by Dan Kelsall
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One of the best ways to start, is to ask this: WHAT DO MY CUSTOMERS WANT TO SAY, BUT DAREN’T
SAY?
If you can say what they wish they were able to say, you’ll immediately garner their admiration and respect.
And what happens when a customer respects you?
They’re much more likely to buy from you.
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4. FUCK STRATEGY
To build a content strategy, don’t build a strategy.
Eh?
Listen, because, and I said this earlier and will probably say it again, going to the trouble of building a strategy before you have any idea what tone of voice, messaging or content works with your audience is nothing short of stupid.
Taking a ridiculous amount of time to write a massive content strategy only to find out that you got it all wrong is, for a marketer, more painful than getting one’s genitals trapped in one’s zip.
So, the right thing to do (in my opinion, because if I don’t say ‘in my opinion’ I end up looking a bit full of myself, and we don’t want that now, do we?) is to test your content first.
Put it this way, if you were developing a product, you wouldn’t just go, “Right, here you go customers, have this new, organic, badger-scented eau de toilette!” without testing the market, would you? You’d do a bit of market research to see if people actually wanted to smell like a badger.
Well, it’s the same with content.
Sure, at first there’s a bit of guesswork involved. It can be hard to know what your market will like, or what stuff will make you or your brand stand out.
Some of you may think you know what your market wants to see, but don’t ever assume. And for those that say you can check out other content that does well in your market and replicate it, I say that’s fucking lazy.
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And by doing that, all you’ll ever produce is the same shit everyone else does. There’s nothing wrong with being inspired by someone else’s content, but that’s all it can ever be -
inspiration.
If you want to be truly good at content marketing, you need to find things – narratives, tones of voice – that haven’t been seen before. And the only way to do that is to try as many different ideas as possible. Most will bomb, but, and this is where it may take a while to get it right, eventually you will stumble upon something that works.
And here’s where most people get it wrong. They keep producing content and when they stumble upon something good, a message or subject or whatever, that works, they pat themselves on the back, have a fucking biscuit, and then never do anything like it again.
But you, as a content creator, don’t have the right to decide when your market’s had enough of a particular type of content.
The analytics will tell you when they’ve had enough.
Let’s say you have a couple of posts about a subject – say the gender pay gap - that do well. There’s so much you can say around that subject that you should probably try and build a campaign around it (more about that later).
You’ve stumbled upon something that your target audience want to see and, unless your market’s proper niche, there will be tons more of your target audience out that will probably react positively to something similar.
Make sense?
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The point is, your content strategy is a live document. You should be prepared to change anything and everything from one day to the next. But if you write a 50-page document and something changes tomorrow which fucks that entire document over, you've got to write a new 50-page document, and that's stupid.
And the other thing that massively pisses me off about these huge marketing documents is, no-one ever really sticks to them anyway, which makes them even more pointless. If you're a CMO or marketing manager or whatever, and you honestly think your team have gone through and digested all the crap you included in your boring, little plan, you're kidding yourself.
The stuff they do stick to is the proper literal bits like, "We're going to post an industry tip on our Instagram each day, designed like this, and written in this tone of voice, and at this time," and then your team continue to push that out each day, but it gets no engagement and drives no traffic etc. but they keep doing it because it was part of this big, rigid, crappy strategy that you came up with.
Not one of you tested whether your market wanted to see those shitty tips and, what baffles me even more is the fact that you'll probably be pushing out those shitty industry tips for the next 6
months, and not one of you will say, "These are fucking pointless. We're wasting our time." So bin the strategies off. Get good at one thing, get your message right, find out what works with your audience and begin to build a loose plan around it.
I'm not saying content strategies shouldn't exist. What I'm saying is, they're something you build over time and constantly adapt based on what your market wants to see.
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5. FUCK CAMPAIGNS
Right, so what’s a campaign then?
Well, it’s just basically taking a message that works with your target market (which you’ll only find by testing different messages), and getting organised around it.
It’s about planning a series of content, for one or more channels, to be executed over a period of time. Which sounds simple, but it’s not really. And it can be frustrating.
So, say you find that a tweet you wrote, taking the piss out of Richard Branson’s weird, yellow hair, did well. You had thousands of likes and retweets, your followers sky rocketed and it even brought in bit of business. You might then decide that your brand will now try a campaign around taking the piss out of other successful entrepreneurs in the hope that it will attract the same engagement, bring in even more followers and net you some more custom.
Only it doesn’t.
You see, just because a message did well, it doesn’t mean your campaign will. Now, I know I said earlier that good campaigns are built around messages that you found to work, but the truth is, it doesn’t matter how well a message in a piece of content did, there’s nothing to say your target market will react in the same way to it when they see more of it. There’s always a chance it was a one-hit-wonder.
Not only that, but many topics are time sensitive too. That’s why when you find a message that works, you can’t spend 6 months dicking around creating a campaign around it. You need to work quickly, because I guarantee, someone will beat you too it.
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Not only is content hit and miss, campaigns are too. Get comfortable with that fact and know that, just because a particular campaign was a flop, it doesn’t mean the next one will be. Get back to trying different kinds of content, find something that works and go again. It’s frustrating, but this is where that patience comes in.
Oh, and always analyse your content. Work out what went well, what had the highest percentage of engagement from your target audience, and what hit your key metrics – revenue, users, hires, whatever.
Keep track of high performing campaigns because, although you’ll never know for definite that a content campaign will do well, campaigns that mimic those that did well previously have a higher chance of garnering the same results. I don’t need to explain why. That’s just common sense, Susan.
People always ask me, “Should we include other channels in our campaigns?”
My answer is always the same: Only if you think you’ve got the time to manage other channels.
What do I mean by that?
Well, let’s say you’ve got a new office dog accessory brand.
Let’s call it ‘Office Shit Bags’. You noticed a gap in the market because everyone nowadays seems to think that an office dog is the answer to a happy workforce, so you started creating little customisable, branded poo bags. You manage to grow a decent Instagram page and sales are coming in steadily. You find that your best performing content is pics of office dogs curling one out on fake grass, under Ping-Pong tables or next to beanbags, 17
so you want to build a campaign around it. You also want to replicate the success you’ve had on Insta on other channels, so you set up a Facebook page. You quickly realise that building an audience on Facebook is completely different to Instagram, and you struggle to get to grips with paid ad campaigns. It takes time to constantly produce content, most of which doesn’t work, and your following is taking ages to grow. Meanwhile, your Insta page has taken a hit because, in between fulfilling orders, creating content, dealing with invoicing, and your new FB
channel, you haven’t had the time to concentrate on it. And, because of that, you’re now getting less sales. A month later, your company goes bust, your partner leaves you, and you starve to death.
Do you get my point?
If you’re a small business and you don’t have the time to master another channel, don’t try it. Wait until your main channel is bringing in enough leads or customers, and either take on someone else to free up some of your time so that you can put the required effort into building another channel, or use the increase in cash to outsource the building of your second channel to an agency who knows what they’re doing.
The worst thing you can do as a marketer is overstretch yourself. Being creative is tough, especially when you’re drained. If you take on too much, your creativity will take a battering, your content will go back to being shit, and, voila, you’re back at square one.
As I said earlier, patience is everything.
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6. FUCK MONEY
Right, so we're all precious about the stuff that we create. We're all protective of our ideas. It's only natural.
But the problem with that is, if we create something and it doesn't do well, we often hold onto it. That's why marketing teams continue to push out the same corporate videos, or entrepreneurs stick with their crappy podcasts and keep inviting guests on, despite the fact that after 17 episodes, they still only attract an average of 2 listeners.
In the same way that it's hard for a mother to look at their child and think they're ugly, even if they have a face like a bulldog licking piss off a nettle, when we create stuff, it's hard to view it negatively. After all, we put our blood sweat and tears into it. It can't be bad.
So when we push out a piece of content and it dives, our automatic reaction isn't to think, "well, that was turd." Instead, (and we're all guilty of this) we make excuses. We say stuff like,
"[insert social media platform of choice]'s algorithm screwed me over" or " I released it at the wrong time of day" or one of a vast array of other things we say to defend our creations.
But in reality, the reason that piece of content didn't do well is because, in truth, it wasn't very good.
However, rather than admit that fact, do you know what a lot of marketing teams and content creators do?
They put money behind it.
And do you know what happens to that money?
It gets swallowed up by the online, money-gobbling machine, never to be seen again.
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Think about it.
If a piece of content goes out to your target audience and gets little to no engagement, do you honestly think that by pushing it via a paid campaign, you'll somehow convince others in your target audience that it's worth engaging with?
What do you think the chances of that are?
The point is, you have an opportunity on most channels to test your content with your market.
For free.
And only when you find a piece of content that works should you put money behind it.
Because a piece of content that does well with your target audience organically will probably also do well with more of your target audience if you build a paid campaign around it.
It's not the most complicated theory to get your noggin around, is it?
If you find something that works well organically prior to every paid campaign, what do you think will happen to your success rate?
That's right. There's a good chance it'll improve.
Simple, init?
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7. FUCK THE DARK SIDE
Okay, so I know I go on all the time about tracking everything and measuring the impact of every piece of content, and tracking your target audience percentage and blah blah, fucking blah.
But there’s a bit of an issue.
It’s a little thing called ‘dark social’.
Sounds sinister, doesn’t it?
Well, lads and gentleladies, ‘dark social’ is a marketer’s worst nightmare.
So what the hell is it?
It’s the fact that, no matter what tools you use to measure the impact of your content, or how well you know your way around Google Analytics, you will never be able to know the origin of every bit of traffic. And, actually, some sources suggest you’ll never truly know the origin of MOST of your traffic. Instead, it usually just gets lumped in with 'direct traffic' which isn't very fair, is it?
But how come?
Well, the nature of t’internet, means that your customers may see your content via a hidden channel. And what I mean by that is, unless you’re a government hacker who spies on people through their webcam and stuff, your little analytics application can’t pick up private activity.
So when little Susie shares your post about the intricacy of gender neutrality in otters with her mate via Whatsapp and her 21
#darksocial
mate visits your site via that link, you’ve no idea where that traffic came from.
But, in truth, there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it. And the less people publicly share content, the more of your traffic goes ‘dark’.
The only thing you can hope to do is marry up content with spikes in visits to your social pages, profiles or website.
Although it’s not massively accurate, you can usually assume that a certain spike was caused by a particular piece of content.
"So I'm going to be guessing forever then?"
To a certain extent, Bob, yeah. GDPR was a big, fat, painful thorn in the marketing industry's side. I mean, it's a good thing, protecting people's privacy and stuff, but the fact that social platforms have locked down a shitload of their APIs means that it's very hard to get access to any meaningful data. You'll find that many of the tools and dashboards available to social media marketers are fucking useless if you actually drill down into the tangible value they provide. Most of them are just churning out analytics that are freely available on the platforms themselves.
Combine that with dark social, and it doesn't paint a very
'insightful' future, does it? But hey, we've got to work with what we've got. And if you think it's bad now (a study by RadiumOne in 2014 suggested 70% of referrals come from 'dark social' - if that's anything to go by, it'll be higher now), I guarantee that things are only going to get worse. People are going to be sharing things privately more and more, and the tighter we get with data, the less insights we'll get as marketers.
Tough cookies, mate.
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8. FUCK VIRAL
So I spent a lot of time trying to go viral, and helped many clients do it too.
The aim was simple. Make as much fucking noise as possible, and drive masses of traffic that I could then manipulate into buying products or services. Basically similar to the model a few digital agencies use, where they build or acquire viral channels and leverage them for other brands.
Don’t get me wrong. Going viral is hard work. And until you’ve built up a decent following, going viral repeatedly is pretty much impossible.
Viral content generally looks like the following: pick a subject with mass-market appeal, make sure it's written in an engaging way, and time it right. (If it’s already been overdone, it probably won’t work.) Oh, and the bigger your audience or following, the more likely you are to go viral. Obviously. The more often you go viral, the bigger your audience becomes, and the more likely you are to continue going viral.
But, after spending a shedload of time creating content for myself and
clients in different industries with the aim of going viral and attracting new customers, I realised something.
Many of the leads seemed to be coming from the posts that didn’t do as well. The ones tailored to a niche audience.
Now, you’re probably thinking, fuck me, Dan, every marketer knows that. But do they though? Would companies really be spending so much money with viral influencers if they truly knew that?