What To Do When You Need Bigger Results From Your Content With Jennifer Pepper From Unbounce [AMP079]
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- At Unbounce, Jennifer manages the production of content marketing initiatives and helps develop content strategy for the company’s marketing goals.
- Unbounce started blogging as a company before it even had a product. It started blogging to validate whether the problem it was trying to solve for marketers actually existed. The problem: Do people need to find a way to build dedicated landing pages without a developer or IT? Yes!
- Unbounce discovered that content and blogging was a great way to build a following by conveying authority and speaking in a way that resonated with marketers.
- Years ago, you could write content that stood out and drove traffic. However, rather than simply focusing on lifestyle, you needed to have a correlation between a product and lifestyle or journey to convert to sales.
- Many marketers realize that having so many channels, such as a blog, podcast, and ebooks, eventually do not produce results despite tons of effort. You need to create content that solves for intent and what the customer wants and needs.
- Unbounce centers on problem focus first vs. bringing a solution right away. What is the problem marketers are trying to solve? How do you meet them on the other end with the best answer on the Internet?
- By blogging first, Unbounce was able to help serve product development and validate assumptions through content.
- The process of connecting lifestyle to a core product involves what’s going to be the next growth channel in terms of content and focusing on fundamental questions and core problems. Learn to optimize the content you create.
- How do you know when it is time to pivot and change? At Unbounce, it reviewed net new traffic to a content channel and whether content attracted people and pushed them to a new trial start.
- There was content that was driving traffic, but it was old. And the traffic was dipping because it was not ranking anymore. Do you invest further in a channel that is flatlining? Or, how do you go back to that content and refresh it to attract traffic and rank again?
- Keep cornerstone content fresh and relevant and at the top of search results. Does it still answer the core question? Would you click it from a search engine results page (SERP)? If not, make changes to the content. On the Web page, how quickly does it get to the core answer? If not fast enough, revise the content. Is the best experience on the Internet for this particular question best suited to a blog post or an online experience?
- Conduct keyword research to discover the intent of what people are looking for and refresh the content. Also, find and use synonyms that relate to your product and business.
- Unbounce uses a few tools that are handy to find relevant synonyms and conduct keyword research: Ahrefs and SEObook.
- It is important to pivot from lifestyle content to optimize for product intent because of how people are interacting with the Internet. Reach the right customers in the right ways to save time and money.
- Jennifer focuses on the customer journey through curriculums - marketing as a form of education and way to nurture prospects into customers. It is about creating content that ranks through keyword research and curriculum through grouping keywords by intent.
- To put a curriculum together, ask yourself the following questions: What’s the best way to show this information online? What are customers hoping to find? Map out and determine calls to action for the customer’s journey.
- Mature content by analyzing traffic drops on posts that used to perform well. Go back to the content to identify its intent and whether the content needs to be refreshed or offer something new. Perform keyword research to cover fundamentals. Are they the best experience on the Internet?
- CoSchedule’s CEO and Founder Garrett Moon just published a book titled, 10X Marketing Formula, which discusses the content core - what you do and what you talk about to create content that gains customers.
- Jennifer Pepper
- Unbounce
- Oli Gardner
- Rand Fishkin
- How to Diagnose SEO Traffic Drops
- Ahrefs and SEObook
- 10X Marketing Formula
- AMP on iTunes - leave a review and send screenshot to podcast@coschedule.com
- “We were always creating more instead of looking to better merchandise messages and content that we’d already perfected and produced.”
- “Ask yourself have we covered the fundamentals, and second to that are they the best experience on the internet for those things? ”
- “We started blogging as a company before we even had a product...as a way of validating early on if the problem we were trying to solve for marketers actually existed.”
What To Do When You Need Bigger Results From Your Content With @PeppersWrite From @Unbounce
Click To TweetTranscript:
Nathan: Content marketing is easy, right? You just find a keyword, write a list post, rank number one on Google, get tons of traffic, and subsequently crush your goals. I mean, it should be that easy right? Well, I’ve talked to a lot of marketers recently and it sounds like the future of successful content marketing is changing. The goal of content marketing after all is to influence profitable customer action and to do that these days requires a mindset shift. That’s why you and I are chatting with Jennifer Pepper today on the Actionable Marketing Podcast. Jennifer is the marketing manager for content marketing at Unbounce. Now if you know Unbounce, you know their content is second class to none and while Jennifer’s mentality has always been about providing the best answer on the internet for every piece they publish, Jennifer has been trying a new approach that’s driving some pretty big results for Unbounce. The good news? She’s sharing that story with you today. You’re about to learn why it’s more important than ever to go beyond lifestyle or listicle content to publish content that solves for intent and to connect the dots between your audiences’ pain and your product offering. I’m not gonna lie, this episode of the Actionable Marketing Podcast is eye-opening. I’m Nathan from CoSchedule and I’m excited about this so let’s listen in with Jennifer. Hey, Jen. Thank you so much for being on the podcast today. Jen: Thanks for having me. Nathan: Yeah. I’m really excited to have you. Let’s just kick this off. Could you tell be just a little bit about Unbounce? Jen: Sure. We’re the conversion platforms for marketers which means basically we’re the easiest way to build and test custom landing pages. We now offer website pop-ups and sticky bars. We help you lower your cost-per-click for your paid campaigns through using landing pages and just launching more campaigns fast. We allow marketers to experiment and really try things out at a quicker rate than if they’d have to go through developers. Nathan: I think that’s a desperately needed thing for marketers who may not have access to developer resources. It’s been fun to see what you guys are up to. Jen, I’m kind of wondering then specifically what are some of the things that you do at Unbounce? Jen: I’m the Marketing Manager for content creation here. In a nutshell, that means I manage the production of content marketing initiatives and help develop out our content strategy aligned with all of our marketing goals. Nathan: Excellent. I could say that we’ve been following a lot of your content for a long time here at CoSchedule so it’s really exciting to be having this conversation with you specifically today. Can you just fill me in really quickly on some of that blog’s progression over the last eight years, some of the work that you’ve been doing to help bring this blog from where it’s started to where it’s at today. Jen: We started blogging as a company before we even had a product. It’ll be nine years ago this years. We started it as a way of validating early on if the problem we were trying to solve for marketers actually existed. Did people actually need to find a way to build dedicated landing pages without a developer or IT? Sure enough, in that time, Oli Gardner developed a huge following. He was critiquing landing pages and writing about landing pages examples, defining the terms of our category, and that kind of thing.
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