Tara Gentile:

All right. I would love at this point to bring up Lacy Boggs who has been sitting lovely in our audience, but, really, she’s a ringer here for your benefit and mine. Lacy, why don’t we just start off by making sure everyone knows who you are and what you do and where they can find you online.

Lacy Boggs:

Sure. My name is Lacy Boggs. I’m a content marketing strategist and also a copywriter and ghost blogger. I help businesses stop blogging out into the void and praying for results and actually start connecting their content to sales. You can find me at LacyBoggs.com.

Tara Gentile:

Do you see what she did there? To blogging into the void. That’s an unaware thing.

Lacy Boggs:

That’s right.

Tara Gentile:

Then you gently guided them to the solution. Lacy is here because, and it’s specifically in this segment because Lacy geeks out on customer awareness as much as I do and all of the fun things that it can do for your business. Let’s first off start by defining content marketing because it’s something that people talk about, but don’t really know what it means, like so many other things in marketing and just business, in general. It’s one of those fun words, fun phrases, that we throw out there. What does content marketing mean to you?

Lacy Boggs:

To me, it is any time you are engaging in a conversation with your potential audience, with the idea of building a relationship that ends in a sale.

Tara Gentile:

Lovely. Make sense? Cool. For content marketing, customer awareness is really key because content marketing is the best way we have for walking people through that section or through that spectrum.  I know one of the things that you do with your clients or with your agency’s clients is actually help people make better use of the content ideas that they have. You can take a single topic or a single idea and actually explore it from all of these different angles. Can you walk us through your thought process when a client says to you, “Okay, this topic really resonates with my audience. I’d like to use it in as many different ways as possible.”

Lacy Boggs:

Sure.

Tara Gentile:

How do you approach that?

Lacy Boggs:

First of all, you can use the same piece of content or the same message across many, many different channels. You were talking about channels earlier today. You can use that same message in different snippets or different forms across all those channels. For example, if I have a podcast, I might have a great message that I want to share on my podcast. Then I definitely want to put that on my blog, maybe with some additional insights or a synthesis of what’s going on in the text underneath the podcast. Then I might put that on Facebook and go do a Facebook Live and say, “Hey, if you have questions about what I talked about on my podcast, I would love to do that on Facebook Live,” and I might put it on my Instagram or whatever. There’s a zillion ways you can keep reusing it over and over again because the people who are following me on Instagram aren’t necessarily watching my Facebook Lives, aren’t necessarily reading my blog.

There was a day when you and I started this that people followed blogs obsessively. They had their RSS feeds.

Tara Gentile:

That’s true.

Lacy Boggs:

They would read all those all the time. Nowadays, you’re very lucky if they open your email. If they actually come to your blog, whew, you’ve done something good because the days of people obsessively reading your blogs are over. Tara, you were talking about meeting people where they are. That’s one way of doing it. It’s showing up and sharing that message across multiple channels.

Tara Gentile:

Perfect. If you were to take a topic then for multiple channels, thinking through for podcasts, for the blog, for Facebook Live, for Instagram stories, whatever it might be, would you want to or could you use different levels of customer awareness to try to create some variety there, and how would you do that?

Lacy Boggs:

Absolutely, because different channels are naturally going to be more aware or less aware. Somebody who’s on my email list is naturally more aware of me. They know what I’m doing. They know who I am. They know what problem I solve probably. They probably even know what solutions I offer, whereas somebody who just finds me on Facebook or hears me on somebody else’s podcast, they’re totally unaware. They’re completely different level. When I’m, for example, writing … Let’s say I start with a blog post. I might promote that on Facebook a little differently than I promote it to my newsletter because my newsletter people already know who I am and what I do. They want to know, “What’s in it for me,” whereas, I might step back out promoting it on Facebook, which is a less aware audience for me and talk more about, “Here’s the big picture, and I’m going to solve … I’m going to tell you the solution. Okay, you’re marriage thing is a great example.”

On Facebook, I might say, “Your marriage sucks, but I can tell you why,” and in the blog post, I’m telling you why, and in the newsletter, I might be mentioning that they can get on a call with me to explore it some more.

Tara Gentile:

Awesome. To take that even one step further, I think a mistake that people make is assuming that everyone on their email list is very aware that they know what the problem is.

Lacy Boggs:

That’s true.

Tara Gentile:

That they know what you solve, even who you are. Just because someone signs up for a webinar doesn’t mean they made a real genuine connection with you yet. One of the ways I approach this is I’ll send the same email three times, and I’ll send it to unopens. I’m not sending the same email to the same … Technically, I am, but they’re not seeing it. They’re seeing different things. I’ll take a subject line, and I’ll adjust the subject line, one, to make it unaware, one, to make it problem aware, one to make it solution aware so that I’m getting as many opens on that based on different groups of people.

You mentioned the same thing with Facebook. You can do the same thing with Facebook ads. You may have one page that you’re taking people to. We do this with CoCommercial, one page, one place that we’re taking people. For Facebook ads, I might have a long form ad that’s an unaware ad, I might have a medium length ad that’s a problem aware ad, and then I might have a super short ad that’s solution aware or product aware that’s just aimed at people who already are looking for that thing.

Lacy Boggs:

Retargeting.

Tara Gentile:

Retargeting, exactly.

Lacy Boggs:

Also, you can get a lot of data from that. In your email example, if you have three different subject lines that are going to different stages of awareness, you can look at those open rates and say, “Wow. They were all totally unaware. That’s where we got the most opens, so, therefore, I need to do some more education around that or whatever. That message really resonated.”

Tara Gentile:

That is a super great point, too, because even if your people are problem aware, but you find that they’re much more responsive to an unaware message, that means they’re more motivated around the itch than they are around the real problem, and so that means you need to do more to educate them on why they should be motivated to solve that real problem, too.

When you’re thinking through a content campaign, walk us through the steps. What are you doing to make sure that by the time you get to that pitch, to the place where you’re trying to close the sale, that everyone’s on the same page as you, that they’re thinking about the solution the same way you’re thinking about the solution, so that they’re most prone to buy.

Lacy Boggs:

I love this because I do it exactly the same way you do it. I work backwards because that’s what you have to do. You have to know what the goal is first in order to get people there. You have to do this walking backwards with the awareness or walking backwards with what’s the goal and how am I going to get there before you can plan a blog post. You can’t know what the blog post should be until you know what you want them to do at the end of the cycle. I look at all the pieces, and I also try to think about just, in general, how those channels are going to play together. If I know that my lead generation strategy is to get somebody to opt in for a content upgrade on my blog post, what do I need to do after that? Then I’d have to have emails that not only deliver that content upgrade, but then probably follow up and continue that message, whereas so that message is a little bit different from the people who haven’t opted in.

The next blog post maybe assumes that they haven’t opted in, so the email message is slightly different. I’m considering how do all those channels play together and where do they diverge.

Tara Gentile:

That’s all starting to sound very complicated.

Lacy Boggs:

I realized it as I was saying it.

Tara Gentile:

This is a place where because we like to really geek out on this stuff, it’s very easy to over-complicate it, and it doesn’t have to be that complicated. Give me your simplest approach to a campaign where you’re not necessarily segmenting your audience completely, but you’re taking them step by step through the journey.

Lacy Boggs:

Sure. Very first is, when you step back to unaware, I’m thinking, “Where am I going to get those new eyeballs? How am I going to get in front of new people that are unaware?” A lot of times, that’s not going to be my blog because people are not just discovering my blog. It doesn’t happen that way anymore, unfortunately, but it might be a podcast interview. It might be a guest post somewhere else. It might be Facebook ads. That’s not working as well anymore, but there’s lots of different ways you can get in front of brand new people. Then how am I going to lead them, so I’m probably going to have content of some kind that’s going to lead them from unaware to problem aware. I’m going to tell them what that problem is, and then I might have another piece of content or a webinar or an event, something that’s really juicy to get them from problem aware to solution aware, and that’s where I’ll make my pitch.

Tara Gentile:

That’s the lead generation pitch.

Lacy Boggs:

Exactly.

Tara Gentile:

Into conversion.

Lacy Boggs:

Into conversion. Then that’s where I’ll make my pitch, and then I’ll have follow-up in my email, but it’s like that traditional … Oh, God, that word you don’t like, funnels.

Tara Gentile:

Sales funnel.

Lacy Boggs:

It is. You’re going from the bigger audience, smaller and smaller and smaller and talking to the people that you’ve lead through that.

Tara Gentile:

You don’t have to do lots of fancy segmentation to make this work. The way we’re talking about campaigns and the up and down cycle and leading people through this process, that is segmentation. This is a sneaky way really of talking about segmentation. Don’t want anyone to stress out, that, “Oh, God, this is too complicated. This is … I can’t keep track of all the different things that need to be going on.” You only need to keep track of one campaign at a time. That’s the campaign you’re currently working on, and you need to focus on finding the new eyeballs, getting them to opt in for the problem or the solution that they’re looking for, and then actually closing them on the sale.

Great. What are some of the big mistakes that small business owners make when it comes to content marketing?

Lacy Boggs:

The biggest one is not making the plan because I hear that all the time, is that, “Oh, I have a launch in two days. What can I do with my content?” Nothing. Good luck. I hope that works out for you, but, really, the further out you can plan your marketing messages, the better off you’ll be because the more time you have to lead people through that sequence, the more likely you are to get them to product aware and then the raving fan stage. It’s the planning things out is a big one.

Also, like you were saying, they focus on one stage as opposed to many as opposed to leading people down the path. My junk food story that I tell is about rocks in the river. If you imagine your customer on one side of the river and your product on the other side of the river, you have to put the rocks in and that’s your content, and if you don’t have enough, they can’t make it.

Tara Gentile:

They’re going to get wet.

Lacy Boggs:

If they’re all over the place, they can’t make it. If they’re too small or too slippery, they can’t make it. You’ve got to make it super, super clear how they get from one place to the next to get to the other side of the river. Otherwise, they fall in and they’re gone.

Tara Gentile:

Exactly. You need the right amount of rock, space the right amount so that they cannot fall in the river.

Lacy Boggs:

Guys, they fall so easily. It’s very dangerous out there.

Tara Gentile:

Like …

Lacy Boggs:

A bear, who knows?

Tara Gentile:

Think about it.

Lacy Boggs:

Oh, gosh. Bears. Come on, Tara. Think how easily we get distracted, and we’re focused on our own stuff. Our potential customers are not nearly as focused on our stuff as we are, and we still get distracted. You have to make it just so easy for them to get to point A to point B.

Tara Gentile:

Any other big mistakes you’re seeing right now?

Lacy Boggs:

You were talking about listening, social listening. The question I’ve heard recently is how do I know which content goes in which channel, and that’s actually the wrong question to ask because your content should all be playing nicely together and you have to think of it as a big web or group because I think a lot of people silo things. They think, “Here’s my podcast and here’s my blog and here’s my Facebook Live.”

Tara Gentile:

Make it worse, “Here’s my newsletter.”

Lacy Boggs:

They don’t realize that even though you’re reaching people at all these different touch points, you need to have a similar message. The podcast needs to also live on your blog, needs to also be emailed out to your people, needs to also be promoted on your Facebook Live show and so on and so forth. You’re hitting that same message in many different places.

Tara Gentile:

That is super duper key.

Lacy Boggs:

What is also awesome about that is it’s less work because you don’t have to come up with a marketing plan for each channel. It’s all the same plan.

Tara Gentile:

Have a marketing plan and use the channels as assets to your advantage.

Lacy Boggs:

As distributions.

Tara Gentile:

You don’t need a plan for each … Notice how we’re not talking about any kind of specifics, “Here’s what you do in social media. Here’s what you do on your blog.” We’re talking about marketing your business, not any particular channel. Brilliant. Do we have any questions for Lacy from you guys? This is a golden opportunity to get some free advice from someone I find very brilliant on this subject. No questions for Lacy.

Lacy Boggs:

Don’t be shy.

Tara Gentile:

Seriously? You guys all have amazing blogs and content marketing strategies? Yeah? Okay.

Lacy Boggs:

Can I ask how many of you are still blogging?

Tara Gentile:

Eww.

Lacy Boggs:

What’s that, about half maybe, a little more than half?

Tara Gentile:

A little more than half I think.

Lacy Boggs:

I think that people believe blogging is dead. I alluded to this earlier. It is not dead, but how we are using it is changing. If you’re blogging the way we were blogging five years ago, you have problems because it’s not converting, it’s not doing what it used to do. That’s why I’ve started talking about content as opposed to blogging because blogging is really just one piece of it. Even if, like me, you love to blog, and that’s the way you communicate, you still need to be using those other channels, too, to make your message heard as widely as possible.

Tara Gentile:

We talked about stories earlier, and that’s how I’m thinking about things, too, is I may have one story that I want to tell in different ways on different channels. Again, it’s content. It’s marketing. It’s not blogging or podcasting or Facebook Live-ing. It’s a story. It’s a campaign. It’s a pass that I want to take people down, and that’s going to go all over the place. Lisa?

Lisa:

You opened up a can of worms for me.

Tara Gentile:

I love cans of worms.

Lisa:

Maybe I’ll just tell you a little bit what I do, which I think is probably old school, and you can maybe give me some tips around it. I write a couple articles a month, and I have for years, and I enjoy it, but I don’t really think a lot of people are reading it, nor am I driving a lot of traffic there intentionally, other than keeping my site active and it ranks higher because of it. I wouldn’t mind some tips on how can I get my content out there. Should I be doing shorter articles, longer articles? Should I be posting, boosting posts? Maybe just a quick and dirty. If I’m doing two decent size, length sized blog posts a month, how can I optimize them or how can I do them to take less time even? Either optimize or maybe spend less time because I’m not sure that trade-off is really working right now.

Lacy Boggs:

Sure.

Lisa:

I think maybe because that’s just old school blogging because it’s just like, “I’m writing two articles.”

Lacy Boggs:

That’s super common.

Lisa:

I don’t think I’ve actually thought about much more than keeping the site active with a couple posts a month.

Lacy Boggs:

I understand. I hear that a lot, so you’re not alone. Don’t feel badly about that. Just to answer a couple of your tactical questions right off the bat, length is more important these days, especially if you’re optimizing for SEO. Google is giving preference to longer form articles, and when I say longer form, I mean 2,000 words, 1,500 words. The days where we could publish 300 words a day, every day of the week are over.

Tara Gentile:

I used to do that.

Lacy Boggs:

It was a thing. It worked back in the day. It doesn’t work anymore. Emphasis on longer form, more informative, more useful-

Lisa:

Is 1,000 considered ok, because 2,000 is pushing…

Lacy Boggs:

It’s a lot. It’s a lot.

Lisa:

1,000 is long without being…

Lacy Boggs:

For those of you who just freaked out when I said that, the flip side of that is that you don’t need to be publishing as often. If you can be consistent, if you can be useful and you can be really delivering a lot of value, you can publish less often. I like to say that consistency is more important than quantity. People are getting away with once every two weeks, even once a month. I wouldn’t go less than that because people will forget about you, but if you’re delivering a really valuable piece once a month, you’re doing okay.

Then the next part of that is, how do we optimize it? If you’re really going to delve in and write a 2,000-word article, even once a month, you want to get the most out of that. That’s a lot of work. Really, it’s about promoting. You said at the beginning that everybody knows they should be marketing, but we’re not spending very much time on it. I think it’s the same with promoting blog posts. It’s not enough to just write the post and hope that somebody will find it anymore. Nowadays, we have to be deliberately promoting and almost marketing our blog posts. It’s about figuring out where am i going to put this that more people will see it, and you mentioned boosting it on Facebook. That can work if you have the budget for it. It’s also maybe not the most budget friendly anymore. The way Facebook ads are working is changing again. Everything’s changing right now. We’re in this shifting time period. I would say figure out how can I do this that’s free that’s also going to engage more people.

Something I’m trying and I know you’re trying is Facebook Live. Even just hopping on once a week to say, “Hey, I’m going to expand a little bit on this part of my blog post,” is a great way to get people to then come to the blog post to get the rest of it. There’s lots of other little techniques and tactics you could use, but really putting some effort and energy into promoting that amazing article will help get the most out of it.

Then the third thing is to repurpose it, what we were just talking about. If you can make an audio and turn it into a podcast, if you can turn it into slides or an infographic that you can post somewhere else, if you can post it on Medium or LinkedIn, if you can share bits and pieces of it on Facebook, put it in graphics on Pinterest. Think about all the different ways you can share that same content so that you’re using that content as much as possible and reaching people where they are.

Lisa:

That makes me think. Those are great suggestions because I know sometimes I put my whole post in my email and, other times, I don’t.

Lacy Boggs:

Sure.

Lisa:

I can’t figure out what is the best, but if it was really long, I couldn’t do it (put it all in my email). I suppose you could every six months almost repurpose with a different lead-in on my email…

Lacy Boggs:

Absolutely.

Lisa:

With the same article, which would then make it worth it because you’re driving more traffic to less effort in a way.

Tara Gentile:

Even not over six months. In the course of a week, I’ve written different lead-ins, different tie-ins, different followups to the same podcast episode that’s leading people back to the show notes on my blog, that’s different emails going out in the same week, so I might write three emails about one podcast episode, but it’s all from a different angle. It hits a different pain point. It hits a different point of the customer awareness spectrum, different people are going to see it. The fact of the matter is, people aren’t opening up email the way they used to either, so sending three emails isn’t overwhelming. It’s getting more opportunity for the right people to see your content. You can do that, as well, to optimize things. If you’re writing one post a month, you might write your weekly email. It’s just a different take on that same post, and they can go there for more information, for something more in depth.

Do we have any more questions for Lacy?

Tara Gentile:

Melissa?

Melissa:

As you know, I’m making this transition in my business, and I have a podcast. I alternate between monologues and guest conversations. The monologues, I do a written version and an audio version, podcast and blog, and now that I’m making this transition in my business, that’s going to be a completely different audience, so I’m trying to figure out, how do I do the content marketing for this completely different audience or do I even do content marketing-

Lacy Boggs:

Sure.

Melissa:

For this completely different audience? How do I even approach that?

Lacy Boggs:

The first question is, where are those people hanging out? The corporate people that you want to talk to are probably not listening to a creativity … Maybe they are, but…

Melissa:

Probably not.

Lacy Boggs:

Probably not, because they don’t know that’s their problem, so they’re way unaware. They’re super unaware. We have to figure out where are they hanging out and how can we communicate and move them down this spectrum. I think we were talking about LinkedIn at lunch. That’s probably a really great prospecting channel for you. I might consider putting up an article on LinkedIn once a month that’s aimed directly at those people, and then make sure you have a strong call to action, how to get in touch with you, but focusing on where those people are hanging out and how you’re actually going to reach them. Don’t try to split your podcast and do half the episodes to your individuals and half the episodes to corporate. That’s not going to really work because I don’t think they’re listening to that podcast, but on the other hand, if you interview somebody awesome, you could run Facebook ads or LinkedIn ads, targeting people that would hire you for your corporate services, and you could use that awesome, corporate interview you did on your podcast as the piece of content to draw them in.

You can double dip, but not as much as you might think.

Tara Gentile:

I completely agree with what you said, and I think often people try to keep them so separate that they forget that they’re might actually be someone who’s super tuned in listening to that podcast, and it just takes one mention. It doesn’t have to be a whole big thing. It’s just one mention could get you a guest.

Lacy Boggs:

The common denominator is you. You’re the product in this scenario, and the common denominator is you. If you can mention it on your podcast that, “I also do corporate speaking,” or interview somebody that makes it clear, you’re marketing yourself there, too.

Melissa:

Cool. Thank you.

Tara Gentile:

Lacy, thank you so much. You dropped so much wisdom for us. Let’s all give her a round of applause.

Lacy Boggs:

Thank you. Thank you.

Tara Gentile:

Again, you can find Lacy at LacyBoggs.com. Her agency really helps people do exactly these things that we’ve been talking about, taking topic ideas and helping them hit as many new people as possible and create this content marketing strategy that puts the little rocks across the stream so you don’t fall in and get washed away in the white water. All right. Awesome. Hopefully, you’ve seen over the course of this lesson how you can really start to bring more people not only into your audience, but into that inner circle where they’re actually going to be willing to buy. This is key. If you’re not using customer awareness yet, implementing what we’ve just talked about is really going to take your marketing to a whole new level. You’re going to see doors open for you that have never been opened for you.

Again, I don’t want to oversell it, but, really, guys, this is game changing stuff!