Episode 66: Creating Content that Converts with Laura Hanly

Laura owns a content marketing agency and has over a decade of writing experience. She’s worked at one of the biggest publishing houses, working on projects like The Twilight phenomenon, J. K. Rowling’s post-Harry Porter publications, and personal memoirs of Michael Palin, Nelson Mandela, and Tina Fey. Molly, how the heck did you run into Laura? And welcome to the show, Laura!

I think that content has sort of become a buzzword, people think that they can start a blog and crank out four pieces of content a week and that for some reason this content is going to print dollar bills for them. That’s really not the function of content.

When we were talking before this episode started, Laura referenced a really astonishing stat from Salesforce. How many touch points someone needs before they actually purchase from you; how many touch points someone needs if they are going to be a high valued company. Most of the touch points that someone needs aren’t retargeting ads necessarily.

I think that’s why content is so important. It’s not about creating a blog where you just crank out pieces of content that don’t really matter, it’s about creating these assets that are really going to benefit your prospects and move them from, “I don’t know who the heck you are,” to, “I can’t wait to tell all of my friends about you!”

Yeah, Laura, I just wanted to turn it over to you to really talk about how you see content playing into the Customer Journey.

They need to interact with you, and not just see your stuff but interact with it, engage with it, six to eight times before they are likely to actually purchase something.

If someone sees your ad and it’s the first time that they’ve ever come across your brand, they are very unlikely to convert first time round. They might click on it, they might read the article, but they are extremely unlikely to actually make any kind of purchasing decision at that point.

You were talking about something interesting and how people really are a few steps ahead of themselves, and really how the avatar process was so important.

Most of the time I see people starting with the third and final element, which is crafting their copy and crafting their messaging. If you look at any successful campaign, the first few elements have to be, knowing your audience and having the right offer to put in front of them. Until you have those two things really nailed down, you really have no business writing any kind of copy.

This is something that I really can’t emphasize enough is that you need to know your customer as well as they know themselves, that you need to know what keeps them up at night.

You need to know what gives them that little pang of anxiety when they drive into the office in the morning. You need to know what they think about when their boss wants to talk to them or sends them an email out of the blue.

Only then can you move onto developing an offer for them. You see it a lot in startups and small businesses that they start with the offer. You might have these great products or an idea for a course or whatever the asset itself is going to be. They start with the asset and have no idea if there is actually an audience for it.

The most important thing to think about from a high level perspective, before you start any kind of marketing campaign, whether it’s Facebook ads, a content marketing strategy, or any kind of PPC, SEO any kind of digital marketing, you need to think very clearly first about who your audience is, do some really in-depth research. Develop your avatars, develop a couple of avatars.

You need to know specifically who those people are and how your offers are going to serve them before you start in on the copy and all the messaging that you put out.

Where am I going to find people who are like this?

Say you have a service business that works with corporate clients. Then you are not going to spend your time looking at small brick and mortar stores.

You are going to go specifically to corporate, then you are going to go, “Which arm of corporate am I serving? Who are the people within that arm that I’m serving? Who do those people interact with? What’s their roles, what are their responsibilities?”

What’s their self-perception with this work? What will my service enable them to do in their professional setting that will make their career better, make their sense of themselves better?

You can sort of hone down gradually, chip away kind of all the extraneous detail until you have a very clear picture of who that person is and what drives them.

For me, it’s really easy, I have a constant client who is just really funny. He is really relaxed, but he’s really organized. He pays on time, he’s very open to suggestions. He knows his business, he knows his customers. If all of my clients were like that, I would be rich and happy.

If you want more information about figuring out who your avatar is, where to find them on an ad platform, definitely check out Episode 30; we did a B2B and a B2C case study, all about ad targeting. If you want some different Google searches that you can do to try to figure out where these people are hanging out, that episode would be great for you.

Awesome, Laura, if we can’t figure out who this person is because you can’t write a piece of content, you can’t write ad copy. You really can’t even sell a product until you know who this person is.

At DigitalMarketer, we try to serve business owners and marketing professionals. Really think about that when you are looking at your customer avatars and when you are looking at your offers.

You copy and your content usually comes down to who are you serving and how you can provide value to them.

To make it simple, think about an audience, if you have an audience of a million people on Facebook, it’s very similar to going to a party with a hundred people maybe that all play golf. Maybe you sell golf instruction or you sell golf clubs or something like that.

At that party, there is probably going to be five or ten people that have intent, are actively in their personal time looking for ways to improve their golf game, or are looking to buy a new club.

What Laura is talking about right now is how you scale. If you have an audience size of say, a million people, you might have 5-10% of those that are your low hanging fruit. Imagine if you could reach the other 90%. This is how you do it. If you have Content That Converts, this is how you take the other 90% that are in your target audience but they don’t have intent because you haven’t been able to build up that desire. You can’t usually do that just in one ad.

This is how you scale, this is how you go after more than just a low hanging fruit.

You have to know them well enough through your research and through your hook, to be able to identify them in a platform like Facebook, where they are not on there to start clicking on ads, but if you captivate them and really understand what their desires or their fears are, because you’ve done this incredible background and research, and you have a good hook.

I thought your process was great, and I can’t think of anyone better to really explain how to actually produce a piece of content to get someone to buy something?

There’s your garden variety content, if you will, the blog posts, YouTube videos, podcasts, etc. The stuff that comes out really regularly from your brand. The stuff that is produced every week. Then you’ve got long-form content which is like books or training courses, really giant pieces of content take you a long time to produce, have a very high production value, and will be sold as a product in their own right.

There are some parallels between how you produce those types of content, but let’s start with the more recurring kinds of content. The first thing to know is that you should never just let out a piece of content for the sake of publishing something.

The messaging is going to be all wrong. You are not going to have any of the three key elements of a successful campaign. The first thing to do is think about where your business is at for the next quarter. What are your business’ goals, what do you want to be trying to achieve, what are your sales targets?

Then work backward.

I would always recommend picking a few key topics that you can come back to again and again, from different angles. For example, this podcast is primarily about Facebook ads and paid traffic. There are so many different elements that you can talk about under that main topic, that you could talk forever. You could just produce an endless amount.

I do this on a quarterly basis, but you can do it on a monthly basis. If you have a very slow moving business, then you can probably do it on a six-month basis. It just depends on the velocity that your business is traveling. Quarterly seems to be a good standard for most people. What I would do is pick three or four key topics that I want to talk about and then brainstorm three to six ideas for each of those topics.

Put them all down in a spreadsheet and schedule them in so that you’ve got twelve weeks’ worth of topics covered from a couple of hours work of developing these ideas.

Then you are either going to be up extremely late that night or you are not going to publish. Having a plan just makes everything so much easier. I’ve got to the point of having a quarterly planner like this, is to just take a lot of the stress out of the production process.

Plan your topics in advance, plan your headlines in advance, plan your keywords in advance, put it all in a spreadsheet, and then make sure that you know who is going to be responsible for writing it.

Make it something that you really enjoy. Go to your favorite café, have a nice cup of coffee, sit down and then work through developing this blog post. Condition yourself to make it an enjoyable experience.

The night before, I’ll actually get excited. I get to produce this piece of content tomorrow. I get to help more people through this piece of content. You look at it differently. You can really condition yourself to get excited about writing, especially if you look at how does this help me achieve my mission or the purpose and the bigger picture?

You have the three or four key points that you want to touch on for this blog post.

A lot of people have very good verbal processing skills, especially if they are used to speaking for their business or if you do a lot of presentation or a lot of sales calls. Probably the format you are really comfortable in is speech. You should really leverage that.

Send it off to a service like Rev.com and they will have it turned around, they just introduced a twelve-hour turnaround on transcriptions. You can have it done really quickly. All of the information that is in your head is not out of your head, it will take you ten or fifteen minutes to record all this information.

The hardest part is getting the key information out of all of that core material that you really want to communicate. Finding the format for your personal style that really works and that you are comfortable with is also another really powerful way of making sure that your content comes out in a way that is compelling to people, and is going to create a lot of conversion opportunities.

I’m not really getting what I hoped to get out of it.” You want to be producing stuff that you enjoy yourself because that really comes through in the presentations. Find the format that works for you and stick with the plan.

Some of those, even somewhat mediocre Siri-like tools, can really help people get over that hump or that fear of staring at that blank page. That’s the biggest thing is, you’ve just got some momentum and start writing.

What would you suggest for someone who has a business and is passionate about it, but maybe just isn’t interested in the whole content side? Do you recommend them hire someone like yourself or hire someone in-house or a mix of both?

What do you think is the best way for someone to get this whole content marketing thing done?

Whereas content is evergreen and it’s going to bring in qualified leads, consistently if you do it right. I would say, the first thing is to realize that content builds a lot of redundancy into your business.

It makes you defensible because it creates an asset that increases in value over time and that can be expanded, that can be re-purposed.

Can you speak on how you think content builds authority? Because to me, I think that’s one of the biggest benefits, when someone hears of you or they see an ad and then they go to Google or you or they go to Google your brand. They see all of this content.

It’s really powerful.

Say, for example, if you are searching for SEO strategies, someone like ViperChill is going to come up, top of the results every time, because he writes two or three thousand words blog post, that just give away the form.

They bookmark it, it goes completely nuts, because they think, “I should be paying thousands of dollars for this information. It’s so valuable, and he’s put so much work into it that I’m not going to go anywhere else for SEO strategy. That’s my guy.”

You can’t give the depth and the expertise that you can in a good blog post through an ad. You need to sort of use your ads to get people to the blog post and then when they are at your site looking at your content, that’s the point where you say like, “Here is why I’m really an authority on this. Here is everything I know. Here is everything that you need to take away from this. Here is how to leverage it.”

This company was hitting on all my desires, all my fears, all my objections. I must have read twelve blog posts, watched three different videos. I ended up buying like four of his products that night.

They must be looking at their Infusionsoft like, “Who is Ralph Burns guy? He just keeps buying stuff.” It was because his content was so damn good and I was like, “This is a really great case study. That falls really neatly into what we are going to be talking about with Laura,” because it was the content that convinced me.

You’ve got to put in the work because it does end up converting.

So many people deal with their blog as an afterthought. As something that they update when they have an afternoon free or something really big happens.

You almost have a responsibility to the people in your audience, to be putting out your best content and always putting your best foot forward, so that they can engage with what you are offering and can make sure that they are getting all those touch points with you that will lead to those long-term conversions.

You owe your customer to have a really kick-ass product that your content has convinced them that they now must buy. That’s a much more natural progression in the sales cycle.

This is dead on without question.

Most of the marketing strategies are very systematic, there is a very clear way of making progress. I didn’t feel like there was something equivalent for content marketing.

It’s everything that I have used with clients all over the world. It talks from a very high-level strategic point of view, so the initial sort of background information that you need to have and the research that you need to do to make your content marketing effective. Then it goes right down into the very tactical stuff, how to create recurring content, your monthly blog content or your podcast or YouTube videos or whatever it is that you are producing regularly, as well as how to use long form content assets like books or training courses to really make a very big impact in your industry to really set yourself apart as an authority and an expert.

Talking about how to leverage those kinds of assets, then going into some of the key areas of email marketing, SEO distribution, and copy-writing, just so that you sort of have a complete tool kit to work from.

Basically, I’m hoping that the book will serve as a complete map to a successful content marketing strategy for business owners.