amplification: content marketing that works
TRANSCRIPT
Justin Jackson, Product Marketing at Sprintly
Amplification: Content Marketing that Works October 2014 Presentation
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Justin Jackson - Sprint.ly - @mijustin
Justin Jackson is the Product Marketing Manager at Sprintly. He’s been featured in Inc. Magazine (“The secret to building a high trafficked blog”) and wrote a book called Amplification. He also hosts a podcast called Product People, and blogs at justinjackson.ca
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Sprintly’s Content Marketing
Amplification is about catching bigger waves
1 Section One - What is Amplification?
Finding your audience
Finding where they hang out
Discovering their needs
Organize your research
2 Section Two - Research
3 Section Three - Writing & promoting
Table of Contents
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What blogs do you read?
1
• Boring
• Bland
• Safe
Most corporate blogs are
• Opinionated
• Surprising
• Have a point of view
• Teach you something
What kind of blogs do you read?
What is Content Marketing?
1
What is content marketing? The Content Marketing Institute defines it like this:
Section One
“Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to a!ract and acquire a clearly defined audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.”
How important is content marketing? Content wins for most effective strategy; but it’s also the hardest to implement
Section One
Amplification = content x channel
What is Amplification?
There’s this fallacy that good content always gets discovered; but the truth is that good content needs distribution in order to be seen.
You could be writing amazing posts that nobody hears about.
Section One
Example:
Example:
Example:
Example:
Original post: 2011
Catching the wave in 2013
The key to success is to create great content and find great channels.
• Choosing a specific audience
• Ge!ing to know their needs: observing trends + pa!erns
• Responding to those needs with targeted content
• Distributing your content through influential networks
• Amplifying your signal on those networks by leveraging your personal
network
What is Amplification?
Section Two:Research
2
Start with People
People first
The first question you need to ask is: “who do I want to reach?” Every good product, website, campaign, and piece of writing starts with people in mind.
Section Two
Make a long list! To trim it down ask these questions:
• Make a list of all the potential customer types you could reach. Example:
Product Managers, Project Managers, CEOs, Founders, Developers
How do you choose your audience?
• In which of these groups do we have an unnatural advantage?
• Which of these groups are we most excited about?
• Which of these groups has money to spend?
Technique #2: draw a venn diagram
Our target audience is: __________________
Finding pain
Section Two
If you can describe the problem be!er than your customer they will assume you have the solution.
- Pat Flynn
When you understand your audience’s pain you’ll be able to be!er define their problem.
Focus on their needs
Don’t ask: ‘what do I want to write?’ Ask: ‘what do people need?’
Always be researching your niche; never stop. I look wherever people congregate: forums, mailing lists, blog posts, off-hand comments from people on Twi!er, support portals, user groups.
Section Two
- Amy Hoy
Observe people in their habitat
Online:
• Forums
• Sub-reddits
• News aggregators
• Social networks
• Blogs
• Support sites
Where do people hang out?
Offline:
• Conferences
• Meetups
• Workshops
• Coffee shops
• Festivals
• Industry parties
Research examples: where would you find managers?
What are you looking for?
BIG problems
trends pain points frustrations
Observing trends
Yesterday I saw this tweet:
He’s tweeting about this site: The Grid
He’s not happy about it
A lot of other designers don’t like it either
A lot of other designers don’t like it either
I go to Designer News:
Where have I seen this before?
Do you remember this?
Do you remember this?
Do you remember this?
Do you remember this?
What’s the trend we’re observing?
Designers are feeling threatened.
This takes time.Collect and
organize your research.
Listen
Focus on your audience’s biggest problems
If you are talking to potential customers, and the pain point that you’re going to target is not one of the top two most pressing issues in their life right now, don’t do that.
Instead, do one of the top two things. If you’re not on my top two issue list, I’m not going to [pay a!ention].
Section Two
- Patrick McKenzie (Patio11)
Organize your research
• Record your findings
• Organize them into groupings
• Identify a big pain / issue / topic you could focus on
You grow an audience by targeting a topic people care about!
Section Three:Writing & Promotion
3
Write for your audience
Writing viral content is hard. For example, look at Nate Silver’s research on the number of views the average article on the Huffington Post gets:
The average blog post got about 2,150 page views. This distribution, however, was highly inequitable. The top-performing blog post — one by the former Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich — had received about 27,000 page views as of Friday morning. The median blog post, on the other hand, received only about 550 page views.
Section Three
Great, shareable content…
• is simple
• is surprising or unexpected
• is focused on a specific problem, issue, or interest for a given audience
• is well researched
• has a “shareable moment”: a standout quote, diagram, or story
• about 7 minutes long (1,000 - 1,600 words)
You grow an audience by targeting a topic people care about!
Why do people share content?
We always seem to be on the lookout for who else will find this helpful, amusing or interesting, and our brain data are showing evidence of that. At the first encounter with information, people are already using the brain network involved in thinking about how this can be interesting to other people. We're wired to want to share information with other people. I think that is a profound statement about the social nature of our minds.
Section Three
Types of content
baremetrics.io/blog/startup-chat-pricing
Amplify your content
Which train are you going to hitch your content to?
Which train are you going to hitch your content to?
Your own small network
Which train are you going to hitch your content to?
Your own small network
Someone else’s big network
Effects of amplification
Section Three
Two types of amplifiers:
1. Individual influencers
Hiten Shah @rands Kevin Rose
2. Online networks: communities, news sites, etc…
Hacker News Designer News Product Hunt
How do you build relationships with influencers?
Hiten Shah @rands Kevin Rose
Interviewed on Product People podcast
Sprintly advisorThrough Sprintly’s founder, Joe Stump
How do you build relationships with influencers?
Samuel Hulick Maura Rodgers Ryan Hoover
Met at a conference
Crashed a speaker’s dinner Met through writing
club
How do you earn the right to on online communities?
Hacker News Designer News Product Hunt
Add value
Target the right networks
Section Three
Coordinate your efforts
• Give them a sneak peek into your post
• Tell them why they might be interested
• Ask for their feedback.
Before you publish, contact influencers + your network
• Let them know your post has been published
• Ask them to share on social networks (use pre-populated tweet for this)
• Ask them to share on relevant networks
The moment you publish, contact those folks again
Example 1: Groovehq
Example 1: Groovehq
Section Three
Coordinate your launch
The game plan
1. Give influencers and your personal network a sneak peek
2. Let them know when you’re going to publish and how they can help
3. Publish + Share on high value networks
4. Mobilize your network to share + get initial traction on community sites
5. Engage with the response
Example 2
A note on Hacker News,
Designer News, Product Hunt,
Reddit…
It typically takes about 20-30 minutes for a story
to slip off the "New Submissions" page.
That's your window to get enough votes to appear on the front
page.
The algorithm on News Sites favours new content
“Reddit's hot ranking uses the logarithm function to weight the first votes higher than the rest. The first 10 up-votes have the same weight as the next 100 up-votes.” -Amir Salihefendic
• On most news sites, initial traction is critical
• In most algorithms, the time since submission is particularly important.
• The more time that elapses, the harder the score falls
• “The first 10 up-votes have the same weight as the next 100 up-votes.”
The algorithm on News Sites favours new content
Can you game the system?
You have to write something genuinely interesting. That's the difference between being on the front page for 10 to 30 minutes, and being there for 10 hours. HN is very very unforgiving and that's awesome because it can't *really* be gamed. If the submission is no good, no amount of "tricks" will help. -Swizec Teller
• Reddit and Hacker News have fairly sophisticated voting ring detectors
• Don’t ask your same people over and over again to up-vote your posts
• Don’t have people from the same IP address (same office) vote
Timing is important
• Publish in the morning!
• Be aware of what else is happening in the world.
• What's happening in your niche?
• Initial traction is key
"Timing plays a big part in most every success."- Jason Fried
A%er you publish
A%er you publish
• Respond to those that engage with your content
• Look for opportunities to expand the discussion, or share the post in new networks
• Thank everyone that shares it
Block off time a%er you publish:
Thanking people will surprise them.
Show gratitude to the people who took the time to share your post. You can do
this by searching for the URL or keywords from your post in Twi!er. Thanking
people will increase the likelihood that they'll follow your work in the future.
Questions?
Justin Jackson Product Marketing
Sprintly @mijustin
jjackson@quickle%.com
Thue Madsen Marketing Associate
KISSmetrics @ThueLMadsen
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THANK YOU
Justin Jackson Product Marketing at Sprintly