#her wardrobe would get more variety simply because she would become interested in other kinds of garments. like ok

[giddlygoat]

TRADITIONAL TOAD GARB PEACH LETS GOOOOOOOO

[hexalt]

Schitt’s Creek and the Transformative Power of Love

I first watched the pilot for Schitt’s Creek in the early part of 2019 and found it...eccentric. Not really funny, the characters weren’t speaking to me (except for Stevie (Emily Hampshire), whom I felt a kinship with), and the story seemed odd. I decided this show just wasn’t for me, and I had given it my best shot. Many months later, one of my best friends was posting about it frequently. Since we have the same taste, I thought maybe it was just the pilot. Maybe I should give it another shot. Maybe this time I’ll actually like it. So I started it from the pilot again, and I kept watching even if I wasn’t thoroughly entertained. I soon grew to love the two black sheep and having characters you understand always makes things easier.

What I didn’t realize when I started the show was that the characters were each more than they seem, they weren’t meant to be shallow jokes of themselves and their personas. The way they acted was often a façade hiding their insecurities of not being good enough in a variety of ways. The only other show that I’ve seen with a somewhat similar premise is Arrested Development, but there the characters are supposed to be absolutely ignorant, privileged assholes with no redeeming qualities.

I didn’t realize each season is better than the last, an astounding and rare feat in television. The quality of each season improves as the show quickly finds its footing by discarding early storylines that didn’t really work and letting the characters slowly becoming more grounded and open. This family that was once so distant that the parents didn’t even know their daughter’s middle name eventually develop genuine relationships for the first time with each other and other people.

Schitt’s Creek, co-created by father and son, Eugene (American Pie, Best in Show) and Dan Levy, wanted us to ultimately empathize with these characters, even if the remnants of their wealth can make them profoundly delusional and hilarious a lot of the time. Before writing the show, they created timelines going back to their characters’ elementary school years, detailing everything from where they worked to what they wore.

The fashion on the show is distinct and the best dressed I’ve seen in any show (and most films). Dan is huge into fashion and personally selects a lot of pieces worn in the show (some of David’s clothes are even from his own wardrobe). Instead of constantly telling the audience that this family used to be rich, we are reminded of it through Moira’s wall of wigs and couture black and white ensembles, David’s patterned black sweaters and low crotch pants, Alexis’s bohemian dresses and headbands, and Johnny’s array of business suits. When they enter any room in town, they are clearly fish out of water.

Schitt’s Creek centers on the Roses, a once-disgustingly wealthy family who lose their fortune and are forced to move to the only asset they have left: a small town named Schitt’s Creek that Johnny Rose (Eugene Levy) bought as a joke for his son, David (Dan Levy). So dilapidated is Schitt's Creek and so destitute are the Roses, they don't even have a house of their own; instead they are forced to live in a motel with two connecting rooms, forgoing all the luxury they had become accustomed to and, more terrifyingly, are now physically closer than ever.

While at first the family is horrified at the prospect of living in such a small town with townies, they eventually embrace the weirdness of the town, and it makes them grow in unexpected ways. Johnny was once the owner of the second-largest video rental store in the country and retains his businessman-like self through and through, but he also began the show more uppity. While he is often the most reasonable of the Roses, he often sees himself as above others in town and gets into awkward situations because of it. Over the course of the show he ends up developing a friendship with the town mayor to whom he initially had yelled “get the fuck out!” While he’s always devoted to his wife, he wasn’t so keen on his children, but being forced to live together makes him take a larger interest in their lives and become a better father.

Alexis (Annie Murphy) is the quintessential “dumb blonde” socialite who’s had a Schitt-ton of relationships with powerful men, making stories of her past highly entertaining, often illegal, and frequently frightening. She clearly grew up way too fast, never having had proper adult supervision. She’s reliant on men, and all she can think about in season one is trying to date cute guys. In the following seasons, she realizes it’s time to start growing up and gets her high school and Associate’s Degree to start her own PR business. She becomes a more enlightened version of herself, still deeply kind but also willing to put the happiness of others above her own. The Alexis who previously couldn’t see beyond her own nose becomes independent and more selfless.

David’s had hundreds of flings with people of all genders, but they seem to be replete with abuse, manipulation, and a lack of care for his being. This is unsurprising when we see how he hides his insecurity behind sarcasm and sometimes downplays things he doesn’t like to fit in. He fears showing kindness to anyone because others haven’t always been so kind to him. Early on, he has a panic attack and comes to the realization that he’s “really lonely here,” but he’s been lonely for a lot longer than that. What he doesn’t expect is to make his first best friend or find his soon-to-be husband in this backwater town. In the process, he learns to shed some of his armor.

Moira (Catherine O’Hara) was once on a soap opera, Sunrise Bay, and retains the melodrama in her day-to-day life and demeanor. She is constantly trying to become what she believes is a star: someone who acts in film, someone who everyone mourns when they die, someone who people will just pay one sliver of attention to. She’s desperately trying to cling to the spotlight, but in “Life is a Cabaret,” she finds what I believe will be her place come this final season. Rather than trying to constantly soak up attention, she gives Stevie the starring role in the town’s production of Cabaret (which Moira comes to direct) because getting that role was a “gift that once jolted [her] out of [her] little podunk routine.” From the wings of the stage, as Stevie slowly builds into “Maybe This Time” with such breathtaking passion and joy after starting off unsure and quiet, Moira is shocked at what she was able to bring out of Stevie. She’s finally realizing that her place isn’t center stage but in bringing out the best in others and helping them find their place in the world.

Stevie Budd begins as the desk clerk of the Schitt’s Creek motel until her great-aunt passes away, and she inherits the motel. From there she has to decide whether she’s ready to grow up and take over the family business, and she’s terrified. Johnny soon teams up with her in the business, renovating the motel and renaming it after both of them, so she sees the Roses aren’t going to abandon her. She is part of the Rose’s found family. Her and David are similar in their bluntness and sarcasm, but Stevie is insecure about never making it out of the town, never being more than a motel desk clerk, never having a long-term romantic relationship. She worries while everyone moves on with their lives, she’s “watching it all happen from behind the desk.”

Dan describes creating Schitt’s Creek as “writing a world that examines the transformational effects of love when the threat of hate and intolerance has been removed from the equation.” While homophobia is often front and center in any media depicting LGBT characters, Schitt’s Creek doesn’t give it as much thought. Where small towns are usually seen as ripe for homophobia, transphobia, and other discrimination, Schitt’s Creek doesn’t fall prey to this trope. Instead, this small town is bursting with love.

Dan purposely made David pansexual (it’s also the only show I’ve seen use the word) to challenge the viewer’s biases and push the boundaries of what it means to be masculine and feminine. David’s parents and others in the town never discuss it as anything strange or bad, it’s something he simply is and as common as the sky being blue. When David tells Stevie about his sexuality (“I like the wine, not the label”), she’s a bit surprised at first because she thought he was gay, but ultimately she doesn’t care.

This doesn’t mean the show never discusses what homophobia can be like, but it comes at it from a different lens.

For example, in “Meet the Parents,” David decides to throw a surprise birthday party for his boyfriend, Patrick Brewer (Noah Reid). What David doesn’t realize is Patrick hasn’t come out to his parents yet, they think David is solely his business partner. He tells David, “I know my parents are good people, I just...can’t shake this fear that there is a small chance that this could change everything.” David himself is prepared for homophobia from Patrick’s parents, but when they tell him they don’t care about that, just that he was hiding such an important part of himself from them, David who’s been trying to stay strong through it all wipes a tear.

“When I found myself in a position to tell stories on a global scale, I seized the opportunity to make a television show that might, in its own way, offer some support, encouragement and love to those who might not have it in their homes or in their schools or in their day to day lives. It’s a place where acceptance incubates joy and creates a clarity that allows people to see themselves and each other more deeply. It’s fiction, yes. But I’ve always been told to lead by example and this felt like a good place to start.”

— Dan Levy

I would be remiss to not touch on the comedic style of the show. This is a comedy that relies heavily on the physicality of its actors. Their facial expressions, accents and tonality, their limp wrists, each create uniquely funny characters with mannerisms unlike any I’ve seen. The cast brought nuance to the characters, when they could have easily fallen into vapid stereotypes.

As season 6 premiered on January 7, Schitt’s Creek is not done yet, and I can’t wait to see how its final season concludes. The characters are all happier now that they are achieving dreams they may not have known they had, they have fulfilling relationships with family and friends, and they all have grown into better people. Schitt’s Creek truly was their saving grace.

*

I’m in a TV group where we wrote essays on our favorite shows of the 2010s, so here is mine on Schitt’s Creek.

[roslinadama-sinequanon]

Saying Good-Bye to Yesterday-Chapter 11

So, yes it’s been forever and day. I haven’t dropped off the planet or quit writing for Shandy. It just got difficult for a while.  

You can find the chapter here https://www.fanfiction.net/s/13004092/11/Saying-Good-Bye-to-Yesterday and here https://archiveofourown.org/works/15321687/chapters/53083987 and here

****

"Hey, hon." Andy paused in buttoning his shirt at the greeting, his lips curving into a smile when he took in Sharon's disheveled appearance as she entered their bedroom, fresh from a workout, spandex shorts clinging to her long toned thighs, loose tendrils of hair slipping out of her high ponytail.

"How was the Barre class?" He asked.

"It wasn't Barre. It was Spin." Over the past few months, Amy had convinced her to start taking spin classes with her, adding to her usual regimen of Body Barre, Pilates, and Yoga.

"Well, how was Spin?"

"Ugh." She pulled the sweaty racerback tank over her head. "Jelly legs."

"Gorgeous legs," he corrected.

"Yes, well, that takes work, darling." Though she ate healthily, for the most part, was supple, naturally active, and thanks to genetics and a great metabolism, didn't have to fight hard to maintain her slender figure, she exercised to keep toned and fit. In addition to the classes she attended when her schedule allowed, she swam laps almost every day, did some light weights at the PD gym, and also got out to Malibu to a riding stable as often as she could. When she first mentioned her horseback riding to Andy as a full-body workout, he gave her a typical Andy quip, "for the horse, right? " She'd ignored the comment until she could prove her point. One afternoon she'd taken him on what he referred to as a "ball crushing" ride, and he'd sheepishly eaten his words. Later still, when they'd become intimate and he'd felt those "thighs of steel" around his waist, he'd come to an even greater appreciation of that "full-body" exercise.

"Well, I'm pretty gross right now, so I'm going to hop in the shower." She pulled off her sports bra and wiped at the sweat under her breasts before dropping it in the hamper and disappearing into the bathroom. When she emerged 15 minutes later, she had one towel wrapped around her torso, the other turban-style around her head.

"Don't forget, I have book club tonight," she said.

"Yeah, I'm gonna hit a meeting."

She glanced up sharply from her dresser, a pair of rose-colored panties dangling from her fingertips. "Everything okay?"

Though her tone remained neutral, Andy picked up the tiny inflection of worry. It wasn't his usual meeting night. "Yeah, everything's fine," he assured her. "I had to skip last week because of our case, and I haven't gotten the chance to talk to Isaac."

"About us?"

"Yes."

Once in her fresh panties, Sharon shimmied on a pair of black leggings that she paired with a long, slouchy v-neck cashmere sweater in a soft shade of blush. To finish off the casual outfit, she slipped on a pair of two-tone quilted Chanel ballet flats, big silver hoop earrings, and a silver cuff bracelet. Andy continued to watch her dress. Watching her shed her professional persona for her personal one was kind of a ritual for him. At work, she was all fitted, classic, sleek lines. Understated and sophisticated. At home, her wardrobe was softer and a little more eclectic. Even her jewelry was different. At work, simple diamond studs in her ears and her watch, no bracelets, no necklaces, no dangling earrings. At home, she often wore pretty bracelets, hoops or dangling earrings, and a variety of necklaces, including the crucifix she never wore to work. Separation of church and state and all. He asked her once why she stopped wearing necklaces when she took over Major Crimes. After expressing surprise that he had actually noticed that, she told him that Brenda had warned her that wearing a necklace when interviewing suspects was dangerous because they could use it to try to strangle her. Given the violent animosity their former Chief seemed to bring out in suspects, he figured she was speaking from experience. Probably a good idea that he wore his sobriety necklace tucked in under his shirt. He was pretty sure there were hundreds of suspects over the years who would have loved nothing more than to strangle him.

A half-hour later, with her hair blown dry and her make up re-applied, Sharon came out of the bedroom to see Andy slipping on his jean jacket as he prepared to head out. Rusty was sitting on the couch on his laptop.

"You boys are on your own for supper tonight," she reminded the two.

"Okay. " Rusty glanced up. "What do you want to do, Andy?"

"I have a meeting, so I thought I could pick something up for us on my way home. Want a pizza from Palermo's?"

"Just make sure my half isn't loaded down with veggies."

Andy rolled his eyes. "No veggies. Got it."

Sharon smiled and started to reach for the Trader Joes bag she'd left on the table.

"I've got that, babe." Andy took the heavy bag and followed her out the door. Not so long ago, she might have bristled at the move and argued that she could carry the bag herself, but Andy knew that. It was simply a gentlemanly act of kindness, and she no longer looked for any sort of underlying misogynistic meaning to his kind gestures.

******

The strong smell of flowers hit Sharon just outside the storefront, and she glanced up at the pretty awning hanging over the doorway. "Lotions and Potions," her friend Summer's bath and body shop in Mar Vista. She opened the door, and the floral and spicy scents grew more pronounced. Taking a few steps in, she scanned the room, looking past the displays of soaps, bath salts, body creams, and lotions to see Summer with a customer over in the incense and essential oil section. The little bell that jangled at her entry drew Summer's attention, and when she glanced over and saw who it was, she gave Sharon a smile and a hand gesture indicating that she would be with her in a minute. Sharon nodded and began browsing, lifting and examining the vintage apothecary jars Summer used to carry her product. The old-fashioned jars and antique-looking sepia labels with their intricate designs and calligraphy lettering harkened back to another era as if she was stepping back in time.

Several years ago, this had been a New Age jewelry and clothing store where Summer worked as a clerk. Summer fit right in with today's millenials, often flitting from job to job, but for as long as Sharon had known her, she grew herbs and made homemade soaps and lotions in her house, selling her creations on the weekends at craft fairs and farmer's markets. Then Anabel, the storeowner, allowed her to put a few samples out for sale at the store, and they were a big hit. Soon she had a whole product line for sale. When Anabel decided to sell the store, the first person she approached was Summer, which had taken Summer completely by surprise. She was an artist, after all, not a businesswoman. I mean sure, she practically managed the store, but what did she know about running a business? At least that's what she said to Sharon when they were talking out the pros and cons. It was a moot point, anyway. Summer didn't have the kind of money needed to start a business.

But Sharon did. When her grandparents died, she was bequeathed quite a large inheritance. Some of the money was in a trust, but she had more than enough to lend Summer for the start-up costs. Summer hadn't seen it that way. It had been a battle royal for Sharon to get her best friend to agree to the loan. The very idea of it terrified Summer. What if she didn't succeed? What if she couldn't pay Sharon back? Sharon had gone through hell digging out of the mess Jack created for her financially, and she didn't want to see her have to deal with anything like that again. And most of all, she didn't want the money coming between them. Their friendship was too important. But Sharon prevailed. They worked it all out, with Sharon as an investor, and then they worked together to make Summer's vision become a reality.

The quirky little store was a reflection of its quirky little owner, and it was a hit. Situated only a few miles from both Venice Beach and Santa Monica, it drew in both the unconventional crowd and the well-to-do. Summer paid Sharon back several years ago, but Sharon still took pride in all that she had helped her friend accomplish here.

Grabbing a bottle of her favorite vanilla/jasmine body cream, Sharon glanced back around to see that Summer was still engrossed in conversation with her customer, her light brown curls bouncing on her shoulders with every enthusiastic nod of her head. Rather than stand around waiting, she decided to make her way to Summer's office in the back of the store. She pushed aside the beads that hung in the doorway, in lieu of an actual door, giving a loud sigh at the chaos. As usual, Summer's desk was filled with clutter: folders, papers, coffee mugs, and a bunch of opened boxes. No way could she ever work surrounded by such a mess. In fact, she could already feel the prickles of anxiety at the very idea. She started to move things around to make a spot to set her bag down when an item in one of the boxes caught her eye. Reaching in, she pulled it out, eyes widening with both surprise and curiosity.

"Find anything you like?"

Sharon jumped, nearly dropping the glass object. "Dammit, Summer! "

Summer's wide grin grew even wider. "Gotcha. Either you're losing your cop instincts, or that object holds more than a little interest for you."

"What is it?"

"If I have to tell you, Andy has a real problem."

Sharon flushed. "I know what it is; I just mean why do you have boxes of this stuff?"

"That stuff, as you call it, is luxury personal care products. "

One elegant brow rose skeptically. "Luxury? They're…"

"Glass dildos."

"And again, you have boxes of these, why?"

"I had a distributor come in for a meeting today. She wants me to try selling her line here."

"You're going to sell sex toys? Here? At Lotions and Potions?" Sharon looked so appalled that Summer had to giggle.

"No, I am possibly going to sell luxury personal care items. I told her I would think about it. It's a big and pretty lucrative business right now. Look at them, Sharon, they're works of art."

Sharon looked again at the item in her hand, eyeing it critically. Blown glass with swirls of color, graceful lines. She had to admit, it really did look like a piece of art.

"Much more attractive than the real thing. Am I right?"

Sharon gave a little snort-laugh. "Oh my God, you're right. It is. Though we better not let the guys hear us say that."

"God, no. Men do love their penises, don't they?"

"Mmm…" Sharon hummed affirmatively.

"Almost as much as they love our boobs."

Sharon shook her head with amused affection and another little snort-laugh. She never quite knew what was going to come out of Summer's mouth. In that respect, and in so many more, they were as different as night and day. Oil and water. Chalk and cheese.

Summer was as outgoing and irreverent as Sharon was private and respectful. As unconventional and flighty as Sharon was traditional and responsible. As loud and boisterous, as Sharon was soft-spoken and reserved.

Summer was thrift store boho gauzy tops, flowing skirts, Birkenstocks, and arms covered in bangle bracelets. Sharon was Neiman Marcus pencil skirts, Armani suits, killer heels, and diamond earrings. Summer lifted her arms in worship to the winter solstice while Sharon knelt in reverent prayer at midnight mass. Summer was homeschooling and a childhood spent on a commune. Sharon was private Catholic schools and summers on Nantucket. Summer was Stevie Nicks to Sharon's Grace Kelly.

And yet, they clicked. For 26 years, they had been best friends. From the day that Sharon and Jack moved into their new home in Mar Vista and a bossy little child knocked on their door stating, "I'm five. Do you have any little girls my age I can play with?" With baby Ricky on her hip, Sharon smiled at the little ragamuffin with Popsicle lips and a mop of brown curls and then introduced her to a bashful four-year-old Emily. Within seconds, a harried woman in a tank top and an Indian wrap skirt straight out of the 1970s followed. Since she shared the same wild head of curls with the little moppet now dragging Emily along by the hand, Sharon assumed she was her mother. Indeed, the woman said she was looking for her daughter and, like Sharon, she too had a diapered little boy resting against her shoulder. Sharon introduced herself then invited the gypsy looking woman in for a cup of coffee. It was the beginning of three very important friendships: Sharon and Summer, Emily and Jade, and Ricky and Cody.

Despite their differences in background, personality, and temperament, the two young women easily found common ground. Their kids were the same age, they both loved the arts, and they were both in difficult marriages. Their bond was quick and strong. They spent their days off from work building sandcastles with their kids at the beach, pushing swings at the park, or attending children's reading circles at the library. They babysat for each other, swapped books, and on those rare occasions when they had time for themselves, browsed through art galleries, bookstores, and museums together. Most importantly, since neither had extended family in Los Angeles, they created a much-needed support system for each other. And that was something that became increasingly important, because, within a few years, they were both on their own. Single parents.

Summer came across as flaky, but she was everything Sharon needed in a friend: supportive, warm, honest, and a strong shoulder to cry on-one of a very select group of people whom Sharon allowed to see her vulnerability. They had journeyed together through all the difficulties and heartaches life threw at them, helping each other raise their children, bucking each other up when things seemed bleak, and sharing in each other's joy as they each found success in their professions and new love. From breast-feeding to hot flashes, they had seen each other through it all.

"So, " Summer continued. "Go ahead and take whatever you like. I know you're not a prude. Try one out and let me know what you think."

"I'm good." Sharon placed the item back in the box with a little quirk of her lips. "I've got the real thing now."

"Yeah, well what about these? Could be fun." Summer dangled a pair of handcuffs.

"Again, I've got the real thing."

"Pfff… Those things would hurt. These are love cuffs. Nice and soft. See." Sharon admired the plush cuffs Summer thrust in her face, faux fur with little tiny bows, definitely not standard LAPD gear, but shook her head negatively. "I'm all set." She glanced down at her watch. "Come on, Sum. We really have to get going or we're going to be late."

"Oh, no, we wouldn't want to be late."

Sharon rolled her eyes, ignoring the sarcasm. Fate had surrounded her with smart asses. "No, we wouldn't. So, let's go."

"Okay, okay, don't get your panties in a wad. Just promise me you'll think about it."

Sharon blew out a long-suffering sigh. "Fine, I'll think about it, now let's go."

*****

Sitting in the back corner of the bookstore, Sharon found herself center stage, surrounded by a group of women gushing with excitement over the diamond on her finger, grabbing her hand to look at it and pumping her for all the details of the proposal.

"It's so beautiful, Sharon. " Aggie's eyes went dreamy, her hands in a prayer triangle under her chin, lost in the fairytale of Sharon's proposal. "And how romantic. I can just picture it…A winter wonderland. A romantic sleigh ride through the woods and Andy down on one knee professing his undying love for you-" She broke off, swiftly coming back to reality when everyone burst into laughter. "What?" She defended herself. "I love romance."

"As if we didn't know," Marina scoffed. Whenever it was Aggie's turn to pick their monthly book, it was invariably a romance of some sort.

"Hey, I thought Russians were supposed to have romantic souls." Aggie's protest was made in the soft New Orleans drawl she hadn't lost despite having lived in LA for the past 20 years.

"I had one of those…Four husbands ago." Marina, a ballerina, had defected to the United States in the late seventies and had later opened a ballet studio in LA after retiring from the stage. Sharon met her when she signed Emily up for lessons at her studio after her young daughter had become more serious about studying dance and outgrown her instructor. It was Marina who had seen the talent and drive in Emily and helped her become the principal ballerina she was today. Marina was also cynical and pragmatic and went through men, mostly younger men, the way Andy used to go through younger women.

"Don't listen to her," Sharon said. "You're right, Aggie, Andy couldn't have picked a more romantic way to propose. Hard to believe I found a man whose sense of occasion can actually rival mine. It's certainly a night I will never forget."

"I still can't believe Andy took Gavin to help pick out your ring and not me," Summer sulked. The room went silent, all the women turning to her with wide eyes before erupting in giggles. "What?" She held her hand's open palms up and shrugged in a "what the hell" gesture.

Rachel, a pretty blonde, responded. "Come on, Sum, when it comes to style, there is nobody, other than maybe Roz here, who is more opposite from Sharon than you."

"I'd take exception to that if it weren't 100% true," was Roz's good-natured response. A writer for a comedy sitcom, Roz was notoriously sloppy in her dress, preferring the sweatpants, t-shirts and Converse sneakers she was wearing right now to any other attire. When she was forced to wear something nice, she chose boxy male suits and would never be caught dead in a "girlie" skirt or dress.

"I don't think we're that opposite." Summer's protest drew more peals of laughter.

"Summer…" Rachel lifted her friend's skirt, smirking when she exposed plastic clogs. "You are wearing Crocs. Need I say more?"

"There's nothing wrong with Crocs. They're comfortable." Summer pushed her skirt back over her shoes.

"No offense, I love you to pieces, but they're fugly and Sharon wouldn't be caught dead out in public in them." With her sleek dark blonde bob and stylish clothes, Rachel Garner had far more in common when shopping with Sharon than Summer. Like Andrea, Rachel was a lawyer, now an advisor to Mayor Garcetti. She and Sharon had become friends back when Sharon was promoted to the LAPD's Women's Coordinator position and they had worked together on numerous cases.

"What I don't understand is why you want to get married in the first place. I mean you just got out of a bad marriage, why jump right back in?" The room went silent, this time with tension, not humor. Roz sat back, arms crossed over her chest, seemingly unconcerned by the group's collective disapproval.

"What the hell are you talking about?" It was Summer who quickly jumped to Sharon's defense. "Just out of a bad marriage? She's been done with that ungrateful, immature, disloyal prick for 23 freaking years! Just because she only formally divorced him a couple of years ago doesn't mean-"

"Summer," Sharon tugged on her friend's arm. "It's okay, calm down."

"It's not okay; she has no right to say that. You," she pointed a finger at Roz, "have no idea what she went through. You've known her for what? Four years? You have no right to question her choices. And just because you hate men doesn't mean she has to feel the same."

"Okay, okay, whoa. I didn't mean to start World War III." Roz held her hands up in defeat. "And for the record, I don't hate men. Well, all men anyway. I'm just saying, she doesn't need a man…a husband."

"Roz is right." Sharon agreed, taking a sip of her wine.

"What?" Summer turned to her with confusion.

"She's right. I don't need a man. But I can want one without needing him. And you know what? That makes this the purest relationship I have ever been in, ever. I don't need Andy's money, I don't need his security, I don't need his protection, I don't need him to provide shelter for me, I'm not looking for a father for my children. I am with Andy for one reason only. I love him. It's as easy and as simple as that. I love him and I want to spend the rest of my life with him. And yes, I want the formal commitment of marriage. I know I don't need it, but I want it. And that's my choice." She tapped her fingers on her chest, stressing the point. "I am at a place in my life right now where I can do what I want to do, not what I need to do, and you have no idea how much freedom there is in that for me."

"And we're thrilled for you." Summer's narrowed eyes shot daggers at Roz, causing Sharon to suppress a smile. Summer was about as laid back a person as she knew, however, one thing they did have in common was that you didn't mess with the people they love.

"Yes, we are." Patrice set a gentle hand on Sharon's knee. "Andy is a great guy, and he loves you to the moon and back." As Andy's caregiver while he was recovering from his surgery, Patrice had gotten to know the man and the way he felt about Sharon better than any of them.

Andrea nodded in agreement. "You all know how I feel about marriage, but hell, if I had a guy who looked at me the way Flynn looks at Sharon, who knows?"

Aggie, who had gone off to pilfer through the shelves, returned and flopped down in an oversized chair. She opened the small book she'd been looking for and began reading. "To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable."

"That's C.S Lewis, isn't it? " Sharon recognized the passage from having read a lot of Lewis's work.

Aggie nodded. "From The Four Loves."

"Well, he sums it up rather nicely, doesn't he? " Sharon poured a little more wine in her glass, then sat back. "Loving someone is a risk, no doubt about it, but I will always believe that it is a risk worth taking." She was well aware of how easy it would have been to encase her heart in one of those caskets after Jack, to allow herself to become unreachable. But that just wasn't in her DNA. Barriers, yes, she had certainly erected some of those, but closed off completely? No. She simply had too much love inside her to shut down like that. She knew people often thought she was cold, aloof, unemotional. They never knew it was all a façade, a shield meant to hide the fact that she actually felt things very deeply. She'd had to learn how to contain those emotions, to hide her feelings, but they were there, they were always there. And, had she entombed her heart, she never would have been able to let Rusty in, nor been able to embrace the man who had become the love of her life. Vulnerable? Yes, love made you vulnerable, but the rewards far outweighed any risk.

"I agree, we all need to remain open to love. Now, who's hungry?" Helen, the owner of the bookstore, set to restore order to their opinionated little group. "We'll eat, then dive into the book."

Sharon shot the older woman a grateful look. They might all be friends, but she had never really been comfortable with people dissecting her life.

The food was potluck. Each member of the club took a turn hosting the meeting, but it was always potluck so no one was stuck having to feed the whole group. At the end of each meeting, they drew out of a hat to see if they would be bringing the beverages, an appetizer, or an entrée to the next meeting. Though it wasn't a rule, they often tried to base whatever food they brought on the setting of their book. The only part of the meal they did not draw for was dessert. Mary Agnes Boudreaux McCormack, Aggie, always brought dessert. Twenty years ago, Aggie had moved to Los Angeles after Craig McCormack walked into her bakery in New Orleans and swept the 37-year-old widow off her feet, taking her home with him to California. Aggie opened a pretty little bed and breakfast near Venice Beach and brought with her the French and Creole delicacies of her former home, including the to-die-for beignets she brought to each meeting, regardless of the setting. No one was willing to forgo those beignets.

This month's book was set in Mexico, so there were cheesy nachos with garlic guacamole, sweet potato and black bean taquitos, a creamy taco soup, Mexican chicken and rice, and fish tacos. Sharon had drawn beverages at their last meeting, so, along with a case of seltzer water, she'd brought a few bottles of a Baja Cabernet Sauvignon/Merlot blend along with the makings for Mojitos.

"And these," she drew out two large bottles of champagne. "Because we can't celebrate 10 years without a little bubbly. I still can't believe we've been doing this for 10 years." She poured the champagne and passed the glasses around to the ten incredible women sprawled over the sitting area. Ranging in age from their late forties to early sixties, with most in their fifties like Sharon, black, white, and mixed heritage, native Californians and transplants, gay and straight, single and married, they were a diverse group who had come together to bond over a shared love of books. And somewhere along the way, they had become friends. Friends that had seen each other through infidelity, divorce, infertility, empty nests, cancer, adoptions, menopause, job losses, promotions, and new loves gained and lost.

The book club had come about rather organically not long after Helen and her business partner, Jenny, opened "The Book Nook", a combination bookstore/café a little over 10 years ago. Helen's husband, Christopher, had accepted the position of visiting professor at USC, and the British couple fell in love with the climate and laid back lifestyle of Southern California. So, when a permanent position became available, they decided to leave the gray skies and rain of England behind and settle in the land of sunshine and surfers. At the time, Jenny was a stay at home mom whose marriage had fallen apart after her battle with breast cancer. Divorced, her children in college, and cancer-free, she was ready to embrace a new life when Helen became a patron of the coffeehouse where she was working as a barista. Soon they were discussing a joint venture. A few years later, their bookstore/cafe became reality, and Sharon, Summer, and Rachel became some of their first customers. Recommendations of authors and long chats over coffee regarding the books they read or were interested in reading had Jenny suggesting the idea of starting a book club.

For Sharon, it was perfect timing. Ricky had just gone off to Stanford, and with Emily across the country at NYU, she was reeling from the effects of her empty nest. For 21 years, her life had revolved around her children and their needs, car-pooling, cooking, laundry, helping with homework, getting them to practices, cheering them on at games and recitals, and most recently visiting college campuses in preparation for their futures. And then suddenly they were just…gone. The house was too quiet, too empty, too filled with memories. And, with her children gone, the fact that she did not have a love life only became more pronounced, her bed suddenly emptier, colder to the touch. And it didn't help that she was starting to feel like she was in a rut at the PSB. Melancholy enveloped her in its insidious web, eating away at her, telling her that her best days were now in the past.

Later, she would find that she actually enjoyed the peace and solitude of being on her own, the freedom of not having to organize anyone but herself. But in the beginning, the loneliness was crushing. Both Rachel and Summer commiserated with her because they were going through the same thing. It was Marina who encouraged her to use that time to focus on herself and do some of the things she'd wanted to do but hadn't had time for in the past.

For many years, Sharon had helped out a few nights a month at St. Joseph's soup kitchen, bringing Emily and Ricky along with her, which was how she'd gotten to know Aggie. Now, she began volunteering at the church's domestic violence shelter, counseling the women on their rights, teaching them how to defend themselves, and helping them to find jobs. She coached them through the interview process and helped them select outfits from donated clothes-including her own-that would help them look professional. Eventually, she ended up on the board of directors. She also became the LAPD's liaison with "The Sunshine Kids Foundation" helping kids with cancer, worked with Rachel to raise money for "Emily's List", sold her house and bought the condo, and then she joined the book club.

It was the perfect hobby and helped her to expand her group of friends. Other than Gavin, Summer, and Rachel, she didn't really have any close friends, confidantes. It wasn't that she was anti-social, she had many friendly acquaintances: Marina, Aggie, a few women and men at work. But, the truth was, she had never had the time to cultivate deep friendships. As a single mom, she was usually either working or taking care of her kids. And where most people made friends on the job, her work within the PSB made that impossible. Barriers were essential in her position, and that had not been easy, especially in the beginning. Even though she'd always been a bit reserved, she was not a naturally unfriendly person, so having to close off that side of her had taken time and effort. But she'd become good at it. Maybe too good. Once her walls were built, it was hard to let people back in.

The book club started out small, and though it had not been intentional, they were all women: Helen, Sharon, Summer, Rachel, Jenny, Marina, and Aggie. Roz, Patrice, and Andrea were later additions. Once the only women thing was established, they decided to keep it that way, which pleased Sharon. She was surrounded by men all day long, worked in a profession dominated by men, and she didn't have a problem with that. For the most part, she liked working with men, liked their direct ways, and had always felt that the best teams had a combination of women and men. On the other hand, it was nice to spend time with her women friends and immerse herself in the female perspective. It was also easier to be herself and let her hair down without the male/female dynamic, without feeling like she had to prove that she was tough enough, strong enough, smart enough, the way she did at work, every… single… day. Around these women, she could express her emotions, and frankly, her sexuality, without being embarrassed or viewed as weak.

"To ten years!" Helen raised her glass of champagne.

"To ten years!" The group chorused.

TBC

[inkdrinkershadowsinger]

Thoughts/Background on Chamber of Secrets

There simply cannot be neighborhoods like this, where there are miles upon miles of cookie cutter homes that stretch out into the horizon. Does anyone know if this is a real shot? Or did they multiply the houses like they do to extras in a battle scene?

I never noticed that this photo album is this detailed. There is a little J and L on either side of James and Lily’s photo here. Hagrid is an artist.

It’s on every page? Was this supposed to be something that Hagrid found from Godric’s Hollow? How did he get something so specific? Or is that rumor true that Hagrid owled Lily and James friend’s and Remus, who had been left things like this when there was no one else left to claim them, got it off his bookshelf and sent it to his best friends’ son?

I like how Harry’s room progressively becomes more his own. Look at it in this movie, the walls are bare, everything is relatively tame and plain verses in Order of The Phoenix, when Harry’s room has distinctly more decoration.

Those pink candlesticks are ghastly.

Harry, my darling, you have been getting letters it is merely a well meaning house elf who has stopped them. I wonder what everyone else thought about Harry’s silence? Especially Hermione. Did she think for even a moment that Harry and Ron had decided that they didn’t want to be her friend at all? Ron isn’t much of a writer, and Harry wasn’t responding. I don’t want to know what kind of a mind fuck that must have been to 12 year old Hermione who had just got home from “magic school”, and none of her new “friends” were responding to her letters.

We have heard that theory that James is Harry and Sirius is Ron, etc. But Dudley is Petunia. Dudley and Harry were raised in the same house, closer than cousins because of location alone. But whereas Petunia never got over the resentment that she felt towards Harry in book seven Dudley was more concerned for Harry’s well-being when they were leaving for the safe house then I think Petunia ever was if Lily ever mentioned how hard and dangerous things were getting during the First Wizarding World. Dudley received some characterization and growth where Petunia never bothered.

Harry sounds so sarcastic when he says that.

Dang! Every time Harry leaves his room he has to see a pencil drawing of Dudley’s face? The Dursley’s cruelty knows no bounds.

All of this decoration, and the shelf are missing from the first scene with Harry in this movie.

Harry is just like, “Fuck it all.”

But he’s got manners galore.

At this point, Harry has never seen a house elf. He has no idea what a house elf does. He has no idea why one would be in his bedroom. He has no idea that this even is a house elf? Why is he so calm? This could be a blood thirsty toga wearing creature that they only study in seventh year, and yet, Harry is all but like, “Can I take your coat, sir?”

And now he’s crying, (those could have been lethal gas releasing nerve agents), and now he’s hitting himself (gearing up for attack.) Oh, Harry, number one at defense my arse.

And their champagne flutes are pink? You can’t buy taste.

Those people look so offended like, “You have a cat? How common.”

I know that the fanon is that wizarding children all heard bedtime stories about Harry Potter, but Dobby is proof that other beings also heard about Harry’s triumph over the Dark Lord.

Who painted that picture on Harry’s wardrobe? Dean Thomas, fanon artist. Or does Harry Potter have latent creative talent? Or can you buy these out of the Hogwart’s catalog? Lol

Dobby is like, “Oh, shit, I should not have said that.”

This is where Harry’s Gryffindor really shows because he could just lie to Dobby, but he doesn’t. It’s that Gryffindor honesty.

The man is just like, “Oh, look, cake. Neither of them even looks angry.

Vernon bowered Niall Horan’s hat for this scene.

Harry sleeps with the scrapbook right by his bed. Someone shoot me.

I love that to Ron, Fred, and George that this is a completely normal thing for them to be doing. None of them look nervous about flying a car in a Muggle neighborhood. Destruction of property? Who gives a fuck? They are just like, we have to do what we have to do for our bud. Just a regular drive around.

Hedwig is very annoyed at being called a pigeon.

Ron knows to appreciate the simple things. Tell you mate Happy Birthday, no werid shows of masculinity here.

I love the Burrow. I love the position of the Burrow. I love that they are surrounded by land and a little pond. I love that it is secluded, and that it looks pieced together.

The inside of the Burrow is stunning. You have the Farm House sink. The detailed windows. The hardwood surfaces. The eclectic but perfectly fitting furniture. It would be considered chic to many a Muggle. And that DOOR, that opens up, and then also opens out. The extra space above that little cubbie. Fireplace. Hand, or magic, knitted blankets.

There is a wooden orange cat, a la, Crookshanks on the fireplace there.

Ginny is me.

He says, “Morning Weasleys.” Like they are a clan. He could totally use that tone and call them all to action.

I feel like Mrs. Weasley could sound more disappointed here. I feel like she is kind of annoyed, but also kind of interested in their little stunts as well.

The stainglass windows, the open placement for the dishes, like this house is amazing!

“Dumbledore must know that you’re here.” So, the headmaster is the one who can keep track of the placement of certain students and their whereabouts, or is this simply a case where Mrs. Figg informed Dumbledore that Harry had taken off. Can you imagine that letter? Like, “Super sorry, Professor Dumbledore, but it seems as if Number Four Pivet Drive has been attacked by three red haired boys in a flying car. The red haired youngsters seemed to be on quite friendly terms with Mr. Potter however, as they helped them into the flying vehicle. Just thought that I should mention it.

Sincerely,

               Arabella Figg

 So, does Appartition take a lot out of a witch or wizard? Why don’t Mr. and Mrs. Weasley just apparate all the kids to the Diagon Alley? Is there such a thing as flooing by twos or threes? Because that would also be useful. Are there many fireplaces lining Diagon Alley like the tones that are shown in seven part one in the Ministry? Where to they floo into? Just one of the thousands of questions that need answers, Mrs. Rowling.

There is a gilded head of an elephant behind Harry’s head before Harry examines closely a cabinet that seems to follow a very tight skull aesthetic for maximum creep.

On the top shelf, there seems to be a lamp? A magical one?

More skulls. The hand of glory, that is mentioned in the books. And then a vase full of eye balls. This place is a health hazard. I know the wizarding world lacks mental health professionals, but you’re telling me they don’t have health inspectors?

Harry looks like he has been covered in spiderwebs. When was the last time that Floo was used?

Who are these random people just immediately accosting a twelve year old boy?

They pass a book seller. Knowledge is the root of all power.

The sign in front says from top to bottom: Quality. Value. Ease. Style. Then I think, Variety.

Hermione is internally shrugging because of course her ride or die new friend is covered in ash and has broken glasses. Of course, he is.

The girl behind them as they walk away looks back at them like, “Oh, Harry Potter.”

The fashion and lighting in this movie went from drab and seventeen hundreds to really flamboyant and really stylish with bright colors. I love that the dashes of color really followed them into the other films. Even Prisoner of Azkaban with its more muted color scheme is still vibrant.

The front page that reads: Gilderoy Lockhart gives Wizarding Wolrd Hero Hygiene Tips. Ash free for the cameras, always.

They are literally crammed into the bottom floor of this shop, and Draco Malfoy has an excellent view from above?

Ginny’s got some balls. Love her. All the boys are silent, and she just ain’t taking no shit.

Like Lucius, it is not okay to fondle people’s foreheads, you creepy mother f-er.

Hermione is a bad bitch. Like she knows how dangerous magic can be know, and yet, she doesn’t back down from this grown wizard.

They are all dirty. What happened to scourgify? Or were they scouring grate after grate trying to find Harry, and just didn’t have time after the relief of finding him? Literally, no one else is dirty.

Ginny’s trunk has a Hogwart’s emblem. And we all know the Weasley’s use hand me down items. Whose trunk does she have?

Like Ronald, this is not logical. Dang! I know y’all aint in Ravenclaw, but you are twelve years old. This is basic.

“Your hands all sweaty.” This is no time to be a snob, Harry.

So, did the car fail because they hit Hogwart’s wards? That would seem logical for its sudden failure.

It could also be why the Womping Willow attacked the car so viscously. It may have sensed that this car doesn’t belong to the grounds, and thus, could potentially be a threat. So, it tried to dislodge and pulverize the threat.

Pete, you rat bastard.

This car knows its way around Hogwarts? Or did some of the sentient magic that is in Hogwarts take over the car, and that is why it saved Harry and Ron when they were in the forest with the acromantulas.

To make things more environmentally friendly. The Daily Prophet should have a self updating paper, that changes with each news day. People can still buy the others, if they want to keep them for posterity, but I mean, come on, save the planet.

I feel like this is just a flashback for Snape. James getting away with everything and now Harry.

And Ron, is just so used to getting caught out by Mrs. Weasley, that he just instantly thinks that he is going home.

The look on Snape’s face is so sad here. Will no one ever take this man’s side?

I like this overhead view of the greenhouses. I like the idea too, that there are several levels of greenhouses. The ones that we see in this movie are close to the castle and are set for first and second years, but then the Greenhouses that we see in Half Blood Prince are set away a bit from the castle for the upper years. And some are just for Professor Sprout.

There are little dragon statues on top of the greenhouses. That’s a bit ironic.

Do you think that those large pot like things hanging from the ceiling are

Like, how common is getting petrified, that this would be in second year school book. Also, why were they being grown in the first place if there uses were so rare.

Headcanon that Neville truly developed an interest in Herbology when he fainted that year. He went back to see what work he missed, and Professor Sprout was just straight battling some giant carnivorous plant, and just kicking the fertilizer out of it, and Neville helps her. Then she shows him something else, and something else, and talks about all the things that plants can do, and what they are capable of achieving. “But that’s normally a lesson I reserve for the older years.” But Neville doesn’t want to wait, he wants to do it now. He goes back to the common room with several borrowed books from Professor Sprout, and he is never the same again.

We are legit just going to leave a student lying on the ground. Are we? The wizarding world is really survival of the fittest.

There is a studious Ravenclaw behind them there, reading away.

Neville still has flashbacks to be honest.

When the wizarding world doesn’t have cell phones to yell at or embarrass your children with, you hit them with a howler. Respect.

This DADA room is surrounded with pictures of Lockhart. All the frames along the side of the room are pictures of Lockhart. Bless this man.

This painting of Lockhart is painting a picture of Lockhart.

He bought those Cornish Pixies on the Wizarding Web.

Is that a skeleton of a hippogriff handing above them there?

Even the pixies have had it with Lockhart’s shit books.

The painting Lockhart runs out of the way as well.

Hermione is a baddie.

Hogwarts is so beautiful.

Flint, Wood is tired of your shit.

Hermione and Ron smell trouble, and are like, “I’m going to get me some of that.” Because Gryffindors.

Clap back Hermione.

I love that in the book everyone reacts to what Draco calls Hermione. I wish they would have included that a bit more in the movie.

Ron must have learned that from somewhere, but instead of someone helping him, they just laugh.

This interaction here with Hagrid and Hermione always melts my heart. I like to think that Hagrid is one of the reasons that Hermione worked so hard later in life for the protection and promotion of creature rights. Hagrid being a half giant.

Hagrid is number one. Let’s be real.

Where can I get this level of staged photograph when I go to the Wizarding World in May?

Lockhart is like, “Dang, the fame is already getting to this one. What a shame.”

Harry hears someone threatening to murder people, and of course, he runs right to them.

If Tom Riddle had a giant, most likely extremely hard to kill snake, why didn’t he just try to ride it on out of Hogwarts, take over Diagon and flatten everything? Why didn’t he come back for it during the first wizarding world?

Ron is not down with spiders, and neither am I.

Look, this may be a controversial opinion, but I love Mrs. Norris, and I think that her and Filch are cute and are not to be messed with.

Let’s be real, Filch has been hearing for a solid year from Snape about how Harry Potter is such a little shit. That rage has got to come from somewhere.

Ron, Hermione, and Harry thinking that they were just about to sneak off. Dumbledore is like, “Bitch, please.”

Hermione, Harry, and Ron: “Is Snape taking up for us….actu….oh, wait, of course not.”

I feel so bad for Filch here. That cat is probably the only thing in the whole world that he actually loves.

McGonagall has a large number of zoo like cages in her classroom as well. Her classroom is also very symmetrical, from the two blackboards, to the candles in the front of the room.

Draco and Goyle are reluctantly impressed.

That is the beautiful thing about libraries. There is an unlimited amount of information available at any point in time.

I’m glad that there is at least one adult in the common space for the students. Is that supposed to be Madam Pince? Or a helpful teaching assistant? We all know that the teachers at Hogwarts have an intense work load.

Why is there a spider depicted on the woman’s head in this book?

I just imagine that every time that Harry is in the air that Ron and Hermione experience quite a lot of anxiety.

I can just hear Lucius in the stands saying, “We do not show off for such people.” When the snitch is right beside Draco’s head.

I feel that Lucius grew into being a good father when the threat of his family became a reality. I think before he judged Draco by too harsh means because things were always rather simple in his mind. He thought he was the best, and Draco should be too. But he was humbled, and became a better father because of it.

Dobby strictly uses the word, “Enslavement” here. That word makes what Hermione does with Spew seem less radical.

The table is decorated with the phases of the moon.

Snape rises from the crowd like a ghost.

How on Earth did Lockhart get Snape to agree to do this? He had to have accosted him in the staffroom or during a meeting when Snape couldn’t get away.

“Severus, I really think it would be a great idea. We could really give the kids something exciting, riveting, and imaginative.”  It is only when McGonagall tells him that he could probably get Lockhart on his perfectly pictured arse a few times that Snape considers it, and eventually concedes.

The most iconic Drarry line ever. “Scared, Potter?” “You wish.”

Can conjured things kill people? Or are they just charms? Is the pain temporary, or a real solid thing that can seriously damage?

Is this study hall?

Harry Potter has the crappiest luck ever.

Some of the headmasters and headmistresses seem to be still. I like the idea that all of the professors that get promoted to that level get to be immortalized whether they would like to put apart of them inside of a portrait or not.

I really like the idea of Dumbledore as a scholar and an academic, so I really like that they show all of his scrolls and books.

I feel like Fawkes dying and then being rebirthed among the flames is a really poignant thing for Harry to experience at this stage in his life. This image of the phoenix dying, but still having life probably stuck with Harry and it might have been something that he thought about when he was preparing to walk into the forest in book seven.

Hagrid has got Harry’s back, and I love it. He is a really good friend.

This image of the Black Lake frozen over, and the students being pulled across it’s icy surface is stunning.

Hermione was training to join MI6 before she got her Hogwarts letter, and no one can tell me differently.

Are flying treats that common that Crabbe and Goyle are just like, “Dead on.” It must have been a cute thing that there house elves did for them when they were children, levitating treats or toys in the air for them to grab. Or their parents showing them magic and giving them treats at the same time. Otherwise, how would they have ever thought, “You know what? Excellent and safe idea to eat these random treats.”

Harry literally doesn’t know here which one is Crabbe and which one is Goyle.

The Slytherin common room looks way more lush then the Gryffindor common room. I feel like you can see really clearly into the Black Lake there, and since it is frozen over, the light that you see is light blue instead of green. I mean, look at how big there common room is. It looks like they have a designated study area and everything.

Draco, don’t be the stereotype of rich boys who steal. Just don’t.

Myrtle is not to be fucked with, bro.

A young Tom Riddle for sure got this one year for Christmas at Wool’s orphanage before the war started, and things got so tight that they couldn’t even afford three meals a day. Then, like everything in his past, he transferred these basic Muggles things to something more extraordinary, like him.

Tom Riddle in this movie is a hottie. Like, y’all can’t even fight me because there is no denying his killer beauty….get it?

Okay, so are we thinking that during this flashback that Tom’s soul piece is not only aware that Harry is watching a scene from his life, but is also, acting out the part of himself? He is the director and the lead, so to say.

I like this sequence because it shows more insight into who Tom Riddle is, and where the fear of death started to come from. I wish that Rowling would have made this connection more thoroughly for the viewers of the movies. A single mention of there being too many bombs, or a lot of fighting by Tom here when he is talking with Dumbledore would have provided some more insight into this character.

Ginny knows how to do some damage. I think it would have been easier for them to figure out. Girls can get up boy’s dorms, but boys cannot get up to girl’s dorms. It would have had to have been a Gyrffindor. The common room couldn’t have been completely empty. Hermioen could have fact checked this, and figured out who had wrecked their dorm.

Look at those game plans back there. I just envision, Oliver Wood drawing frantically on the blackboard wild circles that simulate flying motions, but he goes too quickly for everyone else to understand what he’s saying, and thus, the only one who knows the plan is Wood, himself.

Did they show Colin’s friends his frozen body? Or Penelope and Justin’s? Not one person in this school thinks of the potentially traumatizing circumstances that they are putting these kids through.

It is popular fanon that McGonagall and Riddle went to school together. From this perspective, it would be doubly as traumatizing for her to hear that the school could be closing again.

Ron is me. I ain’t messing with no mother flipping spiders.

Ron is no help in this scenario. Absolutley none.

Harry replacing Hermoine’s flowers, and thus subtly telling the viewers how much time has elapsed.

Harry is wickedly smart. He is also very logical which I think attributes a lot to that sarcastic personality that he has.

McGonagall has some Slytherin in her for sure. She went from worried to blasting Lockhart in 2.5.

Lockhart packed up really quickly. It was almost like he….. had….experience…leaving…quickly.

I wonder if Lockhart’s victims ever got any retribution after he wound up in St. Mungos. It’s almost certain that his sales went up when he got admitted to the hospital just because of the public’s sheer curiosity and gossip mongering.

Salazar Slytherin was one slick mother f-er. “I’m going to hide my chamber in the bathroom.”

I can just imagine Riddle not having a lot of time in between OWLS and what not, and taking the easy way out and opening the Chamber whenever he could just to chuck down dead rabbits and chickens. Forays into the Forbidden Forest were many for Tom’s minions back then.

Honestly, Lockhart, Harry probably wouldn’t mind if you took a few of his less than pleasurable memories.

Tom Riddle also has that innate need to be polite even though he’s about to stab someone just like Harry does. Or is this a British thing?

I love how the villains in these movies say, “Potter.”

That does not look like the hole that they came down? It looks like Fawkes took them up another exit.

Why is Dumbledore trusting Hagrid’s release papers from the wizarding world’s worst prisons to a twelve year old? To a twelve year old Ron Weasley at that.

It looks like Dumbledore has a crystal ball by his desk. Trying his hand at divination? Or is that how he keeps track of all the students? I need to know what headmaster powers enable him to do all of these things.

Jason Isaacs is super fine. I can even deal with the wig. In fact, the wig makes it better.

It looks like Dumbledore’s office is located outside of the courtyard which makes the scene in Order of the Phoenix when Fred and George are comforting that boy all the more poignant.

[thotyssey]

On Point With: Adriana Le Glam

This Costa Rican-born classic ballroom dancer grew up to be a classy beauty of New York and New Jersey nightlife. Now after years in the biz, she is finally about to bring her fierce looks and moves to her very first weekly show. Viva Adriana Le Glam!

Thotyssey: Adriana, hello! It's another hot-ass day, how are you holding up?

Adriana Le Glam: I’m doing great right now! I just left my daytime job--what really pays the bills, lol--and now I’m doing some sunbathing at the Hoboken Pier!

Sounds heavenly! Are you a Hoboken native?

No, I’m actually originally from Costa Rica. My parents brought me here very young, but I now live in what people are calling WEHO, aka West Hoboken.

Have you always been a performer of some kind, even before drag?

Yes, I was a professional balllroom dancer. My parents were national champions, so they literally put me to WERK the moment I started walking!

That's so posh! Did you do major competitions?

I did in Costa Rica. But once I moved here, because of the language barrier back then, I sorta stopped dancing. I did become a cheerleader in high school, and continued dancing on the side for fun.

When did you start drag?

I discovered drag thanks to the transgender community, who paved the way for us. As a little 14 year-old, I would go into the AOL chatrooms and read about this magical place called the Village. So I saved up the money my parents would give me for lunch, and one day took the train to Christopher Street all the way from NJ, almost two hours away.

There I found my tribe my people: trans drag queens, and in general the ballroom scene. I first started walking balls, and slowly got into discovering performance drag. Then finally at 18 I debuted at the famous Escuelita, and it was a dream come true because many divas like Carmen Carrera and Jiggly Caliente started there. Carmen was a huge influence on my life in drag. I would attend pageants with her, and she showed me another side to drag: how feminine it could be, and how much hard work it takes.

If you don't mind me asking, how do you gender identify?

I am not trans, but I do advocate for my trans brothers and sisters. I went through a time in my life where I didn’t identify as either boy or girl. I was okay with wearing both male and female clothing. I am just a human who doesn’t care to identify as either, and I’m happily married to my husband for a year now.

Labels never worked for me simply because they put you in a box, and that’s something I’ve been fighting against in the drag community for a long time. I’ve been boxed in as a look queen or dance queen... but when some people see my other acts, things change.

How would you then describe your performing style on stage, when you have time to show a variety of things?

This one is tricky. I describe myself as high energy, committed, witty, and completely unexpected.

Escualita’s closing was such a huge loss for nightlife culture and history, especially for young queer kids of color. Do you think it’s time to recreate an environment like that for today’s scene?

I think our young queer kids are very lucky to have shows like Pose and social media, because they can identify with some of the things they see. I definitely do think the Pier is still a home for a lot of young homeless youth, and that’s where I wanna come in and volunteer to help some of these kids.

I also think that with the exposure of the ballroom scene, some of these legends and people who are successful should hold open functions--free open functions--for people of all ages to attend. This way, we can bring them in and let them have fun, but also take it as an opportunity to teach them about PrEP / HIV and STDs.

We as a community have a lot responsibility, but no one’s willing to do the work; or very few feel bother to help those in need. I’ve partnered up with Viva Glam before, and I’ve raised money for HIV and AIDS. I’ve given my own tips to help out. I’m currently working on a small project with Hudson Pride, and it will be held at The Royal.

How did you develop such an amazing sense of style, both makeup and wardrobe? Like you said, you’re also thought of as a look queen by many!

I honestly have been in the fashion industry for a long time, doing hair and makeup! I mean, I’m no Aquaria, but you definitely pick up a few pointers here and there.

I also think style is a reflection of how you feel inside. Sometimes I feel glamorous, and sometimes I feel edgy. I like to consider my style unpredictable. And something I say at the end of my shows is: you’ll never see me in the same look twice! Unless I’m in a different city, lol!

Fair! So, Jersey drag can be challenging due to limited venues spread across the state. It must be nice to have the Royal, a small but strong new edition to the Jersey City scene. You hosted a monstrous six consecutive months of RuPaul’s Drag Race viewing parties there... how did that go?

Honestly, it was one of the most rewarding and challenging experiences of my life. Not only do you have to push your character to different levels, you also need to learn how to keep a crowd--and through 6 consecutive months, The Royal was packed wall-to-wall every Thursday! 

Sure some can say people just came for the show, but some others came for me. I had a group of people leave back to Brazil that left me the most heartwarming letter I’ve ever received, thanking me for being me and making it so much more entertaining. 

People also knew that they would never get the same show every week, at least not from me. I always had a new trick up my sleeve, or a guest, or a new setup for the night. Trust me, keeping it interesting is hard. But I’m thankful for the staff at The Royal who work hand-in-hand with me. Without them, I wouldn’t have been successful! Thankful for Paul the owner, Maria, Dave and David the bartenders, and the servers who always were on point with food and drinks. I’m the show, but there’s a million pieces to it that keeps it together.

The hardest part was coming up with looks week to week, and with my work schedule it’s hard to make or create wigs... so time management was a huge thing.

Drag Race may be over, but you’re staying on with The Royal! “Thirsty Thursdays,” your new ongoing show there, replaces that Drag Race weekly time slot. What can we expect from the new show?

The new show will vary week to week. We’re playing with the idea of cabaret / impersonations / contests. We’re also involving the community, like Hudson Pride, to do something in August. It’s definitely something new for me--to have an hour to fill for a show--but I usually do trivia and do about three different performances. 

We’re moving it a little later [10pm]; since there’s no Drag Race, people like to come a little later. Also, whoever wins the Tuesday drag competition by Harmonica gets to share the stage with me on Thursday as well.

Oh, that’s fun! 

Then on Sunday July 22nd, you’ll be hosting the Hombres Lounge Sea Tea boat party! Have you ever done maritime drag before?

I’ve never done a show on a boat, so I’m not sure what to expect. But I have a little story planned for it. I like for my performances to have a beginning, middle, and end. So here’s a hint ... she used to a mermaid, till she found Prince Charming!

Have fun with these amazing gigs! Okay, last question: what is your best piece advice for a brand new queen on the scene who wants to make it big?

I think, be consistent and never give up . CREATE YOUR OWN BOX! Drag isn’t just what you see on Drag Race, or what other queens tell you it should be.  Support local queens so you get booked as well. LIVE YOUR BEST LIFE by creating unforgettable moments with people... but keep it professional! 

Thanks, Adriana!

Adriana Le Glam hosts “Thirsty Thursdays” (10pm) at The Royal. Check Thotyssey’s calendar for all her upcoming gigs, and follow Adriana on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter & YouTube.

On Point Archives

[lawrenceseitz22]

Constant Content: The Silver Bullet for Failing Content Marketing Strategy

Posted by SimonPenson

Incredible, isn’t it? Despite all the fanfare and pageantry that has followed content marketing over the last few years, fewer than 6% of marketers confidently claim to be executing content marketing strategies properly.

It’s just one of a handful of eye-popping stats to come out of the State of Content Marketing Survey, a major new survey of senior UK marketers this month as part of a campaign to help create healthy debate around the misunderstood tactic.

With more budget than ever before pouring into the approach (60% of those surveyed said they were opening the purse strings further in 2017) 92% admitted to not knowing exactly how they should execute.

To check out all the results from the survey, click below (opens up in a new tab):

The biggest pain point of all to come out of the State of Content Marketing survey?

"Producing engaging content, consistently."

I had been reading all the results with mild interest until those words stopped me dead in my tracks.

You may think the source of that concern stemmed from the fact that such a thing should be easy to manage, but it goes deeper than that.

Success with content is predicated entirely on your ability to consistently produce content that engages, resonates and adds value to your audience’s lives. And if producing that is the single biggest barrier then we have a problem!

You see, investment in content is a waste of money if you don’t have a well-designed plan to deliver constant content.

It doesn’t matter how brilliant your campaigns are if your audience has no other content to come back to and engage with.

And this is where the constant content plan comes in...

Constant content

The concept is a simple one: no content plan is complete unless it's based around delivering content consistently.

To do this requires a focus on strategy, not just on a few blog posts and the odd bigger campaign.

The best way to explain this is to visualize it in a different way. Below, you’ll see a simple diagram to throw light on my point.

Here we can see how a campaign-led strategy exposes holes in your plan. While we have plenty of activity going on in both our owned and earned channels, the issue is what goes on between large content launches. Where do those people go during those periods of inactivity? How do we keep them engaged when there's no central content hub to pull them into?

This kind of approach is something we see often, especially from larger brands where budgets allow for more creative content campaigns to be run regularly, and here’s why it doesn’t yield positive ROI.

As human beings, we like variety. To keep us hooked, content delivery needs to reflect this. Campaigns need to be designed as part of a whole, becoming a peak content moment rather than the only content moment, pulling new audiences back to the constant content activity going on at the center of brand activity.

You see it in the way magazines are organized, starting with an initial section of often short-form content before you then hit a four-plus-page feature. This is done to ensure we keep turning the pages, experiencing variation as we do so.

This is something I like to call content flow. It’s a great strategic "tool" to help ensure you design your overall strategy the right way.

The approach to strategy

The key is actually very simple. It focuses the mind on the creation of a content framework that enables you to produce lots of high-quality regular content and the ideas that flow from it. I call it the "Constant Content Plan."

The right way to approach the content planning phase is to create a process that supports the building of layers of different content types, like we see below in our second diagram:

In this example, you can see how we intersperse the bigger campaigns with lots of owned content, creating a blog and resources section that gives the new visitor something to explore and come back to. Without it, they simply float back out into the content abyss and onto someone else’s radar.

That consistent delivery — and the audience retention it creates — comes from the smaller content pieces, the glue that binds it together; the strategy in its entirety.

"Smaller" doesn’t mean lower-quality, however, and investing lots of time through the ideation phase for these pieces is critical to success.

Creating smaller ideas

To do this well and create that constant content strategy, a great place to start is by looking at the ideas magazines use. For example, these are the regular content types you often find in the best-crafted titles:

What I've learned Advice piece from a heavy-hitter. Can sometimes be expanded to what I've learned in my 20s, 30s, 40s, etc.

The dual interview Get two people together for an interview. Write an intro as to why they’re there, and then transcribe their chat. Bingo: unique content.

Have you ever/What do you think of? Pose a question and ask ten people for their responses. Good reactive content to a particular event that might pertain to one of our clients.

Cash for questions Get an interviewee/expert and pose them a series of questions gathered from real-life members of the public.

A day in the life What it says on the tin — an in-depth look at someone of interest's working day.

Person vs person debate Start with a question or subject matter, get two people, put it to them, and record the results.

Master xxxxxx in five minutes A short how-to — can be delivered in pictorial or video format.

This style of regular series content lends itself well to online strategy, too. By running these regularly, you create both variety and the critical stickiness required to keep the audience coming back.

Of course, with such variation it also then allows you to create better newsletters, social strategies, and even inbound marketing plans, maximizing that return on investment.

The strategy allows for informative content as well as entertaining pieces. In doing so, it gives your brand the opportunity to build subject trust and authority, as well as capturing key opportunities in the purchase funnel such as micro-moments and pain points.

This combination of informative and entertaining output ensures you're front and center when your customer eventually falls into the purchase funnel.

Some examples

One way of bringing this to life is to look at brands already executing well.

One of the best blog strategies I have seen in some time is the one by Scotts Menswear. One of the key reasons for its quality is the fact it's run by a very experienced print editor.

If we reverse-engineer what they’ve been doing on-page, we can clearly see that much thought has gone into creating variation, entertainment, and usefulness in a single well-rounded strategy.

Take the last ten posts, for instance. Here's what we have and how it flows:

Seven Films We're Looking Forward to in 2017 – Video-based entertainment/lifestyle piece.

Key Pieces for Your January Fitness Drive – Trending content with useful advice.

Style Focus – A great regular piece that jumps on trending "news" to discuss the implications for fashion.

Updated Classics from Puma – A news article on a new trainer release.

Polo Shirts: A Wardrobe Staple – An in-depth guide to a key piece of clothing (part of a series).

Our Guide to Valentine's Day – Lifestyle guide that helps convey brand positioning, tonality, and opinion.

Nail Your Valentine's Day Outfit – Helpful guide to getting it right on a key seasonal event in the audience’s calendar. Clearly, they see Valentine's as a sales peak.

Get Your Overhead Jacket Kicks – Guide to a fashion staple.

5 Brands and Acts Tipped for Greatness – Lifestyle piece tapping into the music/fashion brand positioning.

Our 5 Favorite Trainers Online Right Now – Great list feature to help the consumer buy smarter.

You can clearly see how they're using structured thinking to create a blog of real variety and value. By combining this with a strong big-bang content plan that sucks in new visitors, you can build a hefty retained audience that improves critical metrics such as dwell time, returning visits, engagement, and sales.

Building our own plan

I know what you're thinking. "Sounds great, for a brand in fashion. It’s cool and interesting. But I work in a 'boring' niche and this type of stuff just isn’t possible."

While it could be a little more difficult that doesn’t mean it is impossible by any stretch of the imagination.

To prove the point, let’s look at a fictional example for a company in the medical products sector.

Here’s the deal: A2Z Medical is a company built up in the '60s and '70s. They have a huge B2B footprint but want to bring their marketing strategy into the current decade, in part because they are launching a consumer-facing brand for the first time. The new venture will offer medical kits for the general public and as such requires a proactive, content-led strategy to promote trust, awareness, and engagement alongside the obvious requirement for sales.

Audience research

The first step in building a content strategy is to understand your audience.

We could go into the detail of that all day long, but for the sake of this example we already have detailed data that tells us there are two main groups of people interested in coming to and buying from the site.

I've also written about the process I go through to define personas, and would always recommend this post too for background.

James is an obsessive ailment Googler, worrying over every little thing that he or his family suffers. He’s a detail man and wants to be prepared for all eventualities.

Chloe, on the other hand, has very different needs. She's a mum, works part-time to help pay the bills, and then devotes herself to her family and children.

She's time-poor and takes a practical view on life to make it work. Her purchase behavior is based on distress or urgent need.

Different need states

It is abundantly clear from this very quick overview that each have very different purchase journeys and needs from a content perspective.

We'll look at what this means for our content strategy a little later. Before we dive into that, though, we must also look at our understanding of the market opportunity.

This data-dive helps us to understand what people are looking for now in the space, where they get it from currently, and where the gaps may be.

The data-dive

This work is carried out by one of our content strategists before any creative sessions take place. This ensures we can validate ideas back to what the data tells us.

So, what does that process involve? Let’s look at each stage briefly now:

Long-tail research

Quora/Reddit/forum research

Magazine research

Pub beers!

It's a well-covered subject area, but also a very important one; it often yields ideas that convert fastest to traffic and revenue.

1. Long-tail research

Much has been written (including this piece I penned in 2015) on this subject area, and in much more detail than I aim to cover it here. Right now, let’s focus on some key tools and areas for opportunity.

It's easy to get lost in this process, so the key is to keep it simple. To do this, I stick to a small handful of tools:

SerpStat – Has a useful long-tail tool based on Google Suggest to give you lists of questions by keyword phrase.

Keywordtool.io – A similar tool, but free to use. Slightly more clunky.

Bloomberry – A new tool by the makers of Buzzsumo. Does a great job of finding opportunities from other sources, such as other sites and forums. It also has a nice data visualization view that gives you volume and key competitor info, the latter of which can be helpful for a later stage in the process. Here’s an example of a search for "first aid":

Storybase – A free tool that pulls long-tail phrases from a variety of sources for content ideas and also includes some demographic data. This can be helpful when it comes to matching ideas to personas.

For the sake of this process, we're not looking to build a full long-tail strategy, of course. This is solely about finding content ideas with search volume attached to them.

By downloading from a bunch of sources (such as those above), it's then relatively easy to de-dupe them in Excel and create a master list of ideas to pull into your overall plan.

It can make sense to segment or classify those ideas by persona, too. I do this via simple color coding, as you can see below. This allows you to create a shortlist of ideas that are on-brand and have the required level of opportunity attached.

Working this way makes sure you're thinking hard about serving the needs and pain points of the personas.

To further reinforce this point, it can work very well to include a mini-brainstorm as part of this stage, gathering a few people to talk specifically about the pain points experienced by each persona.

In this session, it's also useful to talk through the various micro-moment opportunities by asking what questions they ask in each of the following scenarios:

I want to go…. I want to do… I want to know… I want to buy…

You should end up with a list of content ideas per persona that covers pain points and interests.

2. Quora/Reddit/forum research

Another great source of information is the world of forums and aggregator sites. As you might expect, this starts with sub-Reddit research.

Within categories like those below lies a wealth of questions, the answers to which form brilliant article inspiration:

If we pop into the /AskDocs/ forum, we see a plethora of medical challenges from people looking for help — perfect real-world examples of everyday ailments that a site like ours could help to answer.

Q: I have a painful stomach when eating pork…?

Q: Will I need less sleep if I’m on a good diet and active?

Q: Swollen lymph nodes and nose bleeds. What could be going on?

The answers to these questions often require much research and professional advice, but by working through them for the less-serious everyday issues you could soon help Chloe out and become a useful ally.

The same is also true of Quora. You can play around with advanced search queries to drill into the juiciest boards by carrying out searches such as:

Another fantastic area worthy of research focus is forums. We use these to ask our peers and topic experts questions, so spending some time understanding what's being asked within your market can be very helpful.

One of the best ways of doing this is to perform a simple advanced Google search as outlined below:

"keyword" + "forum"

For our example, we might type:

The search engine then delivers a list of super-relevant sites designed to answer medical questions and we can easily pick through them to extract ideas for popular content.

And as an extra tip search for your keyword and “vBulletin” – a popular software used for forum sites. This will often surface rarely found sites with some real insight into particularly the older demographic, who are more likely to use traditional forums.

3. Magazine research

Another very important area to explore is magazine research. They contain some of the most refined content strategies in existence; the level of expertise that goes into idea creation and headline writing is without equal.

It makes sense, therefore, to find titles relevant to your niche (in our case, health and medicine) and look for great content opportunities.

You can even do this online, to a degree. If you go to a site like magazines.com, greatmagazines.co.uk, other magazine subscription sites, or even perform a Google image search, you’ll find a myriad of headline ideas simply by looking at covers.

In the example below I've Googled "medical magazines" and found numerous cover lines that would form great digital content. Here’s an example from just one, 4Health Magazine:

4. Pub beers

And last but certainly not least, we have the tried and true "chat-in-a-pub" approach. It might sound like an excuse for a beer, but it’s actually very useful.

If you can find a handful of people aligned to your personas, offer to buy them a few drinks and chat through their experiences and challenges. You’ll be surprised what you find out!

Product range

Of course, it pays to add some level of alignment to the plan by understanding which products offer the best margin or are most important to the business.

This info should come out of your initial onboarding and overall strategy creation process, but it can also be found via Analytics (if set up correctly) by looking for the best-selling products and finding out their trade cost.

The creative process

By this point, you’ll be overflowing with data and ideas for content. The challenge, however, is ensuring that you can add variation to that ideas mix. I call this stage the "Magazine and Hero Process."

Magazine ideas

To create that level of engagement and stickiness, we need ideas that are less practical and more entertaining. Any good content strategy should include a good mix of both informational and entertaining ideas; the first part of our creative brainstorm focuses on concepts that will achieve this balance.

We follow a structure that looks loosely like the below:

Stage one:

We start by asking "human" questions about each of our personas. While we may have completed all the keyword research in the world, it's important to take a real-world view on pain points and so forth.

From here we discuss the purchase funnel stage, ensuring that we have ideas not just for the top of the funnel but all the way through it, backed by a mix of content types to support that variation aim.

That conversation will then be followed by a look at the brand's wider marketing plan and seasonal events to ensure we plan key periods of activity thoroughly.

And the icing on the top is the quick look at our "swipe file," a treasure trove of old ideas we've seen, to see if we can borrow a concept or two for our plan.

Stage two:

The second and final stage of our ideation is a forensic exploration into what magazines can offer. I am a voracious devourer of specialist magazines; it can really pay dividends to look for clever ideas or content series to bring into your plan before the massive validation process begins. This will sort the possible from the impossible.

By following a set way of discussing ideas, you'll leave no stone unturned.

The discussion around the purchase funnel often turns out to be incredibly important: it ensures you look not just for ideas that help with awareness, but also further down the funnel. It's also possible to tie content types in to this to ensure variation between the types of content you produce.

To do this we use the Content Matrix I created specifically for this purpose; you can see it below:

The idea here is that it makes it easier to decide what content types fit with which parts of the funnel best and also the relative size of that content in terms of the man hours required to create it.

Working in this logical fashion will help with overall content mix.

Hero ideas

Once you've worked through that process, it's time to open up bigger ideas. These are important for one very simple reason: they help you find and reach new audiences to pull back into your sensational constant content plan.

We won’t go into detail here as to how to come up with consistently good big-bang ideas, as the point of this post is to look at the more regular content strategy, but if you want to read more about it click here.

For now, it's enough to note that you should also include time to think about campaigns and how they fit into your overall plan.

Pulling it together – process + example

By now, you should be swimming in great ideas of every kind imaginable, every one of which ties back nicely to your personas.

In our example, we've been focusing on Chloe and James. The next job is to lay those ideas out based on what you know can be delivered.

This process is broken into two parts:

The laying out of the content based on ensuring variation and content flow.

Fitting that plan into an operational format that's deliverable and based on available resources and/or budgets.

Getting that to work is little more than trial and error, but the result should be a content calendar that delivers on the promise of a great mix of regular content ideas, entertaining pieces, and helpful content that makes both James and Chloe want to come back to again and again.

Here’s an example of a two-week window to give you an idea of how just a portion of that regular content might play out:

Free downloads

Fancy giving it a go? You can use this free brand-as-publisher download to make the process easier. It contains all the tools and templates you need to ensure your output joins up the dots to maximize engagement and ‘stickiness’ from your regular content and to critically fix your issues with content marketing effectiveness.

And for those of you that want to see the Content Marketing Survey results in full click on the banner above to claim your free results ebook, complete with commentary, or scroll below for the highlights...

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

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[fairchildlingpo1]

Constant Content: The Silver Bullet for Failing Content Marketing Strategy

Posted by SimonPenson

Incredible, isn’t it? Despite all the fanfare and pageantry that has followed content marketing over the last few years, fewer than 6% of marketers confidently claim to be executing content marketing strategies properly.

It’s just one of a handful of eye-popping stats to come out of the State of Content Marketing Survey, a major new survey of senior UK marketers this month as part of a campaign to help create healthy debate around the misunderstood tactic.

With more budget than ever before pouring into the approach (60% of those surveyed said they were opening the purse strings further in 2017) 92% admitted to not knowing exactly how they should execute.

To check out all the results from the survey, click below (opens up in a new tab):

The biggest pain point of all to come out of the State of Content Marketing survey?

"Producing engaging content, consistently."

I had been reading all the results with mild interest until those words stopped me dead in my tracks.

You may think the source of that concern stemmed from the fact that such a thing should be easy to manage, but it goes deeper than that.

Success with content is predicated entirely on your ability to consistently produce content that engages, resonates and adds value to your audience’s lives. And if producing that is the single biggest barrier then we have a problem!

You see, investment in content is a waste of money if you don’t have a well-designed plan to deliver constant content.

It doesn’t matter how brilliant your campaigns are if your audience has no other content to come back to and engage with.

And this is where the constant content plan comes in...

Constant content

The concept is a simple one: no content plan is complete unless it's based around delivering content consistently.

To do this requires a focus on strategy, not just on a few blog posts and the odd bigger campaign.

The best way to explain this is to visualize it in a different way. Below, you’ll see a simple diagram to throw light on my point.

Here we can see how a campaign-led strategy exposes holes in your plan. While we have plenty of activity going on in both our owned and earned channels, the issue is what goes on between large content launches. Where do those people go during those periods of inactivity? How do we keep them engaged when there's no central content hub to pull them into?

This kind of approach is something we see often, especially from larger brands where budgets allow for more creative content campaigns to be run regularly, and here’s why it doesn’t yield positive ROI.

As human beings, we like variety. To keep us hooked, content delivery needs to reflect this. Campaigns need to be designed as part of a whole, becoming a peak content moment rather than the only content moment, pulling new audiences back to the constant content activity going on at the center of brand activity.

You see it in the way magazines are organized, starting with an initial section of often short-form content before you then hit a four-plus-page feature. This is done to ensure we keep turning the pages, experiencing variation as we do so.

This is something I like to call content flow. It’s a great strategic "tool" to help ensure you design your overall strategy the right way.

The approach to strategy

The key is actually very simple. It focuses the mind on the creation of a content framework that enables you to produce lots of high-quality regular content and the ideas that flow from it. I call it the "Constant Content Plan."

The right way to approach the content planning phase is to create a process that supports the building of layers of different content types, like we see below in our second diagram:

In this example, you can see how we intersperse the bigger campaigns with lots of owned content, creating a blog and resources section that gives the new visitor something to explore and come back to. Without it, they simply float back out into the content abyss and onto someone else’s radar.

That consistent delivery — and the audience retention it creates — comes from the smaller content pieces, the glue that binds it together; the strategy in its entirety.

"Smaller" doesn’t mean lower-quality, however, and investing lots of time through the ideation phase for these pieces is critical to success.

Creating smaller ideas

To do this well and create that constant content strategy, a great place to start is by looking at the ideas magazines use. For example, these are the regular content types you often find in the best-crafted titles:

What I've learned Advice piece from a heavy-hitter. Can sometimes be expanded to what I've learned in my 20s, 30s, 40s, etc.

The dual interview Get two people together for an interview. Write an intro as to why they’re there, and then transcribe their chat. Bingo: unique content.

Have you ever/What do you think of? Pose a question and ask ten people for their responses. Good reactive content to a particular event that might pertain to one of our clients.

Cash for questions Get an interviewee/expert and pose them a series of questions gathered from real-life members of the public.

A day in the life What it says on the tin — an in-depth look at someone of interest's working day.

Person vs person debate Start with a question or subject matter, get two people, put it to them, and record the results.

Master xxxxxx in five minutes A short how-to — can be delivered in pictorial or video format.

This style of regular series content lends itself well to online strategy, too. By running these regularly, you create both variety and the critical stickiness required to keep the audience coming back.

Of course, with such variation it also then allows you to create better newsletters, social strategies, and even inbound marketing plans, maximizing that return on investment.

The strategy allows for informative content as well as entertaining pieces. In doing so, it gives your brand the opportunity to build subject trust and authority, as well as capturing key opportunities in the purchase funnel such as micro-moments and pain points.

This combination of informative and entertaining output ensures you're front and center when your customer eventually falls into the purchase funnel.

Some examples

One way of bringing this to life is to look at brands already executing well.

One of the best blog strategies I have seen in some time is the one by Scotts Menswear. One of the key reasons for its quality is the fact it's run by a very experienced print editor.

If we reverse-engineer what they’ve been doing on-page, we can clearly see that much thought has gone into creating variation, entertainment, and usefulness in a single well-rounded strategy.

Take the last ten posts, for instance. Here's what we have and how it flows:

Seven Films We're Looking Forward to in 2017 – Video-based entertainment/lifestyle piece.

Key Pieces for Your January Fitness Drive – Trending content with useful advice.

Style Focus – A great regular piece that jumps on trending "news" to discuss the implications for fashion.

Updated Classics from Puma – A news article on a new trainer release.

Polo Shirts: A Wardrobe Staple – An in-depth guide to a key piece of clothing (part of a series).

Our Guide to Valentine's Day – Lifestyle guide that helps convey brand positioning, tonality, and opinion.

Nail Your Valentine's Day Outfit – Helpful guide to getting it right on a key seasonal event in the audience’s calendar. Clearly, they see Valentine's as a sales peak.

Get Your Overhead Jacket Kicks – Guide to a fashion staple.

5 Brands and Acts Tipped for Greatness – Lifestyle piece tapping into the music/fashion brand positioning.

Our 5 Favorite Trainers Online Right Now – Great list feature to help the consumer buy smarter.

You can clearly see how they're using structured thinking to create a blog of real variety and value. By combining this with a strong big-bang content plan that sucks in new visitors, you can build a hefty retained audience that improves critical metrics such as dwell time, returning visits, engagement, and sales.

Building our own plan

I know what you're thinking. "Sounds great, for a brand in fashion. It’s cool and interesting. But I work in a 'boring' niche and this type of stuff just isn’t possible."

While it could be a little more difficult that doesn’t mean it is impossible by any stretch of the imagination.

To prove the point, let’s look at a fictional example for a company in the medical products sector.

Here’s the deal: A2Z Medical is a company built up in the '60s and '70s. They have a huge B2B footprint but want to bring their marketing strategy into the current decade, in part because they are launching a consumer-facing brand for the first time. The new venture will offer medical kits for the general public and as such requires a proactive, content-led strategy to promote trust, awareness, and engagement alongside the obvious requirement for sales.

Audience research

The first step in building a content strategy is to understand your audience.

We could go into the detail of that all day long, but for the sake of this example we already have detailed data that tells us there are two main groups of people interested in coming to and buying from the site.

I've also written about the process I go through to define personas, and would always recommend this post too for background.

James is an obsessive ailment Googler, worrying over every little thing that he or his family suffers. He’s a detail man and wants to be prepared for all eventualities.

Chloe, on the other hand, has very different needs. She's a mum, works part-time to help pay the bills, and then devotes herself to her family and children.

She's time-poor and takes a practical view on life to make it work. Her purchase behavior is based on distress or urgent need.

Different need states

It is abundantly clear from this very quick overview that each have very different purchase journeys and needs from a content perspective.

We'll look at what this means for our content strategy a little later. Before we dive into that, though, we must also look at our understanding of the market opportunity.

This data-dive helps us to understand what people are looking for now in the space, where they get it from currently, and where the gaps may be.

The data-dive

This work is carried out by one of our content strategists before any creative sessions take place. This ensures we can validate ideas back to what the data tells us.

So, what does that process involve? Let’s look at each stage briefly now:

Long-tail research

Quora/Reddit/forum research

Magazine research

Pub beers!

It's a well-covered subject area, but also a very important one; it often yields ideas that convert fastest to traffic and revenue.

1. Long-tail research

Much has been written (including this piece I penned in 2015) on this subject area, and in much more detail than I aim to cover it here. Right now, let’s focus on some key tools and areas for opportunity.

It's easy to get lost in this process, so the key is to keep it simple. To do this, I stick to a small handful of tools:

SerpStat – Has a useful long-tail tool based on Google Suggest to give you lists of questions by keyword phrase.

Keywordtool.io – A similar tool, but free to use. Slightly more clunky.

Bloomberry – A new tool by the makers of Buzzsumo. Does a great job of finding opportunities from other sources, such as other sites and forums. It also has a nice data visualization view that gives you volume and key competitor info, the latter of which can be helpful for a later stage in the process. Here’s an example of a search for "first aid":

Storybase – A free tool that pulls long-tail phrases from a variety of sources for content ideas and also includes some demographic data. This can be helpful when it comes to matching ideas to personas.

For the sake of this process, we're not looking to build a full long-tail strategy, of course. This is solely about finding content ideas with search volume attached to them.

By downloading from a bunch of sources (such as those above), it's then relatively easy to de-dupe them in Excel and create a master list of ideas to pull into your overall plan.

It can make sense to segment or classify those ideas by persona, too. I do this via simple color coding, as you can see below. This allows you to create a shortlist of ideas that are on-brand and have the required level of opportunity attached.

Working this way makes sure you're thinking hard about serving the needs and pain points of the personas.

To further reinforce this point, it can work very well to include a mini-brainstorm as part of this stage, gathering a few people to talk specifically about the pain points experienced by each persona.

In this session, it's also useful to talk through the various micro-moment opportunities by asking what questions they ask in each of the following scenarios:

I want to go…. I want to do… I want to know… I want to buy…

You should end up with a list of content ideas per persona that covers pain points and interests.

2. Quora/Reddit/forum research

Another great source of information is the world of forums and aggregator sites. As you might expect, this starts with sub-Reddit research.

Within categories like those below lies a wealth of questions, the answers to which form brilliant article inspiration:

If we pop into the /AskDocs/ forum, we see a plethora of medical challenges from people looking for help — perfect real-world examples of everyday ailments that a site like ours could help to answer.

Q: I have a painful stomach when eating pork…?

Q: Will I need less sleep if I’m on a good diet and active?

Q: Swollen lymph nodes and nose bleeds. What could be going on?

The answers to these questions often require much research and professional advice, but by working through them for the less-serious everyday issues you could soon help Chloe out and become a useful ally.

The same is also true of Quora. You can play around with advanced search queries to drill into the juiciest boards by carrying out searches such as:

Another fantastic area worthy of research focus is forums. We use these to ask our peers and topic experts questions, so spending some time understanding what's being asked within your market can be very helpful.

One of the best ways of doing this is to perform a simple advanced Google search as outlined below:

"keyword" + "forum"

For our example, we might type:

The search engine then delivers a list of super-relevant sites designed to answer medical questions and we can easily pick through them to extract ideas for popular content.

And as an extra tip search for your keyword and “vBulletin” – a popular software used for forum sites. This will often surface rarely found sites with some real insight into particularly the older demographic, who are more likely to use traditional forums.

3. Magazine research

Another very important area to explore is magazine research. They contain some of the most refined content strategies in existence; the level of expertise that goes into idea creation and headline writing is without equal.

It makes sense, therefore, to find titles relevant to your niche (in our case, health and medicine) and look for great content opportunities.

You can even do this online, to a degree. If you go to a site like magazines.com, greatmagazines.co.uk, other magazine subscription sites, or even perform a Google image search, you’ll find a myriad of headline ideas simply by looking at covers.

In the example below I've Googled "medical magazines" and found numerous cover lines that would form great digital content. Here’s an example from just one, 4Health Magazine:

4. Pub beers

And last but certainly not least, we have the tried and true "chat-in-a-pub" approach. It might sound like an excuse for a beer, but it’s actually very useful.

If you can find a handful of people aligned to your personas, offer to buy them a few drinks and chat through their experiences and challenges. You’ll be surprised what you find out!

Product range

Of course, it pays to add some level of alignment to the plan by understanding which products offer the best margin or are most important to the business.

This info should come out of your initial onboarding and overall strategy creation process, but it can also be found via Analytics (if set up correctly) by looking for the best-selling products and finding out their trade cost.

The creative process

By this point, you’ll be overflowing with data and ideas for content. The challenge, however, is ensuring that you can add variation to that ideas mix. I call this stage the "Magazine and Hero Process."

Magazine ideas

To create that level of engagement and stickiness, we need ideas that are less practical and more entertaining. Any good content strategy should include a good mix of both informational and entertaining ideas; the first part of our creative brainstorm focuses on concepts that will achieve this balance.

We follow a structure that looks loosely like the below:

Stage one:

We start by asking "human" questions about each of our personas. While we may have completed all the keyword research in the world, it's important to take a real-world view on pain points and so forth.

From here we discuss the purchase funnel stage, ensuring that we have ideas not just for the top of the funnel but all the way through it, backed by a mix of content types to support that variation aim.

That conversation will then be followed by a look at the brand's wider marketing plan and seasonal events to ensure we plan key periods of activity thoroughly.

And the icing on the top is the quick look at our "swipe file," a treasure trove of old ideas we've seen, to see if we can borrow a concept or two for our plan.

Stage two:

The second and final stage of our ideation is a forensic exploration into what magazines can offer. I am a voracious devourer of specialist magazines; it can really pay dividends to look for clever ideas or content series to bring into your plan before the massive validation process begins. This will sort the possible from the impossible.

By following a set way of discussing ideas, you'll leave no stone unturned.

The discussion around the purchase funnel often turns out to be incredibly important: it ensures you look not just for ideas that help with awareness, but also further down the funnel. It's also possible to tie content types in to this to ensure variation between the types of content you produce.

To do this we use the Content Matrix I created specifically for this purpose; you can see it below:

The idea here is that it makes it easier to decide what content types fit with which parts of the funnel best and also the relative size of that content in terms of the man hours required to create it.

Working in this logical fashion will help with overall content mix.

Hero ideas

Once you've worked through that process, it's time to open up bigger ideas. These are important for one very simple reason: they help you find and reach new audiences to pull back into your sensational constant content plan.

We won’t go into detail here as to how to come up with consistently good big-bang ideas, as the point of this post is to look at the more regular content strategy, but if you want to read more about it click here.

For now, it's enough to note that you should also include time to think about campaigns and how they fit into your overall plan.

Pulling it together – process + example

By now, you should be swimming in great ideas of every kind imaginable, every one of which ties back nicely to your personas.

In our example, we've been focusing on Chloe and James. The next job is to lay those..

http://ift.tt/2oBAJAB

[christinesumpmg1]

Constant Content: The Silver Bullet for Failing Content Marketing Strategy

Posted by SimonPenson

Incredible, isn’t it? Despite all the fanfare and pageantry that has followed content marketing over the last few years, fewer than 6% of marketers confidently claim to be executing content marketing strategies properly.

It’s just one of a handful of eye-popping stats to come out of the State of Content Marketing Survey, a major new survey of senior UK marketers this month as part of a campaign to help create healthy debate around the misunderstood tactic.

With more budget than ever before pouring into the approach (60% of those surveyed said they were opening the purse strings further in 2017) 92% admitted to not knowing exactly how they should execute.

To check out all the results from the survey, click below (opens up in a new tab):

The biggest pain point of all to come out of the State of Content Marketing survey?

"Producing engaging content, consistently."

I had been reading all the results with mild interest until those words stopped me dead in my tracks.

You may think the source of that concern stemmed from the fact that such a thing should be easy to manage, but it goes deeper than that.

Success with content is predicated entirely on your ability to consistently produce content that engages, resonates and adds value to your audience’s lives. And if producing that is the single biggest barrier then we have a problem!

You see, investment in content is a waste of money if you don’t have a well-designed plan to deliver constant content.

It doesn’t matter how brilliant your campaigns are if your audience has no other content to come back to and engage with.

And this is where the constant content plan comes in...

Constant content

The concept is a simple one: no content plan is complete unless it's based around delivering content consistently.

To do this requires a focus on strategy, not just on a few blog posts and the odd bigger campaign.

The best way to explain this is to visualize it in a different way. Below, you’ll see a simple diagram to throw light on my point.

Here we can see how a campaign-led strategy exposes holes in your plan. While we have plenty of activity going on in both our owned and earned channels, the issue is what goes on between large content launches. Where do those people go during those periods of inactivity? How do we keep them engaged when there's no central content hub to pull them into?

This kind of approach is something we see often, especially from larger brands where budgets allow for more creative content campaigns to be run regularly, and here’s why it doesn’t yield positive ROI.

As human beings, we like variety. To keep us hooked, content delivery needs to reflect this. Campaigns need to be designed as part of a whole, becoming a peak content moment rather than the only content moment, pulling new audiences back to the constant content activity going on at the center of brand activity.

You see it in the way magazines are organized, starting with an initial section of often short-form content before you then hit a four-plus-page feature. This is done to ensure we keep turning the pages, experiencing variation as we do so.

This is something I like to call content flow. It’s a great strategic "tool" to help ensure you design your overall strategy the right way.

The approach to strategy

The key is actually very simple. It focuses the mind on the creation of a content framework that enables you to produce lots of high-quality regular content and the ideas that flow from it. I call it the "Constant Content Plan."

The right way to approach the content planning phase is to create a process that supports the building of layers of different content types, like we see below in our second diagram:

In this example, you can see how we intersperse the bigger campaigns with lots of owned content, creating a blog and resources section that gives the new visitor something to explore and come back to. Without it, they simply float back out into the content abyss and onto someone else’s radar.

That consistent delivery — and the audience retention it creates — comes from the smaller content pieces, the glue that binds it together; the strategy in its entirety.

"Smaller" doesn’t mean lower-quality, however, and investing lots of time through the ideation phase for these pieces is critical to success.

Creating smaller ideas

To do this well and create that constant content strategy, a great place to start is by looking at the ideas magazines use. For example, these are the regular content types you often find in the best-crafted titles:

What I've learned Advice piece from a heavy-hitter. Can sometimes be expanded to what I've learned in my 20s, 30s, 40s, etc.

The dual interview Get two people together for an interview. Write an intro as to why they’re there, and then transcribe their chat. Bingo: unique content.

Have you ever/What do you think of? Pose a question and ask ten people for their responses. Good reactive content to a particular event that might pertain to one of our clients.

Cash for questions Get an interviewee/expert and pose them a series of questions gathered from real-life members of the public.

A day in the life What it says on the tin — an in-depth look at someone of interest's working day.

Person vs person debate Start with a question or subject matter, get two people, put it to them, and record the results.

Master xxxxxx in five minutes A short how-to — can be delivered in pictorial or video format.

This style of regular series content lends itself well to online strategy, too. By running these regularly, you create both variety and the critical stickiness required to keep the audience coming back.

Of course, with such variation it also then allows you to create better newsletters, social strategies, and even inbound marketing plans, maximizing that return on investment.

The strategy allows for informative content as well as entertaining pieces. In doing so, it gives your brand the opportunity to build subject trust and authority, as well as capturing key opportunities in the purchase funnel such as micro-moments and pain points.

This combination of informative and entertaining output ensures you're front and center when your customer eventually falls into the purchase funnel.

Some examples

One way of bringing this to life is to look at brands already executing well.

One of the best blog strategies I have seen in some time is the one by Scotts Menswear. One of the key reasons for its quality is the fact it's run by a very experienced print editor.

If we reverse-engineer what they’ve been doing on-page, we can clearly see that much thought has gone into creating variation, entertainment, and usefulness in a single well-rounded strategy.

Take the last ten posts, for instance. Here's what we have and how it flows:

Seven Films We're Looking Forward to in 2017 – Video-based entertainment/lifestyle piece.

Key Pieces for Your January Fitness Drive – Trending content with useful advice.

Style Focus – A great regular piece that jumps on trending "news" to discuss the implications for fashion.

Updated Classics from Puma – A news article on a new trainer release.

Polo Shirts: A Wardrobe Staple – An in-depth guide to a key piece of clothing (part of a series).

Our Guide to Valentine's Day – Lifestyle guide that helps convey brand positioning, tonality, and opinion.

Nail Your Valentine's Day Outfit – Helpful guide to getting it right on a key seasonal event in the audience’s calendar. Clearly, they see Valentine's as a sales peak.

Get Your Overhead Jacket Kicks – Guide to a fashion staple.

5 Brands and Acts Tipped for Greatness – Lifestyle piece tapping into the music/fashion brand positioning.

Our 5 Favorite Trainers Online Right Now – Great list feature to help the consumer buy smarter.

You can clearly see how they're using structured thinking to create a blog of real variety and value. By combining this with a strong big-bang content plan that sucks in new visitors, you can build a hefty retained audience that improves critical metrics such as dwell time, returning visits, engagement, and sales.

Building our own plan

I know what you're thinking. "Sounds great, for a brand in fashion. It’s cool and interesting. But I work in a 'boring' niche and this type of stuff just isn’t possible."

While it could be a little more difficult that doesn’t mean it is impossible by any stretch of the imagination.

To prove the point, let’s look at a fictional example for a company in the medical products sector.

Here’s the deal: A2Z Medical is a company built up in the '60s and '70s. They have a huge B2B footprint but want to bring their marketing strategy into the current decade, in part because they are launching a consumer-facing brand for the first time. The new venture will offer medical kits for the general public and as such requires a proactive, content-led strategy to promote trust, awareness, and engagement alongside the obvious requirement for sales.

Audience research

The first step in building a content strategy is to understand your audience.

We could go into the detail of that all day long, but for the sake of this example we already have detailed data that tells us there are two main groups of people interested in coming to and buying from the site.

I've also written about the process I go through to define personas, and would always recommend this post too for background.

James is an obsessive ailment Googler, worrying over every little thing that he or his family suffers. He’s a detail man and wants to be prepared for all eventualities.

Chloe, on the other hand, has very different needs. She's a mum, works part-time to help pay the bills, and then devotes herself to her family and children.

She's time-poor and takes a practical view on life to make it work. Her purchase behavior is based on distress or urgent need.

Different need states

It is abundantly clear from this very quick overview that each have very different purchase journeys and needs from a content perspective.

We'll look at what this means for our content strategy a little later. Before we dive into that, though, we must also look at our understanding of the market opportunity.

This data-dive helps us to understand what people are looking for now in the space, where they get it from currently, and where the gaps may be.

The data-dive

This work is carried out by one of our content strategists before any creative sessions take place. This ensures we can validate ideas back to what the data tells us.

So, what does that process involve? Let’s look at each stage briefly now:

Long-tail research

Quora/Reddit/forum research

Magazine research

Pub beers!

It's a well-covered subject area, but also a very important one; it often yields ideas that convert fastest to traffic and revenue.

1. Long-tail research

Much has been written (including this piece I penned in 2015) on this subject area, and in much more detail than I aim to cover it here. Right now, let’s focus on some key tools and areas for opportunity.

It's easy to get lost in this process, so the key is to keep it simple. To do this, I stick to a small handful of tools:

SerpStat – Has a useful long-tail tool based on Google Suggest to give you lists of questions by keyword phrase.

Keywordtool.io – A similar tool, but free to use. Slightly more clunky.

Bloomberry – A new tool by the makers of Buzzsumo. Does a great job of finding opportunities from other sources, such as other sites and forums. It also has a nice data visualization view that gives you volume and key competitor info, the latter of which can be helpful for a later stage in the process. Here’s an example of a search for "first aid":

Storybase – A free tool that pulls long-tail phrases from a variety of sources for content ideas and also includes some demographic data. This can be helpful when it comes to matching ideas to personas.

For the sake of this process, we're not looking to build a full long-tail strategy, of course. This is solely about finding content ideas with search volume attached to them.

By downloading from a bunch of sources (such as those above), it's then relatively easy to de-dupe them in Excel and create a master list of ideas to pull into your overall plan.

It can make sense to segment or classify those ideas by persona, too. I do this via simple color coding, as you can see below. This allows you to create a shortlist of ideas that are on-brand and have the required level of opportunity attached.

Working this way makes sure you're thinking hard about serving the needs and pain points of the personas.

To further reinforce this point, it can work very well to include a mini-brainstorm as part of this stage, gathering a few people to talk specifically about the pain points experienced by each persona.

In this session, it's also useful to talk through the various micro-moment opportunities by asking what questions they ask in each of the following scenarios:

I want to go…. I want to do… I want to know… I want to buy…

You should end up with a list of content ideas per persona that covers pain points and interests.

2. Quora/Reddit/forum research

Another great source of information is the world of forums and aggregator sites. As you might expect, this starts with sub-Reddit research.

Within categories like those below lies a wealth of questions, the answers to which form brilliant article inspiration:

If we pop into the /AskDocs/ forum, we see a plethora of medical challenges from people looking for help — perfect real-world examples of everyday ailments that a site like ours could help to answer.

Q: I have a painful stomach when eating pork…?

Q: Will I need less sleep if I’m on a good diet and active?

Q: Swollen lymph nodes and nose bleeds. What could be going on?

The answers to these questions often require much research and professional advice, but by working through them for the less-serious everyday issues you could soon help Chloe out and become a useful ally.

The same is also true of Quora. You can play around with advanced search queries to drill into the juiciest boards by carrying out searches such as:

Another fantastic area worthy of research focus is forums. We use these to ask our peers and topic experts questions, so spending some time understanding what's being asked within your market can be very helpful.

One of the best ways of doing this is to perform a simple advanced Google search as outlined below:

"keyword" + "forum"

For our example, we might type:

The search engine then delivers a list of super-relevant sites designed to answer medical questions and we can easily pick through them to extract ideas for popular content.

And as an extra tip search for your keyword and “vBulletin” – a popular software used for forum sites. This will often surface rarely found sites with some real insight into particularly the older demographic, who are more likely to use traditional forums.

3. Magazine research

Another very important area to explore is magazine research. They contain some of the most refined content strategies in existence; the level of expertise that goes into idea creation and headline writing is without equal.

It makes sense, therefore, to find titles relevant to your niche (in our case, health and medicine) and look for great content opportunities.

You can even do this online, to a degree. If you go to a site like magazines.com, greatmagazines.co.uk, other magazine subscription sites, or even perform a Google image search, you’ll find a myriad of headline ideas simply by looking at covers.

In the example below I've Googled "medical magazines" and found numerous cover lines that would form great digital content. Here’s an example from just one, 4Health Magazine:

4. Pub beers

And last but certainly not least, we have the tried and true "chat-in-a-pub" approach. It might sound like an excuse for a beer, but it’s actually very useful.

If you can find a handful of people aligned to your personas, offer to buy them a few drinks and chat through their experiences and challenges. You’ll be surprised what you find out!

Product range

Of course, it pays to add some level of alignment to the plan by understanding which products offer the best margin or are most important to the business.

This info should come out of your initial onboarding and overall strategy creation process, but it can also be found via Analytics (if set up correctly) by looking for the best-selling products and finding out their trade cost.

The creative process

By this point, you’ll be overflowing with data and ideas for content. The challenge, however, is ensuring that you can add variation to that ideas mix. I call this stage the "Magazine and Hero Process."

Magazine ideas

To create that level of engagement and stickiness, we need ideas that are less practical and more entertaining. Any good content strategy should include a good mix of both informational and entertaining ideas; the first part of our creative brainstorm focuses on concepts that will achieve this balance.

We follow a structure that looks loosely like the below:

Stage one:

We start by asking "human" questions about each of our personas. While we may have completed all the keyword research in the world, it's important to take a real-world view on pain points and so forth.

From here we discuss the purchase funnel stage, ensuring that we have ideas not just for the top of the funnel but all the way through it, backed by a mix of content types to support that variation aim.

That conversation will then be followed by a look at the brand's wider marketing plan and seasonal events to ensure we plan key periods of activity thoroughly.

And the icing on the top is the quick look at our "swipe file," a treasure trove of old ideas we've seen, to see if we can borrow a concept or two for our plan.

Stage two:

The second and final stage of our ideation is a forensic exploration into what magazines can offer. I am a voracious devourer of specialist magazines; it can really pay dividends to look for clever ideas or content series to bring into your plan before the massive validation process begins. This will sort the possible from the impossible.

By following a set way of discussing ideas, you'll leave no stone unturned.

The discussion around the purchase funnel often turns out to be incredibly important: it ensures you look not just for ideas that help with awareness, but also further down the funnel. It's also possible to tie content types in to this to ensure variation between the types of content you produce.

To do this we use the Content Matrix I created specifically for this purpose; you can see it below:

The idea here is that it makes it easier to decide what content types fit with which parts of the funnel best and also the relative size of that content in terms of the man hours required to create it.

Working in this logical fashion will help with overall content mix.

Hero ideas

Once you've worked through that process, it's time to open up bigger ideas. These are important for one very simple reason: they help you find and reach new audiences to pull back into your sensational constant content plan.

We won’t go into detail here as to how to come up with consistently good big-bang ideas, as the point of this post is to look at the more regular content strategy, but if you want to read more about it click here.

For now, it's enough to note that you should also include time to think about campaigns and how they fit into your overall plan.

Pulling it together – process + example

By now, you should be swimming in great ideas of every kind imaginable, every one of which ties back nicely to your personas.

In our example, we've been focusing on Chloe and James. The next job is to lay those..

[mariasolemarionqi]

Constant Content: The Silver Bullet for Failing Content Marketing Strategy

Posted by SimonPenson

Incredible, isn’t it? Despite all the fanfare and pageantry that has followed content marketing over the last few years, fewer than 6% of marketers confidently claim to be executing content marketing strategies properly.

It’s just one of a handful of eye-popping stats to come out of the State of Content Marketing Survey, a major new survey of senior UK marketers this month as part of a campaign to help create healthy debate around the misunderstood tactic.

With more budget than ever before pouring into the approach (60% of those surveyed said they were opening the purse strings further in 2017) 92% admitted to not knowing exactly how they should execute.

To check out all the results from the survey, click below (opens up in a new tab):

The biggest pain point of all to come out of the State of Content Marketing survey?

"Producing engaging content, consistently."

I had been reading all the results with mild interest until those words stopped me dead in my tracks.

You may think the source of that concern stemmed from the fact that such a thing should be easy to manage, but it goes deeper than that.

Success with content is predicated entirely on your ability to consistently produce content that engages, resonates and adds value to your audience’s lives. And if producing that is the single biggest barrier then we have a problem!

You see, investment in content is a waste of money if you don’t have a well-designed plan to deliver constant content.

It doesn’t matter how brilliant your campaigns are if your audience has no other content to come back to and engage with.

And this is where the constant content plan comes in...

Constant content

The concept is a simple one: no content plan is complete unless it's based around delivering content consistently.

To do this requires a focus on strategy, not just on a few blog posts and the odd bigger campaign.

The best way to explain this is to visualize it in a different way. Below, you’ll see a simple diagram to throw light on my point.

Here we can see how a campaign-led strategy exposes holes in your plan. While we have plenty of activity going on in both our owned and earned channels, the issue is what goes on between large content launches. Where do those people go during those periods of inactivity? How do we keep them engaged when there's no central content hub to pull them into?

This kind of approach is something we see often, especially from larger brands where budgets allow for more creative content campaigns to be run regularly, and here’s why it doesn’t yield positive ROI.

As human beings, we like variety. To keep us hooked, content delivery needs to reflect this. Campaigns need to be designed as part of a whole, becoming a peak content moment rather than the only content moment, pulling new audiences back to the constant content activity going on at the center of brand activity.

You see it in the way magazines are organized, starting with an initial section of often short-form content before you then hit a four-plus-page feature. This is done to ensure we keep turning the pages, experiencing variation as we do so.

This is something I like to call content flow. It’s a great strategic "tool" to help ensure you design your overall strategy the right way.

The approach to strategy

The key is actually very simple. It focuses the mind on the creation of a content framework that enables you to produce lots of high-quality regular content and the ideas that flow from it. I call it the "Constant Content Plan."

The right way to approach the content planning phase is to create a process that supports the building of layers of different content types, like we see below in our second diagram:

In this example, you can see how we intersperse the bigger campaigns with lots of owned content, creating a blog and resources section that gives the new visitor something to explore and come back to. Without it, they simply float back out into the content abyss and onto someone else’s radar.

That consistent delivery — and the audience retention it creates — comes from the smaller content pieces, the glue that binds it together; the strategy in its entirety.

"Smaller" doesn’t mean lower-quality, however, and investing lots of time through the ideation phase for these pieces is critical to success.

Creating smaller ideas

To do this well and create that constant content strategy, a great place to start is by looking at the ideas magazines use. For example, these are the regular content types you often find in the best-crafted titles:

What I've learned Advice piece from a heavy-hitter. Can sometimes be expanded to what I've learned in my 20s, 30s, 40s, etc.

The dual interview Get two people together for an interview. Write an intro as to why they’re there, and then transcribe their chat. Bingo: unique content.

Have you ever/What do you think of? Pose a question and ask ten people for their responses. Good reactive content to a particular event that might pertain to one of our clients.

Cash for questions Get an interviewee/expert and pose them a series of questions gathered from real-life members of the public.

A day in the life What it says on the tin — an in-depth look at someone of interest's working day.

Person vs person debate Start with a question or subject matter, get two people, put it to them, and record the results.

Master xxxxxx in five minutes A short how-to — can be delivered in pictorial or video format.

This style of regular series content lends itself well to online strategy, too. By running these regularly, you create both variety and the critical stickiness required to keep the audience coming back.

Of course, with such variation it also then allows you to create better newsletters, social strategies, and even inbound marketing plans, maximizing that return on investment.

The strategy allows for informative content as well as entertaining pieces. In doing so, it gives your brand the opportunity to build subject trust and authority, as well as capturing key opportunities in the purchase funnel such as micro-moments and pain points.

This combination of informative and entertaining output ensures you're front and center when your customer eventually falls into the purchase funnel.

Some examples

One way of bringing this to life is to look at brands already executing well.

One of the best blog strategies I have seen in some time is the one by Scotts Menswear. One of the key reasons for its quality is the fact it's run by a very experienced print editor.

If we reverse-engineer what they’ve been doing on-page, we can clearly see that much thought has gone into creating variation, entertainment, and usefulness in a single well-rounded strategy.

Take the last ten posts, for instance. Here's what we have and how it flows:

Seven Films We're Looking Forward to in 2017 – Video-based entertainment/lifestyle piece.

Key Pieces for Your January Fitness Drive – Trending content with useful advice.

Style Focus – A great regular piece that jumps on trending "news" to discuss the implications for fashion.

Updated Classics from Puma – A news article on a new trainer release.

Polo Shirts: A Wardrobe Staple – An in-depth guide to a key piece of clothing (part of a series).

Our Guide to Valentine's Day – Lifestyle guide that helps convey brand positioning, tonality, and opinion.

Nail Your Valentine's Day Outfit – Helpful guide to getting it right on a key seasonal event in the audience’s calendar. Clearly, they see Valentine's as a sales peak.

Get Your Overhead Jacket Kicks – Guide to a fashion staple.

5 Brands and Acts Tipped for Greatness – Lifestyle piece tapping into the music/fashion brand positioning.

Our 5 Favorite Trainers Online Right Now – Great list feature to help the consumer buy smarter.

You can clearly see how they're using structured thinking to create a blog of real variety and value. By combining this with a strong big-bang content plan that sucks in new visitors, you can build a hefty retained audience that improves critical metrics such as dwell time, returning visits, engagement, and sales.

Building our own plan

I know what you're thinking. "Sounds great, for a brand in fashion. It’s cool and interesting. But I work in a 'boring' niche and this type of stuff just isn’t possible."

While it could be a little more difficult that doesn’t mean it is impossible by any stretch of the imagination.

To prove the point, let’s look at a fictional example for a company in the medical products sector.

Here’s the deal: A2Z Medical is a company built up in the '60s and '70s. They have a huge B2B footprint but want to bring their marketing strategy into the current decade, in part because they are launching a consumer-facing brand for the first time. The new venture will offer medical kits for the general public and as such requires a proactive, content-led strategy to promote trust, awareness, and engagement alongside the obvious requirement for sales.

Audience research

The first step in building a content strategy is to understand your audience.

We could go into the detail of that all day long, but for the sake of this example we already have detailed data that tells us there are two main groups of people interested in coming to and buying from the site.

I've also written about the process I go through to define personas, and would always recommend this post too for background.

James is an obsessive ailment Googler, worrying over every little thing that he or his family suffers. He’s a detail man and wants to be prepared for all eventualities.

Chloe, on the other hand, has very different needs. She's a mum, works part-time to help pay the bills, and then devotes herself to her family and children.

She's time-poor and takes a practical view on life to make it work. Her purchase behavior is based on distress or urgent need.

Different need states

It is abundantly clear from this very quick overview that each have very different purchase journeys and needs from a content perspective.

We'll look at what this means for our content strategy a little later. Before we dive into that, though, we must also look at our understanding of the market opportunity.

This data-dive helps us to understand what people are looking for now in the space, where they get it from currently, and where the gaps may be.

The data-dive

This work is carried out by one of our content strategists before any creative sessions take place. This ensures we can validate ideas back to what the data tells us.

So, what does that process involve? Let’s look at each stage briefly now:

Long-tail research

Quora/Reddit/forum research

Magazine research

Pub beers!

It's a well-covered subject area, but also a very important one; it often yields ideas that convert fastest to traffic and revenue.

1. Long-tail research

Much has been written (including this piece I penned in 2015) on this subject area, and in much more detail than I aim to cover it here. Right now, let’s focus on some key tools and areas for opportunity.

It's easy to get lost in this process, so the key is to keep it simple. To do this, I stick to a small handful of tools:

SerpStat – Has a useful long-tail tool based on Google Suggest to give you lists of questions by keyword phrase.

Keywordtool.io – A similar tool, but free to use. Slightly more clunky.

Bloomberry – A new tool by the makers of Buzzsumo. Does a great job of finding opportunities from other sources, such as other sites and forums. It also has a nice data visualization view that gives you volume and key competitor info, the latter of which can be helpful for a later stage in the process. Here’s an example of a search for "first aid":

Storybase – A free tool that pulls long-tail phrases from a variety of sources for content ideas and also includes some demographic data. This can be helpful when it comes to matching ideas to personas.

For the sake of this process, we're not looking to build a full long-tail strategy, of course. This is solely about finding content ideas with search volume attached to them.

By downloading from a bunch of sources (such as those above), it's then relatively easy to de-dupe them in Excel and create a master list of ideas to pull into your overall plan.

It can make sense to segment or classify those ideas by persona, too. I do this via simple color coding, as you can see below. This allows you to create a shortlist of ideas that are on-brand and have the required level of opportunity attached.

Working this way makes sure you're thinking hard about serving the needs and pain points of the personas.

To further reinforce this point, it can work very well to include a mini-brainstorm as part of this stage, gathering a few people to talk specifically about the pain points experienced by each persona.

In this session, it's also useful to talk through the various micro-moment opportunities by asking what questions they ask in each of the following scenarios:

I want to go…. I want to do… I want to know… I want to buy…

You should end up with a list of content ideas per persona that covers pain points and interests.

2. Quora/Reddit/forum research

Another great source of information is the world of forums and aggregator sites. As you might expect, this starts with sub-Reddit research.

Within categories like those below lies a wealth of questions, the answers to which form brilliant article inspiration:

If we pop into the /AskDocs/ forum, we see a plethora of medical challenges from people looking for help — perfect real-world examples of everyday ailments that a site like ours could help to answer.

Q: I have a painful stomach when eating pork…?

Q: Will I need less sleep if I’m on a good diet and active?

Q: Swollen lymph nodes and nose bleeds. What could be going on?

The answers to these questions often require much research and professional advice, but by working through them for the less-serious everyday issues you could soon help Chloe out and become a useful ally.

The same is also true of Quora. You can play around with advanced search queries to drill into the juiciest boards by carrying out searches such as:

Another fantastic area worthy of research focus is forums. We use these to ask our peers and topic experts questions, so spending some time understanding what's being asked within your market can be very helpful.

One of the best ways of doing this is to perform a simple advanced Google search as outlined below:

"keyword" + "forum"

For our example, we might type:

The search engine then delivers a list of super-relevant sites designed to answer medical questions and we can easily pick through them to extract ideas for popular content.

And as an extra tip search for your keyword and “vBulletin” – a popular software used for forum sites. This will often surface rarely found sites with some real insight into particularly the older demographic, who are more likely to use traditional forums.

3. Magazine research

Another very important area to explore is magazine research. They contain some of the most refined content strategies in existence; the level of expertise that goes into idea creation and headline writing is without equal.

It makes sense, therefore, to find titles relevant to your niche (in our case, health and medicine) and look for great content opportunities.

You can even do this online, to a degree. If you go to a site like magazines.com, greatmagazines.co.uk, other magazine subscription sites, or even perform a Google image search, you’ll find a myriad of headline ideas simply by looking at covers.

In the example below I've Googled "medical magazines" and found numerous cover lines that would form great digital content. Here’s an example from just one, 4Health Magazine:

4. Pub beers

And last but certainly not least, we have the tried and true "chat-in-a-pub" approach. It might sound like an excuse for a beer, but it’s actually very useful.

If you can find a handful of people aligned to your personas, offer to buy them a few drinks and chat through their experiences and challenges. You’ll be surprised what you find out!

Product range

Of course, it pays to add some level of alignment to the plan by understanding which products offer the best margin or are most important to the business.

This info should come out of your initial onboarding and overall strategy creation process, but it can also be found via Analytics (if set up correctly) by looking for the best-selling products and finding out their trade cost.

The creative process

By this point, you’ll be overflowing with data and ideas for content. The challenge, however, is ensuring that you can add variation to that ideas mix. I call this stage the "Magazine and Hero Process."

Magazine ideas

To create that level of engagement and stickiness, we need ideas that are less practical and more entertaining. Any good content strategy should include a good mix of both informational and entertaining ideas; the first part of our creative brainstorm focuses on concepts that will achieve this balance.

We follow a structure that looks loosely like the below:

Stage one:

We start by asking "human" questions about each of our personas. While we may have completed all the keyword research in the world, it's important to take a real-world view on pain points and so forth.

From here we discuss the purchase funnel stage, ensuring that we have ideas not just for the top of the funnel but all the way through it, backed by a mix of content types to support that variation aim.

That conversation will then be followed by a look at the brand's wider marketing plan and seasonal events to ensure we plan key periods of activity thoroughly.

And the icing on the top is the quick look at our "swipe file," a treasure trove of old ideas we've seen, to see if we can borrow a concept or two for our plan.

Stage two:

The second and final stage of our ideation is a forensic exploration into what magazines can offer. I am a voracious devourer of specialist magazines; it can really pay dividends to look for clever ideas or content series to bring into your plan before the massive validation process begins. This will sort the possible from the impossible.

By following a set way of discussing ideas, you'll leave no stone unturned.

The discussion around the purchase funnel often turns out to be incredibly important: it ensures you look not just for ideas that help with awareness, but also further down the funnel. It's also possible to tie content types in to this to ensure variation between the types of content you produce.

To do this we use the Content Matrix I created specifically for this purpose; you can see it below:

The idea here is that it makes it easier to decide what content types fit with which parts of the funnel best and also the relative size of that content in terms of the man hours required to create it.

Working in this logical fashion will help with overall content mix.

Hero ideas

Once you've worked through that process, it's time to open up bigger ideas. These are important for one very simple reason: they help you find and reach new audiences to pull back into your sensational constant content plan.

We won’t go into detail here as to how to come up with consistently good big-bang ideas, as the point of this post is to look at the more regular content strategy, but if you want to read more about it click here.

For now, it's enough to note that you should also include time to think about campaigns and how they fit into your overall plan.

Pulling it together – process + example

By now, you should be swimming in great ideas of every kind imaginable, every one of which ties back nicely to your personas.

In our example, we've been focusing on Chloe and James. The next job is to lay those..

http://ift.tt/2oBAJAB

[dainiaolivahm]

Constant Content: The Silver Bullet for Failing Content Marketing Strategy

Posted by SimonPenson

Incredible, isn’t it? Despite all the fanfare and pageantry that has followed content marketing over the last few years, fewer than 6% of marketers confidently claim to be executing content marketing strategies properly.

It’s just one of a handful of eye-popping stats to come out of the State of Content Marketing Survey, a major new survey of senior UK marketers this month as part of a campaign to help create healthy debate around the misunderstood tactic.

With more budget than ever before pouring into the approach (60% of those surveyed said they were opening the purse strings further in 2017) 92% admitted to not knowing exactly how they should execute.

To check out all the results from the survey, click below (opens up in a new tab):

The biggest pain point of all to come out of the State of Content Marketing survey?

"Producing engaging content, consistently."

I had been reading all the results with mild interest until those words stopped me dead in my tracks.

You may think the source of that concern stemmed from the fact that such a thing should be easy to manage, but it goes deeper than that.

Success with content is predicated entirely on your ability to consistently produce content that engages, resonates and adds value to your audience’s lives. And if producing that is the single biggest barrier then we have a problem!

You see, investment in content is a waste of money if you don’t have a well-designed plan to deliver constant content.

It doesn’t matter how brilliant your campaigns are if your audience has no other content to come back to and engage with.

And this is where the constant content plan comes in...

Constant content

The concept is a simple one: no content plan is complete unless it's based around delivering content consistently.

To do this requires a focus on strategy, not just on a few blog posts and the odd bigger campaign.

The best way to explain this is to visualize it in a different way. Below, you’ll see a simple diagram to throw light on my point.

Here we can see how a campaign-led strategy exposes holes in your plan. While we have plenty of activity going on in both our owned and earned channels, the issue is what goes on between large content launches. Where do those people go during those periods of inactivity? How do we keep them engaged when there's no central content hub to pull them into?

This kind of approach is something we see often, especially from larger brands where budgets allow for more creative content campaigns to be run regularly, and here’s why it doesn’t yield positive ROI.

As human beings, we like variety. To keep us hooked, content delivery needs to reflect this. Campaigns need to be designed as part of a whole, becoming a peak content moment rather than the only content moment, pulling new audiences back to the constant content activity going on at the center of brand activity.

You see it in the way magazines are organized, starting with an initial section of often short-form content before you then hit a four-plus-page feature. This is done to ensure we keep turning the pages, experiencing variation as we do so.

This is something I like to call content flow. It’s a great strategic "tool" to help ensure you design your overall strategy the right way.

The approach to strategy

The key is actually very simple. It focuses the mind on the creation of a content framework that enables you to produce lots of high-quality regular content and the ideas that flow from it. I call it the "Constant Content Plan."

The right way to approach the content planning phase is to create a process that supports the building of layers of different content types, like we see below in our second diagram:

In this example, you can see how we intersperse the bigger campaigns with lots of owned content, creating a blog and resources section that gives the new visitor something to explore and come back to. Without it, they simply float back out into the content abyss and onto someone else’s radar.

That consistent delivery — and the audience retention it creates — comes from the smaller content pieces, the glue that binds it together; the strategy in its entirety.

"Smaller" doesn’t mean lower-quality, however, and investing lots of time through the ideation phase for these pieces is critical to success.

Creating smaller ideas

To do this well and create that constant content strategy, a great place to start is by looking at the ideas magazines use. For example, these are the regular content types you often find in the best-crafted titles:

What I've learned Advice piece from a heavy-hitter. Can sometimes be expanded to what I've learned in my 20s, 30s, 40s, etc.

The dual interview Get two people together for an interview. Write an intro as to why they’re there, and then transcribe their chat. Bingo: unique content.

Have you ever/What do you think of? Pose a question and ask ten people for their responses. Good reactive content to a particular event that might pertain to one of our clients.

Cash for questions Get an interviewee/expert and pose them a series of questions gathered from real-life members of the public.

A day in the life What it says on the tin — an in-depth look at someone of interest's working day.

Person vs person debate Start with a question or subject matter, get two people, put it to them, and record the results.

Master xxxxxx in five minutes A short how-to — can be delivered in pictorial or video format.

This style of regular series content lends itself well to online strategy, too. By running these regularly, you create both variety and the critical stickiness required to keep the audience coming back.

Of course, with such variation it also then allows you to create better newsletters, social strategies, and even inbound marketing plans, maximizing that return on investment.

The strategy allows for informative content as well as entertaining pieces. In doing so, it gives your brand the opportunity to build subject trust and authority, as well as capturing key opportunities in the purchase funnel such as micro-moments and pain points.

This combination of informative and entertaining output ensures you're front and center when your customer eventually falls into the purchase funnel.

Some examples

One way of bringing this to life is to look at brands already executing well.

One of the best blog strategies I have seen in some time is the one by Scotts Menswear. One of the key reasons for its quality is the fact it's run by a very experienced print editor.

If we reverse-engineer what they’ve been doing on-page, we can clearly see that much thought has gone into creating variation, entertainment, and usefulness in a single well-rounded strategy.

Take the last ten posts, for instance. Here's what we have and how it flows:

Seven Films We're Looking Forward to in 2017 – Video-based entertainment/lifestyle piece.

Key Pieces for Your January Fitness Drive – Trending content with useful advice.

Style Focus – A great regular piece that jumps on trending "news" to discuss the implications for fashion.

Updated Classics from Puma – A news article on a new trainer release.

Polo Shirts: A Wardrobe Staple – An in-depth guide to a key piece of clothing (part of a series).

Our Guide to Valentine's Day – Lifestyle guide that helps convey brand positioning, tonality, and opinion.

Nail Your Valentine's Day Outfit – Helpful guide to getting it right on a key seasonal event in the audience’s calendar. Clearly, they see Valentine's as a sales peak.

Get Your Overhead Jacket Kicks – Guide to a fashion staple.

5 Brands and Acts Tipped for Greatness – Lifestyle piece tapping into the music/fashion brand positioning.

Our 5 Favorite Trainers Online Right Now – Great list feature to help the consumer buy smarter.

You can clearly see how they're using structured thinking to create a blog of real variety and value. By combining this with a strong big-bang content plan that sucks in new visitors, you can build a hefty retained audience that improves critical metrics such as dwell time, returning visits, engagement, and sales.

Building our own plan

I know what you're thinking. "Sounds great, for a brand in fashion. It’s cool and interesting. But I work in a 'boring' niche and this type of stuff just isn’t possible."

While it could be a little more difficult that doesn’t mean it is impossible by any stretch of the imagination.

To prove the point, let’s look at a fictional example for a company in the medical products sector.

Here’s the deal: A2Z Medical is a company built up in the '60s and '70s. They have a huge B2B footprint but want to bring their marketing strategy into the current decade, in part because they are launching a consumer-facing brand for the first time. The new venture will offer medical kits for the general public and as such requires a proactive, content-led strategy to promote trust, awareness, and engagement alongside the obvious requirement for sales.

Audience research

The first step in building a content strategy is to understand your audience.

We could go into the detail of that all day long, but for the sake of this example we already have detailed data that tells us there are two main groups of people interested in coming to and buying from the site.

I've also written about the process I go through to define personas, and would always recommend this post too for background.

James is an obsessive ailment Googler, worrying over every little thing that he or his family suffers. He’s a detail man and wants to be prepared for all eventualities.

Chloe, on the other hand, has very different needs. She's a mum, works part-time to help pay the bills, and then devotes herself to her family and children.

She's time-poor and takes a practical view on life to make it work. Her purchase behavior is based on distress or urgent need.

Different need states

It is abundantly clear from this very quick overview that each have very different purchase journeys and needs from a content perspective.

We'll look at what this means for our content strategy a little later. Before we dive into that, though, we must also look at our understanding of the market opportunity.

This data-dive helps us to understand what people are looking for now in the space, where they get it from currently, and where the gaps may be.

The data-dive

This work is carried out by one of our content strategists before any creative sessions take place. This ensures we can validate ideas back to what the data tells us.

So, what does that process involve? Let’s look at each stage briefly now:

Long-tail research

Quora/Reddit/forum research

Magazine research

Pub beers!

It's a well-covered subject area, but also a very important one; it often yields ideas that convert fastest to traffic and revenue.

1. Long-tail research

Much has been written (including this piece I penned in 2015) on this subject area, and in much more detail than I aim to cover it here. Right now, let’s focus on some key tools and areas for opportunity.

It's easy to get lost in this process, so the key is to keep it simple. To do this, I stick to a small handful of tools:

SerpStat – Has a useful long-tail tool based on Google Suggest to give you lists of questions by keyword phrase.

Keywordtool.io – A similar tool, but free to use. Slightly more clunky.

Bloomberry – A new tool by the makers of Buzzsumo. Does a great job of finding opportunities from other sources, such as other sites and forums. It also has a nice data visualization view that gives you volume and key competitor info, the latter of which can be helpful for a later stage in the process. Here’s an example of a search for "first aid":

Storybase – A free tool that pulls long-tail phrases from a variety of sources for content ideas and also includes some demographic data. This can be helpful when it comes to matching ideas to personas.

For the sake of this process, we're not looking to build a full long-tail strategy, of course. This is solely about finding content ideas with search volume attached to them.

By downloading from a bunch of sources (such as those above), it's then relatively easy to de-dupe them in Excel and create a master list of ideas to pull into your overall plan.

It can make sense to segment or classify those ideas by persona, too. I do this via simple color coding, as you can see below. This allows you to create a shortlist of ideas that are on-brand and have the required level of opportunity attached.

Working this way makes sure you're thinking hard about serving the needs and pain points of the personas.

To further reinforce this point, it can work very well to include a mini-brainstorm as part of this stage, gathering a few people to talk specifically about the pain points experienced by each persona.

In this session, it's also useful to talk through the various micro-moment opportunities by asking what questions they ask in each of the following scenarios:

I want to go…. I want to do… I want to know… I want to buy…

You should end up with a list of content ideas per persona that covers pain points and interests.

2. Quora/Reddit/forum research

Another great source of information is the world of forums and aggregator sites. As you might expect, this starts with sub-Reddit research.

Within categories like those below lies a wealth of questions, the answers to which form brilliant article inspiration:

If we pop into the /AskDocs/ forum, we see a plethora of medical challenges from people looking for help — perfect real-world examples of everyday ailments that a site like ours could help to answer.

Q: I have a painful stomach when eating pork…?

Q: Will I need less sleep if I’m on a good diet and active?

Q: Swollen lymph nodes and nose bleeds. What could be going on?

The answers to these questions often require much research and professional advice, but by working through them for the less-serious everyday issues you could soon help Chloe out and become a useful ally.

The same is also true of Quora. You can play around with advanced search queries to drill into the juiciest boards by carrying out searches such as:

Another fantastic area worthy of research focus is forums. We use these to ask our peers and topic experts questions, so spending some time understanding what's being asked within your market can be very helpful.

One of the best ways of doing this is to perform a simple advanced Google search as outlined below:

"keyword" + "forum"

For our example, we might type:

The search engine then delivers a list of super-relevant sites designed to answer medical questions and we can easily pick through them to extract ideas for popular content.

And as an extra tip search for your keyword and “vBulletin” – a popular software used for forum sites. This will often surface rarely found sites with some real insight into particularly the older demographic, who are more likely to use traditional forums.

3. Magazine research

Another very important area to explore is magazine research. They contain some of the most refined content strategies in existence; the level of expertise that goes into idea creation and headline writing is without equal.

It makes sense, therefore, to find titles relevant to your niche (in our case, health and medicine) and look for great content opportunities.

You can even do this online, to a degree. If you go to a site like magazines.com, greatmagazines.co.uk, other magazine subscription sites, or even perform a Google image search, you’ll find a myriad of headline ideas simply by looking at covers.

In the example below I've Googled "medical magazines" and found numerous cover lines that would form great digital content. Here’s an example from just one, 4Health Magazine:

4. Pub beers

And last but certainly not least, we have the tried and true "chat-in-a-pub" approach. It might sound like an excuse for a beer, but it’s actually very useful.

If you can find a handful of people aligned to your personas, offer to buy them a few drinks and chat through their experiences and challenges. You’ll be surprised what you find out!

Product range

Of course, it pays to add some level of alignment to the plan by understanding which products offer the best margin or are most important to the business.

This info should come out of your initial onboarding and overall strategy creation process, but it can also be found via Analytics (if set up correctly) by looking for the best-selling products and finding out their trade cost.

The creative process

By this point, you’ll be overflowing with data and ideas for content. The challenge, however, is ensuring that you can add variation to that ideas mix. I call this stage the "Magazine and Hero Process."

Magazine ideas

To create that level of engagement and stickiness, we need ideas that are less practical and more entertaining. Any good content strategy should include a good mix of both informational and entertaining ideas; the first part of our creative brainstorm focuses on concepts that will achieve this balance.

We follow a structure that looks loosely like the below:

Stage one:

We start by asking "human" questions about each of our personas. While we may have completed all the keyword research in the world, it's important to take a real-world view on pain points and so forth.

From here we discuss the purchase funnel stage, ensuring that we have ideas not just for the top of the funnel but all the way through it, backed by a mix of content types to support that variation aim.

That conversation will then be followed by a look at the brand's wider marketing plan and seasonal events to ensure we plan key periods of activity thoroughly.

And the icing on the top is the quick look at our "swipe file," a treasure trove of old ideas we've seen, to see if we can borrow a concept or two for our plan.

Stage two:

The second and final stage of our ideation is a forensic exploration into what magazines can offer. I am a voracious devourer of specialist magazines; it can really pay dividends to look for clever ideas or content series to bring into your plan before the massive validation process begins. This will sort the possible from the impossible.

By following a set way of discussing ideas, you'll leave no stone unturned.

The discussion around the purchase funnel often turns out to be incredibly important: it ensures you look not just for ideas that help with awareness, but also further down the funnel. It's also possible to tie content types in to this to ensure variation between the types of content you produce.

To do this we use the Content Matrix I created specifically for this purpose; you can see it below:

The idea here is that it makes it easier to decide what content types fit with which parts of the funnel best and also the relative size of that content in terms of the man hours required to create it.

Working in this logical fashion will help with overall content mix.

Hero ideas

Once you've worked through that process, it's time to open up bigger ideas. These are important for one very simple reason: they help you find and reach new audiences to pull back into your sensational constant content plan.

We won’t go into detail here as to how to come up with consistently good big-bang ideas, as the point of this post is to look at the more regular content strategy, but if you want to read more about it click here.

For now, it's enough to note that you should also include time to think about campaigns and how they fit into your overall plan.

Pulling it together – process + example

By now, you should be swimming in great ideas of every kind imaginable, every one of which ties back nicely to your personas.

In our example, we've been focusing on Chloe and James. The next job is to lay those..

http://ift.tt/2oBAJAB

[christinesumpmg]

Constant Content: The Silver Bullet for Failing Content Marketing Strategy

Posted by SimonPenson

Incredible, isn’t it? Despite all the fanfare and pageantry that has followed content marketing over the last few years, fewer than 6% of marketers confidently claim to be executing content marketing strategies properly.

It’s just one of a handful of eye-popping stats to come out of the State of Content Marketing Survey, a major new survey of senior UK marketers this month as part of a campaign to help create healthy debate around the misunderstood tactic.

With more budget than ever before pouring into the approach (60% of those surveyed said they were opening the purse strings further in 2017) 92% admitted to not knowing exactly how they should execute.

To check out all the results from the survey, click below (opens up in a new tab):

The biggest pain point of all to come out of the State of Content Marketing survey?

"Producing engaging content, consistently."

I had been reading all the results with mild interest until those words stopped me dead in my tracks.

You may think the source of that concern stemmed from the fact that such a thing should be easy to manage, but it goes deeper than that.

Success with content is predicated entirely on your ability to consistently produce content that engages, resonates and adds value to your audience’s lives. And if producing that is the single biggest barrier then we have a problem!

You see, investment in content is a waste of money if you don’t have a well-designed plan to deliver constant content.

It doesn’t matter how brilliant your campaigns are if your audience has no other content to come back to and engage with.

And this is where the constant content plan comes in...

Constant content

The concept is a simple one: no content plan is complete unless it's based around delivering content consistently.

To do this requires a focus on strategy, not just on a few blog posts and the odd bigger campaign.

The best way to explain this is to visualize it in a different way. Below, you’ll see a simple diagram to throw light on my point.

Here we can see how a campaign-led strategy exposes holes in your plan. While we have plenty of activity going on in both our owned and earned channels, the issue is what goes on between large content launches. Where do those people go during those periods of inactivity? How do we keep them engaged when there's no central content hub to pull them into?

This kind of approach is something we see often, especially from larger brands where budgets allow for more creative content campaigns to be run regularly, and here’s why it doesn’t yield positive ROI.

As human beings, we like variety. To keep us hooked, content delivery needs to reflect this. Campaigns need to be designed as part of a whole, becoming a peak content moment rather than the only content moment, pulling new audiences back to the constant content activity going on at the center of brand activity.

You see it in the way magazines are organized, starting with an initial section of often short-form content before you then hit a four-plus-page feature. This is done to ensure we keep turning the pages, experiencing variation as we do so.

This is something I like to call content flow. It’s a great strategic "tool" to help ensure you design your overall strategy the right way.

The approach to strategy

The key is actually very simple. It focuses the mind on the creation of a content framework that enables you to produce lots of high-quality regular content and the ideas that flow from it. I call it the "Constant Content Plan."

The right way to approach the content planning phase is to create a process that supports the building of layers of different content types, like we see below in our second diagram:

In this example, you can see how we intersperse the bigger campaigns with lots of owned content, creating a blog and resources section that gives the new visitor something to explore and come back to. Without it, they simply float back out into the content abyss and onto someone else’s radar.

That consistent delivery — and the audience retention it creates — comes from the smaller content pieces, the glue that binds it together; the strategy in its entirety.

"Smaller" doesn’t mean lower-quality, however, and investing lots of time through the ideation phase for these pieces is critical to success.

Creating smaller ideas

To do this well and create that constant content strategy, a great place to start is by looking at the ideas magazines use. For example, these are the regular content types you often find in the best-crafted titles:

What I've learned Advice piece from a heavy-hitter. Can sometimes be expanded to what I've learned in my 20s, 30s, 40s, etc.

The dual interview Get two people together for an interview. Write an intro as to why they’re there, and then transcribe their chat. Bingo: unique content.

Have you ever/What do you think of? Pose a question and ask ten people for their responses. Good reactive content to a particular event that might pertain to one of our clients.

Cash for questions Get an interviewee/expert and pose them a series of questions gathered from real-life members of the public.

A day in the life What it says on the tin — an in-depth look at someone of interest's working day.

Person vs person debate Start with a question or subject matter, get two people, put it to them, and record the results.

Master xxxxxx in five minutes A short how-to — can be delivered in pictorial or video format.

This style of regular series content lends itself well to online strategy, too. By running these regularly, you create both variety and the critical stickiness required to keep the audience coming back.

Of course, with such variation it also then allows you to create better newsletters, social strategies, and even inbound marketing plans, maximizing that return on investment.

The strategy allows for informative content as well as entertaining pieces. In doing so, it gives your brand the opportunity to build subject trust and authority, as well as capturing key opportunities in the purchase funnel such as micro-moments and pain points.

This combination of informative and entertaining output ensures you're front and center when your customer eventually falls into the purchase funnel.

Some examples

One way of bringing this to life is to look at brands already executing well.

One of the best blog strategies I have seen in some time is the one by Scotts Menswear. One of the key reasons for its quality is the fact it's run by a very experienced print editor.

If we reverse-engineer what they’ve been doing on-page, we can clearly see that much thought has gone into creating variation, entertainment, and usefulness in a single well-rounded strategy.

Take the last ten posts, for instance. Here's what we have and how it flows:

Seven Films We're Looking Forward to in 2017 – Video-based entertainment/lifestyle piece.

Key Pieces for Your January Fitness Drive – Trending content with useful advice.

Style Focus – A great regular piece that jumps on trending "news" to discuss the implications for fashion.

Updated Classics from Puma – A news article on a new trainer release.

Polo Shirts: A Wardrobe Staple – An in-depth guide to a key piece of clothing (part of a series).

Our Guide to Valentine's Day – Lifestyle guide that helps convey brand positioning, tonality, and opinion.

Nail Your Valentine's Day Outfit – Helpful guide to getting it right on a key seasonal event in the audience’s calendar. Clearly, they see Valentine's as a sales peak.

Get Your Overhead Jacket Kicks – Guide to a fashion staple.

5 Brands and Acts Tipped for Greatness – Lifestyle piece tapping into the music/fashion brand positioning.

Our 5 Favorite Trainers Online Right Now – Great list feature to help the consumer buy smarter.

You can clearly see how they're using structured thinking to create a blog of real variety and value. By combining this with a strong big-bang content plan that sucks in new visitors, you can build a hefty retained audience that improves critical metrics such as dwell time, returning visits, engagement, and sales.

Building our own plan

I know what you're thinking. "Sounds great, for a brand in fashion. It’s cool and interesting. But I work in a 'boring' niche and this type of stuff just isn’t possible."

While it could be a little more difficult that doesn’t mean it is impossible by any stretch of the imagination.

To prove the point, let’s look at a fictional example for a company in the medical products sector.

Here’s the deal: A2Z Medical is a company built up in the '60s and '70s. They have a huge B2B footprint but want to bring their marketing strategy into the current decade, in part because they are launching a consumer-facing brand for the first time. The new venture will offer medical kits for the general public and as such requires a proactive, content-led strategy to promote trust, awareness, and engagement alongside the obvious requirement for sales.

Audience research

The first step in building a content strategy is to understand your audience.

We could go into the detail of that all day long, but for the sake of this example we already have detailed data that tells us there are two main groups of people interested in coming to and buying from the site.

I've also written about the process I go through to define personas, and would always recommend this post too for background.

James is an obsessive ailment Googler, worrying over every little thing that he or his family suffers. He’s a detail man and wants to be prepared for all eventualities.

Chloe, on the other hand, has very different needs. She's a mum, works part-time to help pay the bills, and then devotes herself to her family and children.

She's time-poor and takes a practical view on life to make it work. Her purchase behavior is based on distress or urgent need.

Different need states

It is abundantly clear from this very quick overview that each have very different purchase journeys and needs from a content perspective.

We'll look at what this means for our content strategy a little later. Before we dive into that, though, we must also look at our understanding of the market opportunity.

This data-dive helps us to understand what people are looking for now in the space, where they get it from currently, and where the gaps may be.

The data-dive

This work is carried out by one of our content strategists before any creative sessions take place. This ensures we can validate ideas back to what the data tells us.

So, what does that process involve? Let’s look at each stage briefly now:

Long-tail research

Quora/Reddit/forum research

Magazine research

Pub beers!

It's a well-covered subject area, but also a very important one; it often yields ideas that convert fastest to traffic and revenue.

1. Long-tail research

Much has been written (including this piece I penned in 2015) on this subject area, and in much more detail than I aim to cover it here. Right now, let’s focus on some key tools and areas for opportunity.

It's easy to get lost in this process, so the key is to keep it simple. To do this, I stick to a small handful of tools:

SerpStat – Has a useful long-tail tool based on Google Suggest to give you lists of questions by keyword phrase.

Keywordtool.io – A similar tool, but free to use. Slightly more clunky.

Bloomberry – A new tool by the makers of Buzzsumo. Does a great job of finding opportunities from other sources, such as other sites and forums. It also has a nice data visualization view that gives you volume and key competitor info, the latter of which can be helpful for a later stage in the process. Here’s an example of a search for "first aid":

Storybase – A free tool that pulls long-tail phrases from a variety of sources for content ideas and also includes some demographic data. This can be helpful when it comes to matching ideas to personas.

For the sake of this process, we're not looking to build a full long-tail strategy, of course. This is solely about finding content ideas with search volume attached to them.

By downloading from a bunch of sources (such as those above), it's then relatively easy to de-dupe them in Excel and create a master list of ideas to pull into your overall plan.

It can make sense to segment or classify those ideas by persona, too. I do this via simple color coding, as you can see below. This allows you to create a shortlist of ideas that are on-brand and have the required level of opportunity attached.

Working this way makes sure you're thinking hard about serving the needs and pain points of the personas.

To further reinforce this point, it can work very well to include a mini-brainstorm as part of this stage, gathering a few people to talk specifically about the pain points experienced by each persona.

In this session, it's also useful to talk through the various micro-moment opportunities by asking what questions they ask in each of the following scenarios:

I want to go…. I want to do… I want to know… I want to buy…

You should end up with a list of content ideas per persona that covers pain points and interests.

2. Quora/Reddit/forum research

Another great source of information is the world of forums and aggregator sites. As you might expect, this starts with sub-Reddit research.

Within categories like those below lies a wealth of questions, the answers to which form brilliant article inspiration:

If we pop into the /AskDocs/ forum, we see a plethora of medical challenges from people looking for help — perfect real-world examples of everyday ailments that a site like ours could help to answer.

Q: I have a painful stomach when eating pork…?

Q: Will I need less sleep if I’m on a good diet and active?

Q: Swollen lymph nodes and nose bleeds. What could be going on?

The answers to these questions often require much research and professional advice, but by working through them for the less-serious everyday issues you could soon help Chloe out and become a useful ally.

The same is also true of Quora. You can play around with advanced search queries to drill into the juiciest boards by carrying out searches such as:

Another fantastic area worthy of research focus is forums. We use these to ask our peers and topic experts questions, so spending some time understanding what's being asked within your market can be very helpful.

One of the best ways of doing this is to perform a simple advanced Google search as outlined below:

"keyword" + "forum"

For our example, we might type:

The search engine then delivers a list of super-relevant sites designed to answer medical questions and we can easily pick through them to extract ideas for popular content.

And as an extra tip search for your keyword and “vBulletin” – a popular software used for forum sites. This will often surface rarely found sites with some real insight into particularly the older demographic, who are more likely to use traditional forums.

3. Magazine research

Another very important area to explore is magazine research. They contain some of the most refined content strategies in existence; the level of expertise that goes into idea creation and headline writing is without equal.

It makes sense, therefore, to find titles relevant to your niche (in our case, health and medicine) and look for great content opportunities.

You can even do this online, to a degree. If you go to a site like magazines.com, greatmagazines.co.uk, other magazine subscription sites, or even perform a Google image search, you’ll find a myriad of headline ideas simply by looking at covers.

In the example below I've Googled "medical magazines" and found numerous cover lines that would form great digital content. Here’s an example from just one, 4Health Magazine:

4. Pub beers

And last but certainly not least, we have the tried and true "chat-in-a-pub" approach. It might sound like an excuse for a beer, but it’s actually very useful.

If you can find a handful of people aligned to your personas, offer to buy them a few drinks and chat through their experiences and challenges. You’ll be surprised what you find out!

Product range

Of course, it pays to add some level of alignment to the plan by understanding which products offer the best margin or are most important to the business.

This info should come out of your initial onboarding and overall strategy creation process, but it can also be found via Analytics (if set up correctly) by looking for the best-selling products and finding out their trade cost.

The creative process

By this point, you’ll be overflowing with data and ideas for content. The challenge, however, is ensuring that you can add variation to that ideas mix. I call this stage the "Magazine and Hero Process."

Magazine ideas

To create that level of engagement and stickiness, we need ideas that are less practical and more entertaining. Any good content strategy should include a good mix of both informational and entertaining ideas; the first part of our creative brainstorm focuses on concepts that will achieve this balance.

We follow a structure that looks loosely like the below:

Stage one:

We start by asking "human" questions about each of our personas. While we may have completed all the keyword research in the world, it's important to take a real-world view on pain points and so forth.

From here we discuss the purchase funnel stage, ensuring that we have ideas not just for the top of the funnel but all the way through it, backed by a mix of content types to support that variation aim.

That conversation will then be followed by a look at the brand's wider marketing plan and seasonal events to ensure we plan key periods of activity thoroughly.

And the icing on the top is the quick look at our "swipe file," a treasure trove of old ideas we've seen, to see if we can borrow a concept or two for our plan.

Stage two:

The second and final stage of our ideation is a forensic exploration into what magazines can offer. I am a voracious devourer of specialist magazines; it can really pay dividends to look for clever ideas or content series to bring into your plan before the massive validation process begins. This will sort the possible from the impossible.

By following a set way of discussing ideas, you'll leave no stone unturned.

The discussion around the purchase funnel often turns out to be incredibly important: it ensures you look not just for ideas that help with awareness, but also further down the funnel. It's also possible to tie content types in to this to ensure variation between the types of content you produce.

To do this we use the Content Matrix I created specifically for this purpose; you can see it below:

The idea here is that it makes it easier to decide what content types fit with which parts of the funnel best and also the relative size of that content in terms of the man hours required to create it.

Working in this logical fashion will help with overall content mix.

Hero ideas

Once you've worked through that process, it's time to open up bigger ideas. These are important for one very simple reason: they help you find and reach new audiences to pull back into your sensational constant content plan.

We won’t go into detail here as to how to come up with consistently good big-bang ideas, as the point of this post is to look at the more regular content strategy, but if you want to read more about it click here.

For now, it's enough to note that you should also include time to think about campaigns and how they fit into your overall plan.

Pulling it together – process + example

By now, you should be swimming in great ideas of every kind imaginable, every one of which ties back nicely to your personas.

In our example, we've been focusing on Chloe and James. The next job is to lay those..

http://ift.tt/2oBAJAB

[rodneyevesuarywk]

Constant Content: The Silver Bullet for Failing Content Marketing Strategy

Posted by SimonPenson

Incredible, isn’t it? Despite all the fanfare and pageantry that has followed content marketing over the last few years, fewer than 6% of marketers confidently claim to be executing content marketing strategies properly.

It’s just one of a handful of eye-popping stats to come out of the State of Content Marketing Survey, a major new survey of senior UK marketers this month as part of a campaign to help create healthy debate around the misunderstood tactic.

With more budget than ever before pouring into the approach (60% of those surveyed said they were opening the purse strings further in 2017) 92% admitted to not knowing exactly how they should execute.

To check out all the results from the survey, click below (opens up in a new tab):

The biggest pain point of all to come out of the State of Content Marketing survey?

"Producing engaging content, consistently."

I had been reading all the results with mild interest until those words stopped me dead in my tracks.

You may think the source of that concern stemmed from the fact that such a thing should be easy to manage, but it goes deeper than that.

Success with content is predicated entirely on your ability to consistently produce content that engages, resonates and adds value to your audience’s lives. And if producing that is the single biggest barrier then we have a problem!

You see, investment in content is a waste of money if you don’t have a well-designed plan to deliver constant content.

It doesn’t matter how brilliant your campaigns are if your audience has no other content to come back to and engage with.

And this is where the constant content plan comes in...

Constant content

The concept is a simple one: no content plan is complete unless it's based around delivering content consistently.

To do this requires a focus on strategy, not just on a few blog posts and the odd bigger campaign.

The best way to explain this is to visualize it in a different way. Below, you’ll see a simple diagram to throw light on my point.

Here we can see how a campaign-led strategy exposes holes in your plan. While we have plenty of activity going on in both our owned and earned channels, the issue is what goes on between large content launches. Where do those people go during those periods of inactivity? How do we keep them engaged when there's no central content hub to pull them into?

This kind of approach is something we see often, especially from larger brands where budgets allow for more creative content campaigns to be run regularly, and here’s why it doesn’t yield positive ROI.

As human beings, we like variety. To keep us hooked, content delivery needs to reflect this. Campaigns need to be designed as part of a whole, becoming a peak content moment rather than the only content moment, pulling new audiences back to the constant content activity going on at the center of brand activity.

You see it in the way magazines are organized, starting with an initial section of often short-form content before you then hit a four-plus-page feature. This is done to ensure we keep turning the pages, experiencing variation as we do so.

This is something I like to call content flow. It’s a great strategic "tool" to help ensure you design your overall strategy the right way.

The approach to strategy

The key is actually very simple. It focuses the mind on the creation of a content framework that enables you to produce lots of high-quality regular content and the ideas that flow from it. I call it the "Constant Content Plan."

The right way to approach the content planning phase is to create a process that supports the building of layers of different content types, like we see below in our second diagram:

In this example, you can see how we intersperse the bigger campaigns with lots of owned content, creating a blog and resources section that gives the new visitor something to explore and come back to. Without it, they simply float back out into the content abyss and onto someone else’s radar.

That consistent delivery — and the audience retention it creates — comes from the smaller content pieces, the glue that binds it together; the strategy in its entirety.

"Smaller" doesn’t mean lower-quality, however, and investing lots of time through the ideation phase for these pieces is critical to success.

Creating smaller ideas

To do this well and create that constant content strategy, a great place to start is by looking at the ideas magazines use. For example, these are the regular content types you often find in the best-crafted titles:

What I've learned Advice piece from a heavy-hitter. Can sometimes be expanded to what I've learned in my 20s, 30s, 40s, etc.

The dual interview Get two people together for an interview. Write an intro as to why they’re there, and then transcribe their chat. Bingo: unique content.

Have you ever/What do you think of? Pose a question and ask ten people for their responses. Good reactive content to a particular event that might pertain to one of our clients.

Cash for questions Get an interviewee/expert and pose them a series of questions gathered from real-life members of the public.

A day in the life What it says on the tin — an in-depth look at someone of interest's working day.

Person vs person debate Start with a question or subject matter, get two people, put it to them, and record the results.

Master xxxxxx in five minutes A short how-to — can be delivered in pictorial or video format.

This style of regular series content lends itself well to online strategy, too. By running these regularly, you create both variety and the critical stickiness required to keep the audience coming back.

Of course, with such variation it also then allows you to create better newsletters, social strategies, and even inbound marketing plans, maximizing that return on investment.

The strategy allows for informative content as well as entertaining pieces. In doing so, it gives your brand the opportunity to build subject trust and authority, as well as capturing key opportunities in the purchase funnel such as micro-moments and pain points.

This combination of informative and entertaining output ensures you're front and center when your customer eventually falls into the purchase funnel.

Some examples

One way of bringing this to life is to look at brands already executing well.

One of the best blog strategies I have seen in some time is the one by Scotts Menswear. One of the key reasons for its quality is the fact it's run by a very experienced print editor.

If we reverse-engineer what they’ve been doing on-page, we can clearly see that much thought has gone into creating variation, entertainment, and usefulness in a single well-rounded strategy.

Take the last ten posts, for instance. Here's what we have and how it flows:

Seven Films We're Looking Forward to in 2017 – Video-based entertainment/lifestyle piece.

Key Pieces for Your January Fitness Drive – Trending content with useful advice.

Style Focus – A great regular piece that jumps on trending "news" to discuss the implications for fashion.

Updated Classics from Puma – A news article on a new trainer release.

Polo Shirts: A Wardrobe Staple – An in-depth guide to a key piece of clothing (part of a series).

Our Guide to Valentine's Day – Lifestyle guide that helps convey brand positioning, tonality, and opinion.

Nail Your Valentine's Day Outfit – Helpful guide to getting it right on a key seasonal event in the audience’s calendar. Clearly, they see Valentine's as a sales peak.

Get Your Overhead Jacket Kicks – Guide to a fashion staple.

5 Brands and Acts Tipped for Greatness – Lifestyle piece tapping into the music/fashion brand positioning.

Our 5 Favorite Trainers Online Right Now – Great list feature to help the consumer buy smarter.

You can clearly see how they're using structured thinking to create a blog of real variety and value. By combining this with a strong big-bang content plan that sucks in new visitors, you can build a hefty retained audience that improves critical metrics such as dwell time, returning visits, engagement, and sales.

Building our own plan

I know what you're thinking. "Sounds great, for a brand in fashion. It’s cool and interesting. But I work in a 'boring' niche and this type of stuff just isn’t possible."

While it could be a little more difficult that doesn’t mean it is impossible by any stretch of the imagination.

To prove the point, let’s look at a fictional example for a company in the medical products sector.

Here’s the deal: A2Z Medical is a company built up in the '60s and '70s. They have a huge B2B footprint but want to bring their marketing strategy into the current decade, in part because they are launching a consumer-facing brand for the first time. The new venture will offer medical kits for the general public and as such requires a proactive, content-led strategy to promote trust, awareness, and engagement alongside the obvious requirement for sales.

Audience research

The first step in building a content strategy is to understand your audience.

We could go into the detail of that all day long, but for the sake of this example we already have detailed data that tells us there are two main groups of people interested in coming to and buying from the site.

I've also written about the process I go through to define personas, and would always recommend this post too for background.

James is an obsessive ailment Googler, worrying over every little thing that he or his family suffers. He’s a detail man and wants to be prepared for all eventualities.

Chloe, on the other hand, has very different needs. She's a mum, works part-time to help pay the bills, and then devotes herself to her family and children.

She's time-poor and takes a practical view on life to make it work. Her purchase behavior is based on distress or urgent need.

Different need states

It is abundantly clear from this very quick overview that each have very different purchase journeys and needs from a content perspective.

We'll look at what this means for our content strategy a little later. Before we dive into that, though, we must also look at our understanding of the market opportunity.

This data-dive helps us to understand what people are looking for now in the space, where they get it from currently, and where the gaps may be.

The data-dive

This work is carried out by one of our content strategists before any creative sessions take place. This ensures we can validate ideas back to what the data tells us.

So, what does that process involve? Let’s look at each stage briefly now:

Long-tail research

Quora/Reddit/forum research

Magazine research

Pub beers!

It's a well-covered subject area, but also a very important one; it often yields ideas that convert fastest to traffic and revenue.

1. Long-tail research

Much has been written (including this piece I penned in 2015) on this subject area, and in much more detail than I aim to cover it here. Right now, let’s focus on some key tools and areas for opportunity.

It's easy to get lost in this process, so the key is to keep it simple. To do this, I stick to a small handful of tools:

SerpStat – Has a useful long-tail tool based on Google Suggest to give you lists of questions by keyword phrase.

Keywordtool.io – A similar tool, but free to use. Slightly more clunky.

Bloomberry – A new tool by the makers of Buzzsumo. Does a great job of finding opportunities from other sources, such as other sites and forums. It also has a nice data visualization view that gives you volume and key competitor info, the latter of which can be helpful for a later stage in the process. Here’s an example of a search for "first aid":

Storybase – A free tool that pulls long-tail phrases from a variety of sources for content ideas and also includes some demographic data. This can be helpful when it comes to matching ideas to personas.

For the sake of this process, we're not looking to build a full long-tail strategy, of course. This is solely about finding content ideas with search volume attached to them.

By downloading from a bunch of sources (such as those above), it's then relatively easy to de-dupe them in Excel and create a master list of ideas to pull into your overall plan.

It can make sense to segment or classify those ideas by persona, too. I do this via simple color coding, as you can see below. This allows you to create a shortlist of ideas that are on-brand and have the required level of opportunity attached.

Working this way makes sure you're thinking hard about serving the needs and pain points of the personas.

To further reinforce this point, it can work very well to include a mini-brainstorm as part of this stage, gathering a few people to talk specifically about the pain points experienced by each persona.

In this session, it's also useful to talk through the various micro-moment opportunities by asking what questions they ask in each of the following scenarios:

I want to go…. I want to do… I want to know… I want to buy…

You should end up with a list of content ideas per persona that covers pain points and interests.

2. Quora/Reddit/forum research

Another great source of information is the world of forums and aggregator sites. As you might expect, this starts with sub-Reddit research.

Within categories like those below lies a wealth of questions, the answers to which form brilliant article inspiration:

If we pop into the /AskDocs/ forum, we see a plethora of medical challenges from people looking for help — perfect real-world examples of everyday ailments that a site like ours could help to answer.

Q: I have a painful stomach when eating pork…?

Q: Will I need less sleep if I’m on a good diet and active?

Q: Swollen lymph nodes and nose bleeds. What could be going on?

The answers to these questions often require much research and professional advice, but by working through them for the less-serious everyday issues you could soon help Chloe out and become a useful ally.

The same is also true of Quora. You can play around with advanced search queries to drill into the juiciest boards by carrying out searches such as:

Another fantastic area worthy of research focus is forums. We use these to ask our peers and topic experts questions, so spending some time understanding what's being asked within your market can be very helpful.

One of the best ways of doing this is to perform a simple advanced Google search as outlined below:

"keyword" + "forum"

For our example, we might type:

The search engine then delivers a list of super-relevant sites designed to answer medical questions and we can easily pick through them to extract ideas for popular content.

And as an extra tip search for your keyword and “vBulletin” – a popular software used for forum sites. This will often surface rarely found sites with some real insight into particularly the older demographic, who are more likely to use traditional forums.

3. Magazine research

Another very important area to explore is magazine research. They contain some of the most refined content strategies in existence; the level of expertise that goes into idea creation and headline writing is without equal.

It makes sense, therefore, to find titles relevant to your niche (in our case, health and medicine) and look for great content opportunities.

You can even do this online, to a degree. If you go to a site like magazines.com, greatmagazines.co.uk, other magazine subscription sites, or even perform a Google image search, you’ll find a myriad of headline ideas simply by looking at covers.

In the example below I've Googled "medical magazines" and found numerous cover lines that would form great digital content. Here’s an example from just one, 4Health Magazine:

4. Pub beers

And last but certainly not least, we have the tried and true "chat-in-a-pub" approach. It might sound like an excuse for a beer, but it’s actually very useful.

If you can find a handful of people aligned to your personas, offer to buy them a few drinks and chat through their experiences and challenges. You’ll be surprised what you find out!

Product range

Of course, it pays to add some level of alignment to the plan by understanding which products offer the best margin or are most important to the business.

This info should come out of your initial onboarding and overall strategy creation process, but it can also be found via Analytics (if set up correctly) by looking for the best-selling products and finding out their trade cost.

The creative process

By this point, you’ll be overflowing with data and ideas for content. The challenge, however, is ensuring that you can add variation to that ideas mix. I call this stage the "Magazine and Hero Process."

Magazine ideas

To create that level of engagement and stickiness, we need ideas that are less practical and more entertaining. Any good content strategy should include a good mix of both informational and entertaining ideas; the first part of our creative brainstorm focuses on concepts that will achieve this balance.

We follow a structure that looks loosely like the below:

Stage one:

We start by asking "human" questions about each of our personas. While we may have completed all the keyword research in the world, it's important to take a real-world view on pain points and so forth.

From here we discuss the purchase funnel stage, ensuring that we have ideas not just for the top of the funnel but all the way through it, backed by a mix of content types to support that variation aim.

That conversation will then be followed by a look at the brand's wider marketing plan and seasonal events to ensure we plan key periods of activity thoroughly.

And the icing on the top is the quick look at our "swipe file," a treasure trove of old ideas we've seen, to see if we can borrow a concept or two for our plan.

Stage two:

The second and final stage of our ideation is a forensic exploration into what magazines can offer. I am a voracious devourer of specialist magazines; it can really pay dividends to look for clever ideas or content series to bring into your plan before the massive validation process begins. This will sort the possible from the impossible.

By following a set way of discussing ideas, you'll leave no stone unturned.

The discussion around the purchase funnel often turns out to be incredibly important: it ensures you look not just for ideas that help with awareness, but also further down the funnel. It's also possible to tie content types in to this to ensure variation between the types of content you produce.

To do this we use the Content Matrix I created specifically for this purpose; you can see it below:

The idea here is that it makes it easier to decide what content types fit with which parts of the funnel best and also the relative size of that content in terms of the man hours required to create it.

Working in this logical fashion will help with overall content mix.

Hero ideas

Once you've worked through that process, it's time to open up bigger ideas. These are important for one very simple reason: they help you find and reach new audiences to pull back into your sensational constant content plan.

We won’t go into detail here as to how to come up with consistently good big-bang ideas, as the point of this post is to look at the more regular content strategy, but if you want to read more about it click here.

For now, it's enough to note that you should also include time to think about campaigns and how they fit into your overall plan.

Pulling it together – process + example

By now, you should be swimming in great ideas of every kind imaginable, every one of which ties back nicely to your personas.

In our example, we've been focusing on Chloe and James. The next job is to lay those..

http://ift.tt/2oBAJAB

[maryhare96]

Constant Content: The Silver Bullet for Failing Content Marketing Strategy

Posted by SimonPenson

Incredible, isn’t it? Despite all the fanfare and pageantry that has followed content marketing over the last few years, fewer than 6% of marketers confidently claim to be executing content marketing strategies properly.

It’s just one of a handful of eye-popping stats to come out of the State of Content Marketing Survey, a major new survey of senior UK marketers this month as part of a campaign to help create healthy debate around the misunderstood tactic.

With more budget than ever before pouring into the approach (60% of those surveyed said they were opening the purse strings further in 2017) 92% admitted to not knowing exactly how they should execute.

To check out all the results from the survey, click below (opens up in a new tab):

The biggest pain point of all to come out of the State of Content Marketing survey?

"Producing engaging content, consistently."

I had been reading all the results with mild interest until those words stopped me dead in my tracks.

You may think the source of that concern stemmed from the fact that such a thing should be easy to manage, but it goes deeper than that.

Success with content is predicated entirely on your ability to consistently produce content that engages, resonates and adds value to your audience’s lives. And if producing that is the single biggest barrier then we have a problem!

You see, investment in content is a waste of money if you don’t have a well-designed plan to deliver constant content.

It doesn’t matter how brilliant your campaigns are if your audience has no other content to come back to and engage with.

And this is where the constant content plan comes in...

Constant content

The concept is a simple one: no content plan is complete unless it's based around delivering content consistently.

To do this requires a focus on strategy, not just on a few blog posts and the odd bigger campaign.

The best way to explain this is to visualize it in a different way. Below, you’ll see a simple diagram to throw light on my point.

Here we can see how a campaign-led strategy exposes holes in your plan. While we have plenty of activity going on in both our owned and earned channels, the issue is what goes on between large content launches. Where do those people go during those periods of inactivity? How do we keep them engaged when there's no central content hub to pull them into?

This kind of approach is something we see often, especially from larger brands where budgets allow for more creative content campaigns to be run regularly, and here’s why it doesn’t yield positive ROI.

As human beings, we like variety. To keep us hooked, content delivery needs to reflect this. Campaigns need to be designed as part of a whole, becoming a peak content moment rather than the only content moment, pulling new audiences back to the constant content activity going on at the center of brand activity.

You see it in the way magazines are organized, starting with an initial section of often short-form content before you then hit a four-plus-page feature. This is done to ensure we keep turning the pages, experiencing variation as we do so.

This is something I like to call content flow. It’s a great strategic "tool" to help ensure you design your overall strategy the right way.

The approach to strategy

The key is actually very simple. It focuses the mind on the creation of a content framework that enables you to produce lots of high-quality regular content and the ideas that flow from it. I call it the "Constant Content Plan."

The right way to approach the content planning phase is to create a process that supports the building of layers of different content types, like we see below in our second diagram:

In this example, you can see how we intersperse the bigger campaigns with lots of owned content, creating a blog and resources section that gives the new visitor something to explore and come back to. Without it, they simply float back out into the content abyss and onto someone else’s radar.

That consistent delivery — and the audience retention it creates — comes from the smaller content pieces, the glue that binds it together; the strategy in its entirety.

"Smaller" doesn’t mean lower-quality, however, and investing lots of time through the ideation phase for these pieces is critical to success.

Creating smaller ideas

To do this well and create that constant content strategy, a great place to start is by looking at the ideas magazines use. For example, these are the regular content types you often find in the best-crafted titles:

What I've learned Advice piece from a heavy-hitter. Can sometimes be expanded to what I've learned in my 20s, 30s, 40s, etc.

The dual interview Get two people together for an interview. Write an intro as to why they’re there, and then transcribe their chat. Bingo: unique content.

Have you ever/What do you think of? Pose a question and ask ten people for their responses. Good reactive content to a particular event that might pertain to one of our clients.

Cash for questions Get an interviewee/expert and pose them a series of questions gathered from real-life members of the public.

A day in the life What it says on the tin — an in-depth look at someone of interest's working day.

Person vs person debate Start with a question or subject matter, get two people, put it to them, and record the results.

Master xxxxxx in five minutes A short how-to — can be delivered in pictorial or video format.

This style of regular series content lends itself well to online strategy, too. By running these regularly, you create both variety and the critical stickiness required to keep the audience coming back.

Of course, with such variation it also then allows you to create better newsletters, social strategies, and even inbound marketing plans, maximizing that return on investment.

The strategy allows for informative content as well as entertaining pieces. In doing so, it gives your brand the opportunity to build subject trust and authority, as well as capturing key opportunities in the purchase funnel such as micro-moments and pain points.

This combination of informative and entertaining output ensures you're front and center when your customer eventually falls into the purchase funnel.

Some examples

One way of bringing this to life is to look at brands already executing well.

One of the best blog strategies I have seen in some time is the one by Scotts Menswear. One of the key reasons for its quality is the fact it's run by a very experienced print editor.

If we reverse-engineer what they’ve been doing on-page, we can clearly see that much thought has gone into creating variation, entertainment, and usefulness in a single well-rounded strategy.

Take the last ten posts, for instance. Here's what we have and how it flows:

Seven Films We're Looking Forward to in 2017 – Video-based entertainment/lifestyle piece.

Key Pieces for Your January Fitness Drive – Trending content with useful advice.

Style Focus – A great regular piece that jumps on trending "news" to discuss the implications for fashion.

Updated Classics from Puma – A news article on a new trainer release.

Polo Shirts: A Wardrobe Staple – An in-depth guide to a key piece of clothing (part of a series).

Our Guide to Valentine's Day – Lifestyle guide that helps convey brand positioning, tonality, and opinion.

Nail Your Valentine's Day Outfit – Helpful guide to getting it right on a key seasonal event in the audience’s calendar. Clearly, they see Valentine's as a sales peak.

Get Your Overhead Jacket Kicks – Guide to a fashion staple.

5 Brands and Acts Tipped for Greatness – Lifestyle piece tapping into the music/fashion brand positioning.

Our 5 Favorite Trainers Online Right Now – Great list feature to help the consumer buy smarter.

You can clearly see how they're using structured thinking to create a blog of real variety and value. By combining this with a strong big-bang content plan that sucks in new visitors, you can build a hefty retained audience that improves critical metrics such as dwell time, returning visits, engagement, and sales.

Building our own plan

I know what you're thinking. "Sounds great, for a brand in fashion. It’s cool and interesting. But I work in a 'boring' niche and this type of stuff just isn’t possible."

While it could be a little more difficult that doesn’t mean it is impossible by any stretch of the imagination.

To prove the point, let’s look at a fictional example for a company in the medical products sector.

Here’s the deal: A2Z Medical is a company built up in the '60s and '70s. They have a huge B2B footprint but want to bring their marketing strategy into the current decade, in part because they are launching a consumer-facing brand for the first time. The new venture will offer medical kits for the general public and as such requires a proactive, content-led strategy to promote trust, awareness, and engagement alongside the obvious requirement for sales.

Audience research

The first step in building a content strategy is to understand your audience.

We could go into the detail of that all day long, but for the sake of this example we already have detailed data that tells us there are two main groups of people interested in coming to and buying from the site.

I've also written about the process I go through to define personas, and would always recommend this post too for background.

James is an obsessive ailment Googler, worrying over every little thing that he or his family suffers. He’s a detail man and wants to be prepared for all eventualities.

Chloe, on the other hand, has very different needs. She's a mum, works part-time to help pay the bills, and then devotes herself to her family and children.

She's time-poor and takes a practical view on life to make it work. Her purchase behavior is based on distress or urgent need.

Different need states

It is abundantly clear from this very quick overview that each have very different purchase journeys and needs from a content perspective.

We'll look at what this means for our content strategy a little later. Before we dive into that, though, we must also look at our understanding of the market opportunity.

This data-dive helps us to understand what people are looking for now in the space, where they get it from currently, and where the gaps may be.

The data-dive

This work is carried out by one of our content strategists before any creative sessions take place. This ensures we can validate ideas back to what the data tells us.

So, what does that process involve? Let’s look at each stage briefly now:

Long-tail research

Quora/Reddit/forum research

Magazine research

Pub beers!

It's a well-covered subject area, but also a very important one; it often yields ideas that convert fastest to traffic and revenue.

1. Long-tail research

Much has been written (including this piece I penned in 2015) on this subject area, and in much more detail than I aim to cover it here. Right now, let’s focus on some key tools and areas for opportunity.

It's easy to get lost in this process, so the key is to keep it simple. To do this, I stick to a small handful of tools:

SerpStat – Has a useful long-tail tool based on Google Suggest to give you lists of questions by keyword phrase.

Keywordtool.io – A similar tool, but free to use. Slightly more clunky.

Bloomberry – A new tool by the makers of Buzzsumo. Does a great job of finding opportunities from other sources, such as other sites and forums. It also has a nice data visualization view that gives you volume and key competitor info, the latter of which can be helpful for a later stage in the process. Here’s an example of a search for "first aid":

Storybase – A free tool that pulls long-tail phrases from a variety of sources for content ideas and also includes some demographic data. This can be helpful when it comes to matching ideas to personas.

For the sake of this process, we're not looking to build a full long-tail strategy, of course. This is solely about finding content ideas with search volume attached to them.

By downloading from a bunch of sources (such as those above), it's then relatively easy to de-dupe them in Excel and create a master list of ideas to pull into your overall plan.

It can make sense to segment or classify those ideas by persona, too. I do this via simple color coding, as you can see below. This allows you to create a shortlist of ideas that are on-brand and have the required level of opportunity attached.

Working this way makes sure you're thinking hard about serving the needs and pain points of the personas.

To further reinforce this point, it can work very well to include a mini-brainstorm as part of this stage, gathering a few people to talk specifically about the pain points experienced by each persona.

In this session, it's also useful to talk through the various micro-moment opportunities by asking what questions they ask in each of the following scenarios:

I want to go…. I want to do… I want to know… I want to buy…

You should end up with a list of content ideas per persona that covers pain points and interests.

2. Quora/Reddit/forum research

Another great source of information is the world of forums and aggregator sites. As you might expect, this starts with sub-Reddit research.

Within categories like those below lies a wealth of questions, the answers to which form brilliant article inspiration:

If we pop into the /AskDocs/ forum, we see a plethora of medical challenges from people looking for help — perfect real-world examples of everyday ailments that a site like ours could help to answer.

Q: I have a painful stomach when eating pork…?

Q: Will I need less sleep if I’m on a good diet and active?

Q: Swollen lymph nodes and nose bleeds. What could be going on?

The answers to these questions often require much research and professional advice, but by working through them for the less-serious everyday issues you could soon help Chloe out and become a useful ally.

The same is also true of Quora. You can play around with advanced search queries to drill into the juiciest boards by carrying out searches such as:

Another fantastic area worthy of research focus is forums. We use these to ask our peers and topic experts questions, so spending some time understanding what's being asked within your market can be very helpful.

One of the best ways of doing this is to perform a simple advanced Google search as outlined below:

"keyword" + "forum"

For our example, we might type:

The search engine then delivers a list of super-relevant sites designed to answer medical questions and we can easily pick through them to extract ideas for popular content.

And as an extra tip search for your keyword and “vBulletin” – a popular software used for forum sites. This will often surface rarely found sites with some real insight into particularly the older demographic, who are more likely to use traditional forums.

3. Magazine research

Another very important area to explore is magazine research. They contain some of the most refined content strategies in existence; the level of expertise that goes into idea creation and headline writing is without equal.

It makes sense, therefore, to find titles relevant to your niche (in our case, health and medicine) and look for great content opportunities.

You can even do this online, to a degree. If you go to a site like magazines.com, greatmagazines.co.uk, other magazine subscription sites, or even perform a Google image search, you’ll find a myriad of headline ideas simply by looking at covers.

In the example below I've Googled "medical magazines" and found numerous cover lines that would form great digital content. Here’s an example from just one, 4Health Magazine:

4. Pub beers

And last but certainly not least, we have the tried and true "chat-in-a-pub" approach. It might sound like an excuse for a beer, but it’s actually very useful.

If you can find a handful of people aligned to your personas, offer to buy them a few drinks and chat through their experiences and challenges. You’ll be surprised what you find out!

Product range

Of course, it pays to add some level of alignment to the plan by understanding which products offer the best margin or are most important to the business.

This info should come out of your initial onboarding and overall strategy creation process, but it can also be found via Analytics (if set up correctly) by looking for the best-selling products and finding out their trade cost.

The creative process

By this point, you’ll be overflowing with data and ideas for content. The challenge, however, is ensuring that you can add variation to that ideas mix. I call this stage the "Magazine and Hero Process."

Magazine ideas

To create that level of engagement and stickiness, we need ideas that are less practical and more entertaining. Any good content strategy should include a good mix of both informational and entertaining ideas; the first part of our creative brainstorm focuses on concepts that will achieve this balance.

We follow a structure that looks loosely like the below:

Stage one:

We start by asking "human" questions about each of our personas. While we may have completed all the keyword research in the world, it's important to take a real-world view on pain points and so forth.

From here we discuss the purchase funnel stage, ensuring that we have ideas not just for the top of the funnel but all the way through it, backed by a mix of content types to support that variation aim.

That conversation will then be followed by a look at the brand's wider marketing plan and seasonal events to ensure we plan key periods of activity thoroughly.

And the icing on the top is the quick look at our "swipe file," a treasure trove of old ideas we've seen, to see if we can borrow a concept or two for our plan.

Stage two:

The second and final stage of our ideation is a forensic exploration into what magazines can offer. I am a voracious devourer of specialist magazines; it can really pay dividends to look for clever ideas or content series to bring into your plan before the massive validation process begins. This will sort the possible from the impossible.

By following a set way of discussing ideas, you'll leave no stone unturned.

The discussion around the purchase funnel often turns out to be incredibly important: it ensures you look not just for ideas that help with awareness, but also further down the funnel. It's also possible to tie content types in to this to ensure variation between the types of content you produce.

To do this we use the Content Matrix I created specifically for this purpose; you can see it below:

The idea here is that it makes it easier to decide what content types fit with which parts of the funnel best and also the relative size of that content in terms of the man hours required to create it.

Working in this logical fashion will help with overall content mix.

Hero ideas

Once you've worked through that process, it's time to open up bigger ideas. These are important for one very simple reason: they help you find and reach new audiences to pull back into your sensational constant content plan.

We won’t go into detail here as to how to come up with consistently good big-bang ideas, as the point of this post is to look at the more regular content strategy, but if you want to read more about it click here.

For now, it's enough to note that you should also include time to think about campaigns and how they fit into your overall plan.

Pulling it together – process + example

By now, you should be swimming in great ideas of every kind imaginable, every one of which ties back nicely to your personas.

In our example, we've been focusing on Chloe and James. The next job is to lay those..

http://ift.tt/2oBAJAB

[conniecogeie]

Constant Content: The Silver Bullet for Failing Content Marketing Strategy

Posted by SimonPenson

Incredible, isn’t it? Despite all the fanfare and pageantry that has followed content marketing over the last few years, fewer than 6% of marketers confidently claim to be executing content marketing strategies properly.

It’s just one of a handful of eye-popping stats to come out of the State of Content Marketing Survey, a major new survey of senior UK marketers this month as part of a campaign to help create healthy debate around the misunderstood tactic.

With more budget than ever before pouring into the approach (60% of those surveyed said they were opening the purse strings further in 2017) 92% admitted to not knowing exactly how they should execute.

To check out all the results from the survey, click below (opens up in a new tab):

The biggest pain point of all to come out of the State of Content Marketing survey?

"Producing engaging content, consistently."

I had been reading all the results with mild interest until those words stopped me dead in my tracks.

You may think the source of that concern stemmed from the fact that such a thing should be easy to manage, but it goes deeper than that.

Success with content is predicated entirely on your ability to consistently produce content that engages, resonates and adds value to your audience’s lives. And if producing that is the single biggest barrier then we have a problem!

You see, investment in content is a waste of money if you don’t have a well-designed plan to deliver constant content.

It doesn’t matter how brilliant your campaigns are if your audience has no other content to come back to and engage with.

And this is where the constant content plan comes in...

Constant content

The concept is a simple one: no content plan is complete unless it's based around delivering content consistently.

To do this requires a focus on strategy, not just on a few blog posts and the odd bigger campaign.

The best way to explain this is to visualize it in a different way. Below, you’ll see a simple diagram to throw light on my point.

Here we can see how a campaign-led strategy exposes holes in your plan. While we have plenty of activity going on in both our owned and earned channels, the issue is what goes on between large content launches. Where do those people go during those periods of inactivity? How do we keep them engaged when there's no central content hub to pull them into?

This kind of approach is something we see often, especially from larger brands where budgets allow for more creative content campaigns to be run regularly, and here’s why it doesn’t yield positive ROI.

As human beings, we like variety. To keep us hooked, content delivery needs to reflect this. Campaigns need to be designed as part of a whole, becoming a peak content moment rather than the only content moment, pulling new audiences back to the constant content activity going on at the center of brand activity.

You see it in the way magazines are organized, starting with an initial section of often short-form content before you then hit a four-plus-page feature. This is done to ensure we keep turning the pages, experiencing variation as we do so.

This is something I like to call content flow. It’s a great strategic "tool" to help ensure you design your overall strategy the right way.

The approach to strategy

The key is actually very simple. It focuses the mind on the creation of a content framework that enables you to produce lots of high-quality regular content and the ideas that flow from it. I call it the "Constant Content Plan."

The right way to approach the content planning phase is to create a process that supports the building of layers of different content types, like we see below in our second diagram:

In this example, you can see how we intersperse the bigger campaigns with lots of owned content, creating a blog and resources section that gives the new visitor something to explore and come back to. Without it, they simply float back out into the content abyss and onto someone else’s radar.

That consistent delivery — and the audience retention it creates — comes from the smaller content pieces, the glue that binds it together; the strategy in its entirety.

"Smaller" doesn’t mean lower-quality, however, and investing lots of time through the ideation phase for these pieces is critical to success.

Creating smaller ideas

To do this well and create that constant content strategy, a great place to start is by looking at the ideas magazines use. For example, these are the regular content types you often find in the best-crafted titles:

What I've learned Advice piece from a heavy-hitter. Can sometimes be expanded to what I've learned in my 20s, 30s, 40s, etc.

The dual interview Get two people together for an interview. Write an intro as to why they’re there, and then transcribe their chat. Bingo: unique content.

Have you ever/What do you think of? Pose a question and ask ten people for their responses. Good reactive content to a particular event that might pertain to one of our clients.

Cash for questions Get an interviewee/expert and pose them a series of questions gathered from real-life members of the public.

A day in the life What it says on the tin — an in-depth look at someone of interest's working day.

Person vs person debate Start with a question or subject matter, get two people, put it to them, and record the results.

Master xxxxxx in five minutes A short how-to — can be delivered in pictorial or video format.

This style of regular series content lends itself well to online strategy, too. By running these regularly, you create both variety and the critical stickiness required to keep the audience coming back.

Of course, with such variation it also then allows you to create better newsletters, social strategies, and even inbound marketing plans, maximizing that return on investment.

The strategy allows for informative content as well as entertaining pieces. In doing so, it gives your brand the opportunity to build subject trust and authority, as well as capturing key opportunities in the purchase funnel such as micro-moments and pain points.

This combination of informative and entertaining output ensures you're front and center when your customer eventually falls into the purchase funnel.

Some examples

One way of bringing this to life is to look at brands already executing well.

One of the best blog strategies I have seen in some time is the one by Scotts Menswear. One of the key reasons for its quality is the fact it's run by a very experienced print editor.

If we reverse-engineer what they’ve been doing on-page, we can clearly see that much thought has gone into creating variation, entertainment, and usefulness in a single well-rounded strategy.

Take the last ten posts, for instance. Here's what we have and how it flows:

Seven Films We're Looking Forward to in 2017 – Video-based entertainment/lifestyle piece.

Key Pieces for Your January Fitness Drive – Trending content with useful advice.

Style Focus – A great regular piece that jumps on trending "news" to discuss the implications for fashion.

Updated Classics from Puma – A news article on a new trainer release.

Polo Shirts: A Wardrobe Staple – An in-depth guide to a key piece of clothing (part of a series).

Our Guide to Valentine's Day – Lifestyle guide that helps convey brand positioning, tonality, and opinion.

Nail Your Valentine's Day Outfit – Helpful guide to getting it right on a key seasonal event in the audience’s calendar. Clearly, they see Valentine's as a sales peak.

Get Your Overhead Jacket Kicks – Guide to a fashion staple.

5 Brands and Acts Tipped for Greatness – Lifestyle piece tapping into the music/fashion brand positioning.

Our 5 Favorite Trainers Online Right Now – Great list feature to help the consumer buy smarter.

You can clearly see how they're using structured thinking to create a blog of real variety and value. By combining this with a strong big-bang content plan that sucks in new visitors, you can build a hefty retained audience that improves critical metrics such as dwell time, returning visits, engagement, and sales.

Building our own plan

I know what you're thinking. "Sounds great, for a brand in fashion. It’s cool and interesting. But I work in a 'boring' niche and this type of stuff just isn’t possible."

While it could be a little more difficult that doesn’t mean it is impossible by any stretch of the imagination.

To prove the point, let’s look at a fictional example for a company in the medical products sector.

Here’s the deal: A2Z Medical is a company built up in the '60s and '70s. They have a huge B2B footprint but want to bring their marketing strategy into the current decade, in part because they are launching a consumer-facing brand for the first time. The new venture will offer medical kits for the general public and as such requires a proactive, content-led strategy to promote trust, awareness, and engagement alongside the obvious requirement for sales.

Audience research

The first step in building a content strategy is to understand your audience.

We could go into the detail of that all day long, but for the sake of this example we already have detailed data that tells us there are two main groups of people interested in coming to and buying from the site.

I've also written about the process I go through to define personas, and would always recommend this post too for background.

James is an obsessive ailment Googler, worrying over every little thing that he or his family suffers. He’s a detail man and wants to be prepared for all eventualities.

Chloe, on the other hand, has very different needs. She's a mum, works part-time to help pay the bills, and then devotes herself to her family and children.

She's time-poor and takes a practical view on life to make it work. Her purchase behavior is based on distress or urgent need.

Different need states

It is abundantly clear from this very quick overview that each have very different purchase journeys and needs from a content perspective.

We'll look at what this means for our content strategy a little later. Before we dive into that, though, we must also look at our understanding of the market opportunity.

This data-dive helps us to understand what people are looking for now in the space, where they get it from currently, and where the gaps may be.

The data-dive

This work is carried out by one of our content strategists before any creative sessions take place. This ensures we can validate ideas back to what the data tells us.

So, what does that process involve? Let’s look at each stage briefly now:

Long-tail research

Quora/Reddit/forum research

Magazine research

Pub beers!

It's a well-covered subject area, but also a very important one; it often yields ideas that convert fastest to traffic and revenue.

1. Long-tail research

Much has been written (including this piece I penned in 2015) on this subject area, and in much more detail than I aim to cover it here. Right now, let’s focus on some key tools and areas for opportunity.

It's easy to get lost in this process, so the key is to keep it simple. To do this, I stick to a small handful of tools:

SerpStat – Has a useful long-tail tool based on Google Suggest to give you lists of questions by keyword phrase.

Keywordtool.io – A similar tool, but free to use. Slightly more clunky.

Bloomberry – A new tool by the makers of Buzzsumo. Does a great job of finding opportunities from other sources, such as other sites and forums. It also has a nice data visualization view that gives you volume and key competitor info, the latter of which can be helpful for a later stage in the process. Here’s an example of a search for "first aid":

Storybase – A free tool that pulls long-tail phrases from a variety of sources for content ideas and also includes some demographic data. This can be helpful when it comes to matching ideas to personas.

For the sake of this process, we're not looking to build a full long-tail strategy, of course. This is solely about finding content ideas with search volume attached to them.

By downloading from a bunch of sources (such as those above), it's then relatively easy to de-dupe them in Excel and create a master list of ideas to pull into your overall plan.

It can make sense to segment or classify those ideas by persona, too. I do this via simple color coding, as you can see below. This allows you to create a shortlist of ideas that are on-brand and have the required level of opportunity attached.

Working this way makes sure you're thinking hard about serving the needs and pain points of the personas.

To further reinforce this point, it can work very well to include a mini-brainstorm as part of this stage, gathering a few people to talk specifically about the pain points experienced by each persona.

In this session, it's also useful to talk through the various micro-moment opportunities by asking what questions they ask in each of the following scenarios:

I want to go…. I want to do… I want to know… I want to buy…

You should end up with a list of content ideas per persona that covers pain points and interests.

2. Quora/Reddit/forum research

Another great source of information is the world of forums and aggregator sites. As you might expect, this starts with sub-Reddit research.

Within categories like those below lies a wealth of questions, the answers to which form brilliant article inspiration:

If we pop into the /AskDocs/ forum, we see a plethora of medical challenges from people looking for help — perfect real-world examples of everyday ailments that a site like ours could help to answer.

Q: I have a painful stomach when eating pork…?

Q: Will I need less sleep if I’m on a good diet and active?

Q: Swollen lymph nodes and nose bleeds. What could be going on?

The answers to these questions often require much research and professional advice, but by working through them for the less-serious everyday issues you could soon help Chloe out and become a useful ally.

The same is also true of Quora. You can play around with advanced search queries to drill into the juiciest boards by carrying out searches such as:

Another fantastic area worthy of research focus is forums. We use these to ask our peers and topic experts questions, so spending some time understanding what's being asked within your market can be very helpful.

One of the best ways of doing this is to perform a simple advanced Google search as outlined below:

"keyword" + "forum"

For our example, we might type:

The search engine then delivers a list of super-relevant sites designed to answer medical questions and we can easily pick through them to extract ideas for popular content.

And as an extra tip search for your keyword and “vBulletin” – a popular software used for forum sites. This will often surface rarely found sites with some real insight into particularly the older demographic, who are more likely to use traditional forums.

3. Magazine research

Another very important area to explore is magazine research. They contain some of the most refined content strategies in existence; the level of expertise that goes into idea creation and headline writing is without equal.

It makes sense, therefore, to find titles relevant to your niche (in our case, health and medicine) and look for great content opportunities.

You can even do this online, to a degree. If you go to a site like magazines.com, greatmagazines.co.uk, other magazine subscription sites, or even perform a Google image search, you’ll find a myriad of headline ideas simply by looking at covers.

In the example below I've Googled "medical magazines" and found numerous cover lines that would form great digital content. Here’s an example from just one, 4Health Magazine:

4. Pub beers

And last but certainly not least, we have the tried and true "chat-in-a-pub" approach. It might sound like an excuse for a beer, but it’s actually very useful.

If you can find a handful of people aligned to your personas, offer to buy them a few drinks and chat through their experiences and challenges. You’ll be surprised what you find out!

Product range

Of course, it pays to add some level of alignment to the plan by understanding which products offer the best margin or are most important to the business.

This info should come out of your initial onboarding and overall strategy creation process, but it can also be found via Analytics (if set up correctly) by looking for the best-selling products and finding out their trade cost.

The creative process

By this point, you’ll be overflowing with data and ideas for content. The challenge, however, is ensuring that you can add variation to that ideas mix. I call this stage the "Magazine and Hero Process."

Magazine ideas

To create that level of engagement and stickiness, we need ideas that are less practical and more entertaining. Any good content strategy should include a good mix of both informational and entertaining ideas; the first part of our creative brainstorm focuses on concepts that will achieve this balance.

We follow a structure that looks loosely like the below:

Stage one:

We start by asking "human" questions about each of our personas. While we may have completed all the keyword research in the world, it's important to take a real-world view on pain points and so forth.

From here we discuss the purchase funnel stage, ensuring that we have ideas not just for the top of the funnel but all the way through it, backed by a mix of content types to support that variation aim.

That conversation will then be followed by a look at the brand's wider marketing plan and seasonal events to ensure we plan key periods of activity thoroughly.

And the icing on the top is the quick look at our "swipe file," a treasure trove of old ideas we've seen, to see if we can borrow a concept or two for our plan.

Stage two:

The second and final stage of our ideation is a forensic exploration into what magazines can offer. I am a voracious devourer of specialist magazines; it can really pay dividends to look for clever ideas or content series to bring into your plan before the massive validation process begins. This will sort the possible from the impossible.

By following a set way of discussing ideas, you'll leave no stone unturned.

The discussion around the purchase funnel often turns out to be incredibly important: it ensures you look not just for ideas that help with awareness, but also further down the funnel. It's also possible to tie content types in to this to ensure variation between the types of content you produce.

To do this we use the Content Matrix I created specifically for this purpose; you can see it below:

The idea here is that it makes it easier to decide what content types fit with which parts of the funnel best and also the relative size of that content in terms of the man hours required to create it.

Working in this logical fashion will help with overall content mix.

Hero ideas

Once you've worked through that process, it's time to open up bigger ideas. These are important for one very simple reason: they help you find and reach new audiences to pull back into your sensational constant content plan.

We won’t go into detail here as to how to come up with consistently good big-bang ideas, as the point of this post is to look at the more regular content strategy, but if you want to read more about it click here.

For now, it's enough to note that you should also include time to think about campaigns and how they fit into your overall plan.

Pulling it together – process + example

By now, you should be swimming in great ideas of every kind imaginable, every one of which ties back nicely to your personas.

In our example, we've been focusing on Chloe and James. The next job is to lay those..

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[lawrenceseitz22]

Constant Content: The Silver Bullet for Failing Content Marketing Strategy

Posted by SimonPenson

Incredible, isn’t it? Despite all the fanfare and pageantry that has followed content marketing over the last few years, fewer than 6% of marketers confidently claim to be executing content marketing strategies properly.

It’s just one of a handful of eye-popping stats to come out of the State of Content Marketing Survey, a major new survey of senior UK marketers this month as part of a campaign to help create healthy debate around the misunderstood tactic.

With more budget than ever before pouring into the approach (60% of those surveyed said they were opening the purse strings further in 2017) 92% admitted to not knowing exactly how they should execute.

To check out all the results from the survey, click below (opens up in a new tab):

The biggest pain point of all to come out of the State of Content Marketing survey?

"Producing engaging content, consistently."

I had been reading all the results with mild interest until those words stopped me dead in my tracks.

You may think the source of that concern stemmed from the fact that such a thing should be easy to manage, but it goes deeper than that.

Success with content is predicated entirely on your ability to consistently produce content that engages, resonates and adds value to your audience’s lives. And if producing that is the single biggest barrier then we have a problem!

You see, investment in content is a waste of money if you don’t have a well-designed plan to deliver constant content.

It doesn’t matter how brilliant your campaigns are if your audience has no other content to come back to and engage with.

And this is where the constant content plan comes in...

Constant content

The concept is a simple one: no content plan is complete unless it's based around delivering content consistently.

To do this requires a focus on strategy, not just on a few blog posts and the odd bigger campaign.

The best way to explain this is to visualize it in a different way. Below, you’ll see a simple diagram to throw light on my point.

Here we can see how a campaign-led strategy exposes holes in your plan. While we have plenty of activity going on in both our owned and earned channels, the issue is what goes on between large content launches. Where do those people go during those periods of inactivity? How do we keep them engaged when there's no central content hub to pull them into?

This kind of approach is something we see often, especially from larger brands where budgets allow for more creative content campaigns to be run regularly, and here’s why it doesn’t yield positive ROI.

As human beings, we like variety. To keep us hooked, content delivery needs to reflect this. Campaigns need to be designed as part of a whole, becoming a peak content moment rather than the only content moment, pulling new audiences back to the constant content activity going on at the center of brand activity.

You see it in the way magazines are organized, starting with an initial section of often short-form content before you then hit a four-plus-page feature. This is done to ensure we keep turning the pages, experiencing variation as we do so.

This is something I like to call content flow. It’s a great strategic "tool" to help ensure you design your overall strategy the right way.

The approach to strategy

The key is actually very simple. It focuses the mind on the creation of a content framework that enables you to produce lots of high-quality regular content and the ideas that flow from it. I call it the "Constant Content Plan."

The right way to approach the content planning phase is to create a process that supports the building of layers of different content types, like we see below in our second diagram:

In this example, you can see how we intersperse the bigger campaigns with lots of owned content, creating a blog and resources section that gives the new visitor something to explore and come back to. Without it, they simply float back out into the content abyss and onto someone else’s radar.

That consistent delivery — and the audience retention it creates — comes from the smaller content pieces, the glue that binds it together; the strategy in its entirety.

"Smaller" doesn’t mean lower-quality, however, and investing lots of time through the ideation phase for these pieces is critical to success.

Creating smaller ideas

To do this well and create that constant content strategy, a great place to start is by looking at the ideas magazines use. For example, these are the regular content types you often find in the best-crafted titles:

What I've learned Advice piece from a heavy-hitter. Can sometimes be expanded to what I've learned in my 20s, 30s, 40s, etc.

The dual interview Get two people together for an interview. Write an intro as to why they’re there, and then transcribe their chat. Bingo: unique content.

Have you ever/What do you think of? Pose a question and ask ten people for their responses. Good reactive content to a particular event that might pertain to one of our clients.

Cash for questions Get an interviewee/expert and pose them a series of questions gathered from real-life members of the public.

A day in the life What it says on the tin — an in-depth look at someone of interest's working day.

Person vs person debate Start with a question or subject matter, get two people, put it to them, and record the results.

Master xxxxxx in five minutes A short how-to — can be delivered in pictorial or video format.

This style of regular series content lends itself well to online strategy, too. By running these regularly, you create both variety and the critical stickiness required to keep the audience coming back.

Of course, with such variation it also then allows you to create better newsletters, social strategies, and even inbound marketing plans, maximizing that return on investment.

The strategy allows for informative content as well as entertaining pieces. In doing so, it gives your brand the opportunity to build subject trust and authority, as well as capturing key opportunities in the purchase funnel such as micro-moments and pain points.

This combination of informative and entertaining output ensures you're front and center when your customer eventually falls into the purchase funnel.

Some examples

One way of bringing this to life is to look at brands already executing well.

One of the best blog strategies I have seen in some time is the one by Scotts Menswear. One of the key reasons for its quality is the fact it's run by a very experienced print editor.

If we reverse-engineer what they’ve been doing on-page, we can clearly see that much thought has gone into creating variation, entertainment, and usefulness in a single well-rounded strategy.

Take the last ten posts, for instance. Here's what we have and how it flows:

Seven Films We're Looking Forward to in 2017 – Video-based entertainment/lifestyle piece.

Key Pieces for Your January Fitness Drive – Trending content with useful advice.

Style Focus – A great regular piece that jumps on trending "news" to discuss the implications for fashion.

Updated Classics from Puma – A news article on a new trainer release.

Polo Shirts: A Wardrobe Staple – An in-depth guide to a key piece of clothing (part of a series).

Our Guide to Valentine's Day – Lifestyle guide that helps convey brand positioning, tonality, and opinion.

Nail Your Valentine's Day Outfit – Helpful guide to getting it right on a key seasonal event in the audience’s calendar. Clearly, they see Valentine's as a sales peak.

Get Your Overhead Jacket Kicks – Guide to a fashion staple.

5 Brands and Acts Tipped for Greatness – Lifestyle piece tapping into the music/fashion brand positioning.

Our 5 Favorite Trainers Online Right Now – Great list feature to help the consumer buy smarter.

You can clearly see how they're using structured thinking to create a blog of real variety and value. By combining this with a strong big-bang content plan that sucks in new visitors, you can build a hefty retained audience that improves critical metrics such as dwell time, returning visits, engagement, and sales.

Building our own plan

I know what you're thinking. "Sounds great, for a brand in fashion. It’s cool and interesting. But I work in a 'boring' niche and this type of stuff just isn’t possible."

While it could be a little more difficult that doesn’t mean it is impossible by any stretch of the imagination.

To prove the point, let’s look at a fictional example for a company in the medical products sector.

Here’s the deal: A2Z Medical is a company built up in the '60s and '70s. They have a huge B2B footprint but want to bring their marketing strategy into the current decade, in part because they are launching a consumer-facing brand for the first time. The new venture will offer medical kits for the general public and as such requires a proactive, content-led strategy to promote trust, awareness, and engagement alongside the obvious requirement for sales.

Audience research

The first step in building a content strategy is to understand your audience.

We could go into the detail of that all day long, but for the sake of this example we already have detailed data that tells us there are two main groups of people interested in coming to and buying from the site.

I've also written about the process I go through to define personas, and would always recommend this post too for background.

James is an obsessive ailment Googler, worrying over every little thing that he or his family suffers. He’s a detail man and wants to be prepared for all eventualities.

Chloe, on the other hand, has very different needs. She's a mum, works part-time to help pay the bills, and then devotes herself to her family and children.

She's time-poor and takes a practical view on life to make it work. Her purchase behavior is based on distress or urgent need.

Different need states

It is abundantly clear from this very quick overview that each have very different purchase journeys and needs from a content perspective.

We'll look at what this means for our content strategy a little later. Before we dive into that, though, we must also look at our understanding of the market opportunity.

This data-dive helps us to understand what people are looking for now in the space, where they get it from currently, and where the gaps may be.

The data-dive

This work is carried out by one of our content strategists before any creative sessions take place. This ensures we can validate ideas back to what the data tells us.

So, what does that process involve? Let’s look at each stage briefly now:

Long-tail research

Quora/Reddit/forum research

Magazine research

Pub beers!

It's a well-covered subject area, but also a very important one; it often yields ideas that convert fastest to traffic and revenue.

1. Long-tail research

Much has been written (including this piece I penned in 2015) on this subject area, and in much more detail than I aim to cover it here. Right now, let’s focus on some key tools and areas for opportunity.

It's easy to get lost in this process, so the key is to keep it simple. To do this, I stick to a small handful of tools:

SerpStat – Has a useful long-tail tool based on Google Suggest to give you lists of questions by keyword phrase.

Keywordtool.io – A similar tool, but free to use. Slightly more clunky.

Bloomberry – A new tool by the makers of Buzzsumo. Does a great job of finding opportunities from other sources, such as other sites and forums. It also has a nice data visualization view that gives you volume and key competitor info, the latter of which can be helpful for a later stage in the process. Here’s an example of a search for "first aid":

Storybase – A free tool that pulls long-tail phrases from a variety of sources for content ideas and also includes some demographic data. This can be helpful when it comes to matching ideas to personas.

For the sake of this process, we're not looking to build a full long-tail strategy, of course. This is solely about finding content ideas with search volume attached to them.

By downloading from a bunch of sources (such as those above), it's then relatively easy to de-dupe them in Excel and create a master list of ideas to pull into your overall plan.

It can make sense to segment or classify those ideas by persona, too. I do this via simple color coding, as you can see below. This allows you to create a shortlist of ideas that are on-brand and have the required level of opportunity attached.

Working this way makes sure you're thinking hard about serving the needs and pain points of the personas.

To further reinforce this point, it can work very well to include a mini-brainstorm as part of this stage, gathering a few people to talk specifically about the pain points experienced by each persona.

In this session, it's also useful to talk through the various micro-moment opportunities by asking what questions they ask in each of the following scenarios:

I want to go…. I want to do… I want to know… I want to buy…

You should end up with a list of content ideas per persona that covers pain points and interests.

2. Quora/Reddit/forum research

Another great source of information is the world of forums and aggregator sites. As you might expect, this starts with sub-Reddit research.

Within categories like those below lies a wealth of questions, the answers to which form brilliant article inspiration:

If we pop into the /AskDocs/ forum, we see a plethora of medical challenges from people looking for help — perfect real-world examples of everyday ailments that a site like ours could help to answer.

Q: I have a painful stomach when eating pork…?

Q: Will I need less sleep if I’m on a good diet and active?

Q: Swollen lymph nodes and nose bleeds. What could be going on?

The answers to these questions often require much research and professional advice, but by working through them for the less-serious everyday issues you could soon help Chloe out and become a useful ally.

The same is also true of Quora. You can play around with advanced search queries to drill into the juiciest boards by carrying out searches such as:

Another fantastic area worthy of research focus is forums. We use these to ask our peers and topic experts questions, so spending some time understanding what's being asked within your market can be very helpful.

One of the best ways of doing this is to perform a simple advanced Google search as outlined below:

"keyword" + "forum"

For our example, we might type:

The search engine then delivers a list of super-relevant sites designed to answer medical questions and we can easily pick through them to extract ideas for popular content.

And as an extra tip search for your keyword and “vBulletin” – a popular software used for forum sites. This will often surface rarely found sites with some real insight into particularly the older demographic, who are more likely to use traditional forums.

3. Magazine research

Another very important area to explore is magazine research. They contain some of the most refined content strategies in existence; the level of expertise that goes into idea creation and headline writing is without equal.

It makes sense, therefore, to find titles relevant to your niche (in our case, health and medicine) and look for great content opportunities.

You can even do this online, to a degree. If you go to a site like magazines.com, greatmagazines.co.uk, other magazine subscription sites, or even perform a Google image search, you’ll find a myriad of headline ideas simply by looking at covers.

In the example below I've Googled "medical magazines" and found numerous cover lines that would form great digital content. Here’s an example from just one, 4Health Magazine:

4. Pub beers

And last but certainly not least, we have the tried and true "chat-in-a-pub" approach. It might sound like an excuse for a beer, but it’s actually very useful.

If you can find a handful of people aligned to your personas, offer to buy them a few drinks and chat through their experiences and challenges. You’ll be surprised what you find out!

Product range

Of course, it pays to add some level of alignment to the plan by understanding which products offer the best margin or are most important to the business.

This info should come out of your initial onboarding and overall strategy creation process, but it can also be found via Analytics (if set up correctly) by looking for the best-selling products and finding out their trade cost.

The creative process

By this point, you’ll be overflowing with data and ideas for content. The challenge, however, is ensuring that you can add variation to that ideas mix. I call this stage the "Magazine and Hero Process."

Magazine ideas

To create that level of engagement and stickiness, we need ideas that are less practical and more entertaining. Any good content strategy should include a good mix of both informational and entertaining ideas; the first part of our creative brainstorm focuses on concepts that will achieve this balance.

We follow a structure that looks loosely like the below:

Stage one:

We start by asking "human" questions about each of our personas. While we may have completed all the keyword research in the world, it's important to take a real-world view on pain points and so forth.

From here we discuss the purchase funnel stage, ensuring that we have ideas not just for the top of the funnel but all the way through it, backed by a mix of content types to support that variation aim.

That conversation will then be followed by a look at the brand's wider marketing plan and seasonal events to ensure we plan key periods of activity thoroughly.

And the icing on the top is the quick look at our "swipe file," a treasure trove of old ideas we've seen, to see if we can borrow a concept or two for our plan.

Stage two:

The second and final stage of our ideation is a forensic exploration into what magazines can offer. I am a voracious devourer of specialist magazines; it can really pay dividends to look for clever ideas or content series to bring into your plan before the massive validation process begins. This will sort the possible from the impossible.

By following a set way of discussing ideas, you'll leave no stone unturned.

The discussion around the purchase funnel often turns out to be incredibly important: it ensures you look not just for ideas that help with awareness, but also further down the funnel. It's also possible to tie content types in to this to ensure variation between the types of content you produce.

To do this we use the Content Matrix I created specifically for this purpose; you can see it below:

The idea here is that it makes it easier to decide what content types fit with which parts of the funnel best and also the relative size of that content in terms of the man hours required to create it.

Working in this logical fashion will help with overall content mix.

Hero ideas

Once you've worked through that process, it's time to open up bigger ideas. These are important for one very simple reason: they help you find and reach new audiences to pull back into your sensational constant content plan.

We won’t go into detail here as to how to come up with consistently good big-bang ideas, as the point of this post is to look at the more regular content strategy, but if you want to read more about it click here.

For now, it's enough to note that you should also include time to think about campaigns and how they fit into your overall plan.

Pulling it together – process + example

By now, you should be swimming in great ideas of every kind imaginable, every one of which ties back nicely to your personas.

In our example, we've been focusing on Chloe and James. The next job is to lay those ideas out based on what you know can be delivered.

This process is broken into two parts:

The laying out of the content based on ensuring variation and content flow.

Fitting that plan into an operational format that's deliverable and based on available resources and/or budgets.

Getting that to work is little more than trial and error, but the result should be a content calendar that delivers on the promise of a great mix of regular content ideas, entertaining pieces, and helpful content that makes both James and Chloe want to come back to again and again.

Here’s an example of a two-week window to give you an idea of how just a portion of that regular content might play out:

Free downloads

Fancy giving it a go? You can use this free brand-as-publisher download to make the process easier. It contains all the tools and templates you need to ensure your output joins up the dots to maximize engagement and ‘stickiness’ from your regular content and to critically fix your issues with content marketing effectiveness.

And for those of you that want to see the Content Marketing Survey results in full click on the banner above to claim your free results ebook, complete with commentary, or scroll below for the highlights...

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

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[ubizheroes]

Constant Content: The Silver Bullet for Failing Content Marketing Strategy

Posted by SimonPenson

Incredible, isn’t it? Despite all the fanfare and pageantry that has followed content marketing over the last few years, fewer than 6% of marketers confidently claim to be executing content marketing strategies properly.

It’s just one of a handful of eye-popping stats to come out of the State of Content Marketing Survey, a major new survey of senior UK marketers this month as part of a campaign to help create healthy debate around the misunderstood tactic.

With more budget than ever before pouring into the approach (60% of those surveyed said they were opening the purse strings further in 2017) 92% admitted to not knowing exactly how they should execute.

To check out all the results from the survey, click below (opens up in a new tab):

The biggest pain point of all to come out of the State of Content Marketing survey?

“Producing engaging content, consistently.”

I had been reading all the results with mild interest until those words stopped me dead in my tracks.

You may think the source of that concern stemmed from the fact that such a thing should be easy to manage, but it goes deeper than that.

Success with content is predicated entirely on your ability to consistently produce content that engages, resonates and adds value to your audience’s lives. And if producing that is the single biggest barrier then we have a problem!

You see, investment in content is a waste of money if you don’t have a well-designed plan to deliver constant content.

It doesn’t matter how brilliant your campaigns are if your audience has no other content to come back to and engage with.

And this is where the constant content plan comes in…

Constant content

The concept is a simple one: no content plan is complete unless it’s based around delivering content consistently.

To do this requires a focus on strategy, not just on a few blog posts and the odd bigger campaign.

The best way to explain this is to visualize it in a different way. Below, you’ll see a simple diagram to throw light on my point.

Here we can see how a campaign-led strategy exposes holes in your plan. While we have plenty of activity going on in both our owned and earned channels, the issue is what goes on between large content launches. Where do those people go during those periods of inactivity? How do we keep them engaged when there’s no central content hub to pull them into?

This kind of approach is something we see often, especially from larger brands where budgets allow for more creative content campaigns to be run regularly, and here’s why it doesn’t yield positive ROI.

As human beings, we like variety. To keep us hooked, content delivery needs to reflect this. Campaigns need to be designed as part of a whole, becoming a peak content moment rather than the only content moment, pulling new audiences back to the constant content activity going on at the center of brand activity.

You see it in the way magazines are organized, starting with an initial section of often short-form content before you then hit a four-plus-page feature. This is done to ensure we keep turning the pages, experiencing variation as we do so.

This is something I like to call content flow. It’s a great strategic “tool” to help ensure you design your overall strategy the right way.

The approach to strategy

The key is actually very simple. It focuses the mind on the creation of a content framework that enables you to produce lots of high-quality regular content and the ideas that flow from it. I call it the “Constant Content Plan.”

The right way to approach the content planning phase is to create a process that supports the building of layers of different content types, like we see below in our second diagram:

In this example, you can see how we intersperse the bigger campaigns with lots of owned content, creating a blog and resources section that gives the new visitor something to explore and come back to. Without it, they simply float back out into the content abyss and onto someone else’s radar.

That consistent delivery — and the audience retention it creates — comes from the smaller content pieces, the glue that binds it together; the strategy in its entirety.

“Smaller” doesn’t mean lower-quality, however, and investing lots of time through the ideation phase for these pieces is critical to success.

Creating smaller ideas

To do this well and create that constant content strategy, a great place to start is by looking at the ideas magazines use. For example, these are the regular content types you often find in the best-crafted titles:

What I’ve learned Advice piece from a heavy-hitter. Can sometimes be expanded to what I’ve learned in my 20s, 30s, 40s, etc.

The dual interview Get two people together for an interview. Write an intro as to why they’re there, and then transcribe their chat. Bingo: unique content.

Have you ever/What do you think of? Pose a question and ask ten people for their responses. Good reactive content to a particular event that might pertain to one of our clients.

Cash for questions Get an interviewee/expert and pose them a series of questions gathered from real-life members of the public.

A day in the life What it says on the tin — an in-depth look at someone of interest’s working day.

Person vs person debate Start with a question or subject matter, get two people, put it to them, and record the results.

Master xxxxxx in five minutes A short how-to — can be delivered in pictorial or video format.

This style of regular series content lends itself well to online strategy, too. By running these regularly, you create both variety and the critical stickiness required to keep the audience coming back.

Of course, with such variation it also then allows you to create better newsletters, social strategies, and even inbound marketing plans, maximizing that return on investment.

The strategy allows for informative content as well as entertaining pieces. In doing so, it gives your brand the opportunity to build subject trust and authority, as well as capturing key opportunities in the purchase funnel such as micro-moments and pain points.

This combination of informative and entertaining output ensures you’re front and center when your customer eventually falls into the purchase funnel.

Some examples

One way of bringing this to life is to look at brands already executing well.

One of the best blog strategies I have seen in some time is the one by Scotts Menswear. One of the key reasons for its quality is the fact it’s run by a very experienced print editor.

If we reverse-engineer what they’ve been doing on-page, we can clearly see that much thought has gone into creating variation, entertainment, and usefulness in a single well-rounded strategy.

Take the last ten posts, for instance. Here’s what we have and how it flows:

Seven Films We’re Looking Forward to in 2017 – Video-based entertainment/lifestyle piece.

Key Pieces for Your January Fitness Drive – Trending content with useful advice.

Style Focus – A great regular piece that jumps on trending “news” to discuss the implications for fashion.

Updated Classics from Puma – A news article on a new trainer release.

Polo Shirts: A Wardrobe Staple – An in-depth guide to a key piece of clothing (part of a series).

Our Guide to Valentine’s Day – Lifestyle guide that helps convey brand positioning, tonality, and opinion.

Nail Your Valentine’s Day Outfit – Helpful guide to getting it right on a key seasonal event in the audience’s calendar. Clearly, they see Valentine’s as a sales peak.

Get Your Overhead Jacket Kicks – Guide to a fashion staple.

5 Brands and Acts Tipped for Greatness – Lifestyle piece tapping into the music/fashion brand positioning.

Our 5 Favorite Trainers Online Right Now – Great list feature to help the consumer buy smarter.

You can clearly see how they’re using structured thinking to create a blog of real variety and value. By combining this with a strong big-bang content plan that sucks in new visitors, you can build a hefty retained audience that improves critical metrics such as dwell time, returning visits, engagement, and sales.

Building our own plan

I know what you’re thinking. “Sounds great, for a brand in fashion. It’s cool and interesting. But I work in a ‘boring’ niche and this type of stuff just isn’t possible.”

While it could be a little more difficult that doesn’t mean it is impossible by any stretch of the imagination.

To prove the point, let’s look at a fictional example for a company in the medical products sector.

Here’s the deal: A2Z Medical is a company built up in the ’60s and ’70s. They have a huge B2B footprint but want to bring their marketing strategy into the current decade, in part because they are launching a consumer-facing brand for the first time. The new venture will offer medical kits for the general public and as such requires a proactive, content-led strategy to promote trust, awareness, and engagement alongside the obvious requirement for sales.

Audience research

The first step in building a content strategy is to understand your audience.

We could go into the detail of that all day long, but for the sake of this example we already have detailed data that tells us there are two main groups of people interested in coming to and buying from the site.

I’ve also written about the process I go through to define personas, and would always recommend this post too for background.

James is an obsessive ailment Googler, worrying over every little thing that he or his family suffers. He’s a detail man and wants to be prepared for all eventualities.

Chloe, on the other hand, has very different needs. She’s a mum, works part-time to help pay the bills, and then devotes herself to her family and children.

She’s time-poor and takes a practical view on life to make it work. Her purchase behavior is based on distress or urgent need.

Different need states

It is abundantly clear from this very quick overview that each have very different purchase journeys and needs from a content perspective.

We’ll look at what this means for our content strategy a little later. Before we dive into that, though, we must also look at our understanding of the market opportunity.

This data-dive helps us to understand what people are looking for now in the space, where they get it from currently, and where the gaps may be.

The data-dive

This work is carried out by one of our content strategists before any creative sessions take place. This ensures we can validate ideas back to what the data tells us.

So, what does that process involve? Let’s look at each stage briefly now:

Long-tail research

Quora/Reddit/forum research

Magazine research

Pub beers!

It’s a well-covered subject area, but also a very important one; it often yields ideas that convert fastest to traffic and revenue.

1. Long-tail research

Much has been written (including this piece I penned in 2015) on this subject area, and in much more detail than I aim to cover it here. Right now, let’s focus on some key tools and areas for opportunity.

It’s easy to get lost in this process, so the key is to keep it simple. To do this, I stick to a small handful of tools:

SerpStat – Has a useful long-tail tool based on Google Suggest to give you lists of questions by keyword phrase.

Keywordtool.io – A similar tool, but free to use. Slightly more clunky.

Bloomberry – A new tool by the makers of Buzzsumo. Does a great job of finding opportunities from other sources, such as other sites and forums. It also has a nice data visualization view that gives you volume and key competitor info, the latter of which can be helpful for a later stage in the process. Here’s an example of a search for “first aid”:

Storybase – A free tool that pulls long-tail phrases from a variety of sources for content ideas and also includes some demographic data. This can be helpful when it comes to matching ideas to personas.

For the sake of this process, we’re not looking to build a full long-tail strategy, of course. This is solely about finding content ideas with search volume attached to them.

By downloading from a bunch of sources (such as those above), it’s then relatively easy to de-dupe them in Excel and create a master list of ideas to pull into your overall plan.

It can make sense to segment or classify those ideas by persona, too. I do this via simple color coding, as you can see below. This allows you to create a shortlist of ideas that are on-brand and have the required level of opportunity attached.

Working this way makes sure you’re thinking hard about serving the needs and pain points of the personas.

To further reinforce this point, it can work very well to include a mini-brainstorm as part of this stage, gathering a few people to talk specifically about the pain points experienced by each persona.

In this session, it’s also useful to talk through the various micro-moment opportunities by asking what questions they ask in each of the following scenarios:

I want to go…. I want to do… I want to know… I want to buy…

You should end up with a list of content ideas per persona that covers pain points and interests.

2. Quora/Reddit/forum research

Another great source of information is the world of forums and aggregator sites. As you might expect, this starts with sub-Reddit research.

Within categories like those below lies a wealth of questions, the answers to which form brilliant article inspiration:

If we pop into the /AskDocs/ forum, we see a plethora of medical challenges from people looking for help — perfect real-world examples of everyday ailments that a site like ours could help to answer.

Q: I have a painful stomach when eating pork…?

Q: Will I need less sleep if I’m on a good diet and active?

Q: Swollen lymph nodes and nose bleeds. What could be going on?

The answers to these questions often require much research and professional advice, but by working through them for the less-serious everyday issues you could soon help Chloe out and become a useful ally.

The same is also true of Quora. You can play around with advanced search queries to drill into the juiciest boards by carrying out searches such as:

Another fantastic area worthy of research focus is forums. We use these to ask our peers and topic experts questions, so spending some time understanding what’s being asked within your market can be very helpful.

One of the best ways of doing this is to perform a simple advanced Google search as outlined below:

“keyword” + “forum”

For our example, we might type:

The search engine then delivers a list of super-relevant sites designed to answer medical questions and we can easily pick through them to extract ideas for popular content.

And as an extra tip search for your keyword and “vBulletin” – a popular software used for forum sites. This will often surface rarely found sites with some real insight into particularly the older demographic, who are more likely to use traditional forums.

3. Magazine research

Another very important area to explore is magazine research. They contain some of the most refined content strategies in existence; the level of expertise that goes into idea creation and headline writing is without equal.

It makes sense, therefore, to find titles relevant to your niche (in our case, health and medicine) and look for great content opportunities.

You can even do this online, to a degree. If you go to a site like magazines.com, greatmagazines.co.uk, other magazine subscription sites, or even perform a Google image search, you’ll find a myriad of headline ideas simply by looking at covers.

In the example below I’ve Googled “medical magazines” and found numerous cover lines that would form great digital content. Here’s an example from just one, 4Health Magazine:

4. Pub beers

And last but certainly not least, we have the tried and true “chat-in-a-pub” approach. It might sound like an excuse for a beer, but it’s actually very useful.

If you can find a handful of people aligned to your personas, offer to buy them a few drinks and chat through their experiences and challenges. You’ll be surprised what you find out!

Product range

Of course, it pays to add some level of alignment to the plan by understanding which products offer the best margin or are most important to the business.

This info should come out of your initial onboarding and overall strategy creation process, but it can also be found via Analytics (if set up correctly) by looking for the best-selling products and finding out their trade cost.

The creative process

By this point, you’ll be overflowing with data and ideas for content. The challenge, however, is ensuring that you can add variation to that ideas mix. I call this stage the “Magazine and Hero Process.”

Magazine ideas

To create that level of engagement and stickiness, we need ideas that are less practical and more entertaining. Any good content strategy should include a good mix of both informational and entertaining ideas; the first part of our creative brainstorm focuses on concepts that will achieve this balance.

We follow a structure that looks loosely like the below:

Stage one:

We start by asking “human” questions about each of our personas. While we may have completed all the keyword research in the world, it’s important to take a real-world view on pain points and so forth.

From here we discuss the purchase funnel stage, ensuring that we have ideas not just for the top of the funnel but all the way through it, backed by a mix of content types to support that variation aim.

That conversation will then be followed by a look at the brand’s wider marketing plan and seasonal events to ensure we plan key periods of activity thoroughly.

And the icing on the top is the quick look at our “swipe file,” a treasure trove of old ideas we’ve seen, to see if we can borrow a concept or two for our plan.

Stage two:

The second and final stage of our ideation is a forensic exploration into what magazines can offer. I am a voracious devourer of specialist magazines; it can really pay dividends to look for clever ideas or content series to bring into your plan before the massive validation process begins. This will sort the possible from the impossible.

By following a set way of discussing ideas, you’ll leave no stone unturned.

The discussion around the purchase funnel often turns out to be incredibly important: it ensures you look not just for ideas that help with awareness, but also further down the funnel. It’s also possible to tie content types in to this to ensure variation between the types of content you produce.

To do this we use the Content Matrix I created specifically for this purpose; you can see it below:

The idea here is that it makes it easier to decide what content types fit with which parts of the funnel best and also the relative size of that content in terms of the man hours required to create it.

Working in this logical fashion will help with overall content mix.

Hero ideas

Once you’ve worked through that process, it’s time to open up bigger ideas. These are important for one very simple reason: they help you find and reach new audiences to pull back into your sensational constant content plan.

We won’t go into detail here as to how to come up with consistently good big-bang ideas, as the point of this post is to look at the more regular content strategy, but if you want to read more about it click here.

For now, it’s enough to note that you should also include time to think about campaigns and how they fit into your overall plan.

Pulling it together – process + example

By now, you should be swimming in great ideas of every kind imaginable, every one of which ties back nicely to your personas.

In our example, we’ve been focusing on Chloe and James. The next job is to lay those ideas out based on what you know can be delivered.

This process is broken into two parts:

The laying out of the content based on ensuring variation and content flow.

Fitting that plan into an operational format that’s deliverable and based on available resources and/or budgets.

Getting that to work is little more than trial and error, but the result should be a content calendar that delivers on the promise of a great mix of regular content ideas, entertaining pieces, and helpful content that makes both James and Chloe want to come back to again and again.

Here’s an example of a two-week window to give you an idea of how just a portion of that regular content might play out:

Free downloads

Fancy giving it a go? You can use this free brand-as-publisher download to make the process easier. It contains all the tools and templates you need to ensure your output joins up the dots to maximize engagement and ‘stickiness’ from your regular content and to critically fix your issues with content marketing effectiveness.

And for those of you that want to see the Content Marketing Survey results in full click on the banner above to claim your free results ebook, complete with commentary, or scroll below for the highlights…

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