Course Description
Overview
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. Content marketing is much more than just writing. It is a holistic lifecycle of creating relevant and compelling content in a consistent fashion that turns a website visitor into a targeted buyer. This content marketing training 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.
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. Putting content online is not enough, it needs to be engaging and measurable. Whether you have been writing for years or are just getting started, there are guidelines for your content marketing strategy. This content marketing training course teaches you to understand why people share information, how they share it, and how that benefits you.
- How to track your results properly – both success and failure
- Exactly what content marketing is and how to incorporate it into your business
- How to publish your content and incorporate SEO into your strategy so people can find you
- How to increase traffic coming to your website(s)
- How to engage your customers with your content
- How to optimize what you already have and create GREAT content with it – you don't need to start from scratch
- How to develop a strategy to create content for what your customers want – not what you think they want
- How content marketing can be a cohesive blend with your other marketing tactics, not competition
- Which channels work, why, and how to incorporate them into your marketing plan
- How to use social media to communicate better in your networks, and more efficiently
1. What is content marketing and why does my company need it?
- Definition
- Evolution of marketing
- Messaging
- Devices
- Attention span
- Permission marketing
- Don Draper vs. Seth Godin
- Share of mind
- Thought leadership
- HubSpot
- Contrast to paid advertising
- Ad blindness
- Never ending cost
- Attention spans and distractions
2. Types of content marketing, how it's shared and why it works
- Content types
- Email
- Blog posts
- Video
- Web Seminars
- Publications
- Events
- Public speaking
- Published works
- Other
- Importance of headlines
- Content curation
- Content creation
Activity: Where do you stand? What do you currently have as content marketing?
3. 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 rewards great content
- Knowing what customers want
- Author rank
- Biggest SEO mistakes
- Anatomy of a Landing page
- Content/sharing drop-off
- Industry leaders drop-off in SEO
- Check drop-off of class sites in SEO
- Best practices – tips and tricks for good SEO
- Tools and resources
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?
4. Leveraging content marketing
- Stop selling, start helping
- Consistency is key
- Success takes time
- Whiteboard Friday
- Freezerburns
- The "My product/service isn't exciting enough" excuse
- Best Made Co.
- 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
5. Optimizing your content
- Who is your content for?
- What is the purpose of your content?
- Show don't tell
- 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
- Creating opportunities
- Anatomy of a landing page
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?
6. Creating original 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: What are content marketing elements that you can integrate in your overall marketing strategy now? What is relevant and unique about you?
Activity: Brainstorm three blog posts relevant to your company.
7. 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
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