Permission marketing
- Consistency is key
- Contrast to paid advertising
- Ad blindness
- Never ending cost
- Examples of good content marketing
II. Types of content marketing, how it's shared and why it works
- Email
- Blog posts
- Video
- Web Seminars
- Publications
- Events
- Public speaking
- Published works
- Other
Activity: Where do you stand? What do you currently have as content marketing? Blog, email, video, web seminars, social media, etc.
III. The Google algorithm and SEO
- Content is king – it's finally official
- Gaming the system gets harder every day
- Algorithm updates to squash spam
- Google rewarding authors of great content
- Biggest SEO mistakes
- Content/sharing drop-off
- Industry leaders drop-off in OSE
- Check drop-off of class sites in OSE
- Checklist: Tips and tricks for good SEO
- Best practices
Activity: Review tools you can use to help improve your SEO strategy.
Activity: Where do you rank in SEO among your competitors? What are the top five keywords you want to be known for, and what is your rank? What improvements can you make now?
IV. Leveraging content marketing
- Stop selling, start helping
- Success takes time
- Whiteboard Friday
- Freezerburns
- The "My product/service isn't exciting enough" excuse
- Real time and real resources
- Quilting all the content you've ever created
- Activity: Determine the content you already have and create ways to reuse but not repeat
V. Optimizing your content
- Who is your content for?
- What is the purpose of your content?
- What is the lifecycle of the content?
- Become a published author – the easy way
- Giving information away
- When and why to charge for your content
Activity: Create a persona of your typical client/customer. Why do they want or need your content? How will they find your content? At what point in the lifecycle and buying cycle will they see your content?
Activity: What is your ideal landing page? What elements are on that page? What will your headlines and copy body look like?
VI. Creating content
- The value of questions and answers
- Using lists
- Sharing is the new Super Bowl ad for small businesses
- You don't need to go viral
- 1,000 true fans
- Connecting with your target audience
- Where to share for maximum impact
- Video
- Is it right for your company?
- Pros and cons of YouTube
Activity: Brainstorm content marketing elements that you can integrate in your overall marketing strategy. What is relevant and unique about you?
Activity: Write one blog post relevant to your company.
VII. Managing a content marketing and SEO strategy
- Who and what you need to sustain your strategies
- Measuring your success and failures
- Using in-house resources
- Questions to ask vendors if you choose to go out-of-house