With your content intent, it's particularly important to determine what audience you're speaking to. We can broadly group these into two sets: what we call B to C which is business to consumer, or B to B which is business to business. We're going to consider a couple of determining factors when pushing content out of these two audiences on how you should tailor and adapt based on their content need and their conversion behaviors. Generally speaking, a business to consumer audience is a lot broader. When we recommend pushing a business-to-business content, being focused on a particular vertical, being quite specialist, and a little bit more niche than a business-to-consumer audience is generally recommended. When we talk about the individual purchaser in a business to consumer situation, largely the purchaser is a single person. For example, somebody who buys a single ice cream goes to the shop and makes a purchase. Where with a business-to-business relationship, if the shopper is ordering an ice cream from the wholesaler, there might be multiple factors influencing their purchase decision based on shelf space, based on retailer, and based on logistics. So being cognizant of the purchase behavior in that individual relationship is key. The buying process for a business to consumer audience is very much a single-step process. Generally speaking, these are individual purchases that are carried out and completed quite fast. Within a business to business realm, a multiple step process can be in place. Talking to procurement teams, being able to pitch for business, or being able to smish your credentials in order to win new business are sometimes key in this arena. It's a very different purchase behavior that you have to be cognizant of. In terms of the sale cycle, as a result of these more impulsive short lead sales with a business to consumer, the sales cycle is a lot shorter. With a business to business, essentially services are retained and are kept on for a lot longer. Be aware of this when you're generating your content and you can see the need for investment in long-term relationships with a business to business audience. Considering sales drivers, a lot of business to consumers make their purchases based on recognition and reputation of brands or businesses. Business to business relationships are a lot more rationalized around the relationship and also detailed information based on whatever your business or brand is offering. Finally, sales factor. Consumer audiences often buy into more impulsive or emotionally targeted advertising or marketing. On the other side, business to business is a lot more rational, thought-out, fact-based. Being able to create content that talks to each of these individual markets would be key to securing the right content marketing strategy for you. There are a myriad of different content types across the board. The entire world of content ranges in everything from infographics to longform videos, static graphics, and e-books. Being able to determine exactly what content will help you achieve your goals is key. So make sure that you read up and that you're familiar with the individual content types that we're going to speak through today. Taking the time to identify exactly what content works with your audience, what the content is that they're consuming on a day-to-day basis and what will help you achieve your goals will help deliver the best content strategy possible. When we talk about content, it's incredibly important to recognize how this feeds the sales funnel. Loosely speaking, we can break the sales funnel into three key sections. Awareness, consideration, and eventual conversion. When we talk about awareness, the content here should be general content that can excite interest but also identify a need of our target audience. Being broad with this content will help get more people into the funnel at that particular moment in time. Entertaining and educational content works really well in this section. In terms of consideration, we're trying to build a larger relationship and a more ongoing moment of trust with our individual audience. Being able to create content that provides a utility to the individual really helps build up that trust and that credibility in this section. Then in terms of our conversion ultimately we need to be including calls to action. We need our intended audience to know exactly what it is that we would like them to do. Using sales formats in this particular area of content creation makes a lot of sense. Being able to offer discounts, trials, promotions, being able to add value to our users and help them on the path to purchase. When we overlay the audience journey with our sales funnel and our content formats, we can start to build a real clear picture of exactly how we're going to get consumers to convert. When we talk about the awareness section, great content suggestions here would be stuff like: e-books, white papers, blogs, podcasts, or even video content. Looking at social media advertising in this section as well for a mass audience with too strong of a sales call to action would be key for generating mass brand awareness. In terms of the consideration phase again, this is about building the relationship. Answering questions, building a community that you interact with on an ongoing basis, and also replying to any emails that you get, being able to essentially build up a friendship or a relationship with individual consumers or mass. Offering trials, garnering testimonials from existing clients, and being able to really build up that element of trust with new intended audience is key in this section. Finally, in the conversion section, being able to add additional value, looking to see where you can make further discounts, and being quite clear and direct with your call to action and exactly what you want users to do to convert is absolutely key. In terms of amplifying content, this has never been more important for social media marketers. Essentially, what was before seen as a free launch by a lot of marketeers has now become pay to play. Understandably, the content channels like Facebook, and Twitter, and Instagram have now got business cases to support themselves. They do this by leveraging reach in exchange for payment by brands. What we see here is that brands don't just rely on organic reach for getting their content out to their intended audiences, but are also well versed and familiar with social media advertising and boosting content and newsfeeds. We'll consider the difference between organic and social content and when to leverage and use both and also the individual formats available to you as a social media market here. Getting your content seen by your intended audience based purely on a channel by channel basis, has its own mitigating factors that you should consider for each individual channel. We're going to have a look at some of the larger social media channels and things that you should be quite aware of when you're placing your content. Facebook as a channel has an incredibly low reach. Facebook was the first channel to introduce what we call algorithmic content newsfeed. This means that essentially brands can pay to be up higher in the newsfeed and also appear in more newsfeeds based on the algorithm that Facebook have introduced around not only advertising formats, but also endorsements from your friends and from your contacts that you have on Facebook too. Facebook has become the largest donor of paid social advertising in the world. Through the paid formats, you can activate a number of ad types. There are fund recruitment ads, page-like ads, click to install ads for mobile applications, and even content-boosting ads. This is to generate engagement on individual piece of content. When we look at Twitter, they have also followed up with an algorithmic news feed for their individual platform. There are nice paid formats on Twitter as well to help your content be seen by individual audiences. These include what we call Twitter cards. Twitter cards are largely aligned much like Facebook ads to win a clear objective, whether this be click to install, content promotion, click to engage, or click to web search. Being able to align exactly what your ad type is with your intent and your business objective for each piece of content will help you receive the best return on investment. Instagram have also introduced an algorithmic newsfeed for organic content, but have also introduced new ad formats as well. These are pushed through Facebook's Power Editor. These individual formats are lessened than Facebook's vast array of ad formats. However, their targeting on their intent is aligned with business objectives and is very powerful too. Individual objectives for Instagram advertising could be click to app install, click to web search, and also video view content. With YouTube, there's no such thing as an algorithmic news feed there. However, the platform doesn't largely function on a newsfeed basis. YouTube doesn't suffer from the same algorithmic newsfeed, mainly because there is no real newsfeed basis for YouTube. Essentially, the platform is more about video discovery. However, low organic reach is suffered by brands who activate on the platform. Largely for your content to be seen as a digital marketer, you need to be using Google AdWords for video formats which come in a multiple array which we'll discuss later in this presentation. These are placed through the Google AdWords platform. With Tumblr, they don't currently have an algorithmic newsfeed. There are an array of paid formats which can be utilized by brands for getting content seen by larger audiences. These include sponsored posts and sponsored videos. Finally Snapchat, not currently affected by algorithmic newsfeed, however, there are some really nice innovative platform features for brands to utilize on Snapchat. A great example of this would be Cadbury's cream egg Easter Snapchat filter, which run across the UK and Ireland for two days and achieved over 4.5 million views on usages of the filter on the platform. Other innovative advertising formats on the platform would also be sponsored stories. When it comes to content, there is no one-size-fits-all. We strongly recommend that in your research and planning phase that you establish what we call content personas. As you can see from these three examples, there is no one piece of content that would necessarily relate and resonate with each of these individual audiences. In terms of establishing exactly these content personas, there are a number of key questions you should ask yourself about your intended audience. What life stage are they at? Are they married? Do they have kids? Are they still in college? What age are they? Where are they located? What makes them buy? Why do they buy? What are their passion points, interests, or challenges on a day-to-day basis? Creating content that resonates with each of these audiences should be a no born objective free. We recommend not trying to make too many content personas, but ultimately identifying what the ideal consumer looks like for you and then generating halo content around that individual. Gaining shares and positive amplification of your content is great. A recent research poll done by [inaudible] found that 70 percent of consumers are more likely to trust a peer-to-peer recommendation than an advertisement for a brand or a business. When newer content is shared by consumers amongst themselves, it does a great job of building up that peer-to-peer recommendation aspect. We're going to look at three reasons why people share content online and delve into the inside a little bit deeper. Number 1 would be incentives. Usually, some form of a tactic in terms of a discount, a promotion, or even a competition that you run through your social media channel can help your content get likes and be shared across a number of different platforms from a number of different consumers. Be very aware of the individual regulations by platform on stage in your own social media computations however as this can be quite regulated. Always make sure to cover yourself off with standard terms and conditions and if needed, a data privacy policy. Fame, being able to provide some form of social currency with an intended audiences' peer group or social network themselves, as I find this piece of content first, being able to tap into that aspect of vanity for users within their individual social networks will help you achieve great brand kudos. People often share content that they believe their peer groups or their social circles will find useful, valuable, or insightful. This can also lead towards emotional connections between the brands and the businesses based on that aspect of trust and credibility which we touched on earlier.
