MarketingZAP!
The InfoSnack IT
Habit HOW
THE INFOSNACK HABIT & HOW IT LEAVES YOU FORGOTTEN
D N A R B R U O LEAVES Y
N E T T FORGO
How The InfoSnack Habit Leaves Your Brand Forgotten View Webinar Video & See Blog Post Kim Albee: Welcome, everybody, to the webinar this morning. Our focus today is: How we snack, and how not to get left on the side like sauce. We're going to decode how we consume and snack on information, so that your brand won't be forgotten. Given the volume of content that is being produced, those that maximize how they utilize it will win in the long term. Just to give you a little bit of introduction, my name is Kim Albee. I'm the president and founder of Genoo, and our professional services agency called Content Zap. I was honored to be named one of the top 20 digital strategists in 2015 by the Online Marketing Institution. We work with businesses of all sizes to supercharge your online marketing, and build and augment your marketing teams. That's at ContentZap.com. We also offer online marketing tools and marketing automation to small and midsized businesses. That's http://www.genoo.com. What I wanted to do initially is just recap the first two webinars, because this is the third webinar in the series and concludes our series of these three. For those of you that were on them, this will just be a little refresh. For those of you that haven't yet been on them, it will be an update, so you'll know where to go get the information that were contained on the first two. The first webinar we did two weeks ago was called "No Such Thing as Social Media." We basically distinguished social networks, and the fact that content on social networks revolves around people. They go by quickly. It's fleeting, that content, as it scrolls by. We're talking about LinkedIn and Facebook and Google+ and Twitter. But media platforms, the people revolve around the content. You go out to these media platforms like YouTube and you search for a subject. You revolve around the content that gets found out there, rather than having to know the person in order to see the content. Understanding the distinction covered in that webinar is huge in the way that you design and leverage your content for engagement. The second webinar that we did last week was called "Turning Lurkers into Leads." What we looked at there was we covered the one percent rule. One percent of people create, nine percent of people contribute, and 90 percent of people lurk. What that uncovers is that 90 percent of the people who engage with your content are not at all on your lead list. The question then becomes, how do you entice participation? That's what we covered in Turning Lurkers into Leads. © 2015 Genoo, LLC.
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What's really fun is bringing people like Nick Kellet, who I'm now introducing, who is the cofounder of Listly. He's the largest list provider on the web. Introducing and bringing his ideas and his thinking to our audience, so that you can really start to look at and examine new ideas about how you distribute content, how you come up with your content strategies, and all of that. Today we're going to be looking at snacking, and info snacking specifically. How we snack, and how to not get left on the side like sauce. Nick Kellet is going to take us through exactly how to think about your content. How to think about how it gets consumed, so you can design content and distribute it in ways that will help you be effective and remembered. Without any further ado, I'm going to make Nick the presenter and we'll get going here. Nick Kellet: OK, great. This morning I'm going to basically build on the previous discussions about the difference between social platforms and media platforms. The reason we should be focused on the whole marketplace is because, we know that 90 percent of the people are just looking for passive consumers. If you don't understand that, if you don't understand the way the Internet works, and the way the models, the way all these systems put together, then in isolation you can look at your content and you'll begin to wonder what's happening, and why it's not doing what you want it to do. If you actually take a bit of time to understand the way the platforms work, then you can really make that, those platforms perform much more effectively for you. Because you're actually working with the system as opposed to against it. As the cofounder of the content platform Listly, one of the things I've thought about a lot is, we communicate the idea that Listly is a list platform for consuming quick snacks of list information. 27 tips on how to, 7 things you need to know about. We've all consumed that kind of content. In my process of communicating these ideas I discovered a lot of people didn't...I was saying that we were basically like Slideshare but for lists, or YouTube but for lists. One of the things I came across was people didn't fully get the idea of why or how they should be using Slideshare or YouTube. I basically drilled in a lot more to explain the way the systems work. This morning we're going to talk about snacking, and how now to get left out. I don't know if it's an interesting statistic, but something like 90 percent of mustard is left on the side of the plate. That's just how we consume. Content has moved to that model of just snacks. Today, I think one of the things that always strikes me is no one wants to learn anything. They just learn what's right in front of their nose. They want their immediate problems solved. If you understand that and you really get and step inside the learning process, then it changes the way of what you expect from your content, and you think about the kind of content that you should create.
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I first just want to start off by looking at why we snack. You'll see there are many reasons. It's almost full of contradiction, as well as contrast in here. We snack to remove pain, because we don't know something. We snack to solve problems. We get curious, so we snack because we're hungry. We snack for status. We're looking for things to share, because we're all part of that and we want to feed our Facebook feed. We want to appear interesting. We want to go to a cocktail party and have something new and interesting to say. We snack bit by bit to accumulate knowledge. It's interesting to me. On the one hand we snack to guard our time. We don't want to give too much time to anything. But we also snack to pass time. It's full of contrast there. We're quite addicted to the idea of just these snacks. They're fast rewarding. They give us a hit, a little, "Oh. We found that, I didn't know. That's cool." We like snacks. We don't want any big ideas. If you think of your product and your services, if you make them into a big idea, you're really going to struggle. But if you make them into mini-‐sized Mars bars, bite-‐sized chunks, things where you can just snack on, just grab a little bit of it. If you try and tell your whole story, you will really struggle. If you try and make your story consumable bit by bit, tell little sound bites of your story to get people curious. Then you're going to earn permission for them to come back. You're going to leave room for them to come back and learn more from you later in that journey. One of the things that's also changed a lot for me, and I think about it is how we learn. We used to do it so much alone on the Internet. Or before the Internet we used to read a lot. We used to read alone. Now we don't read alone. We read a Kindle and we discover that the most interesting paragraphs have been highlighted. We don't learn alone, either, because we actually use the content on the Internet as a way of collaborating. We discover stuff and we share what we find. People, who are passionate enough about something, will actually share what they've discovered. We expect that other people have solved our problem. If my TV screen isn't working, I just, or if my DVD player won't play international DVDs, I can jump on Google, and I expect to find someone will have done the answer there. They've put the answer to share, tell me exactly how to uncrack my DVD player. How to do something with my iPhone that I didn't know I needed to do. The answer is there. There is an insane ability to say, "I know I can go to the Internet and find an answer." What's interesting to me is we, I used to assume that meant Google. It does in a large part. But what I've found through doing some casual research, I've found that it's way less Google-‐dependent, than we actually first thought. The reason and the way we learn, and we each learn differently. Some of us are very visual. Some are very audio-‐centric, and some of us, we just love to see stuff. Some people like words, some people don't. You will have your own personal biases, and one of the worst things I would say you can do is apply your personal biases to your content strategy. You need to basically recognize that all people are different. Everyone has different perspectives. You need to provide your content across audio, video, as text, as lists, as graphics. © 2015 Genoo, LLC.
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Because you need to be where people are in the medium they are willing to consume in, if you want to become part of their world. When they are feeling pain, they will turn to their favorite place to search for information. If you're not there, it won't be you that's being shortlisted for the product that they're looking for. Last week we talked a lot about 1-‐9-‐90, the 1 percent rule. 1 percent of people create, 9 percent of people contribute, comment, and 90 percent of people consume. We mostly just ignore the 90 percent, and yet really, that's where we should be focusing. The 90 percent of the people who are outside of our active, visible frame of reference are there consuming our content. They are making judgments every single day to judge where we are...Whether we're a brand that they want to engage with. If they see us doing something that they don't like, they'll walk away. It's not to do with your content, they're judging your culture and your communications. Learning is why we lurk, and in many cases. We're trying to discern, distill, filter, accumulate knowledge, make decisions, solve problems, all of which is making us smarter. Whether it's giving us social capital to be smarter, whether it's solving our problems. Whatever it is, just feeding your curiosity. All of these things are helping us learn and become smarter, better. More well-‐prepared to deal with the things that we face on a day-‐to-‐day basis. The one thing that really surprised me when I drilled into this, and I have done this, you can try this yourself. I've walked into bars and coffee shops and just asked people, "How do you search?" I've asked it in many various non-‐loaded ways. I've always come back with this really interesting result. Is that people don't today, people have learned to bypass Google's algorithms. Google and search ranking is way less critical, than we used to think it was. Because people don't want single-‐URL answers. They don't want to say the best coffee...They don't want a coffee shop in a particular city. Because they trust that list, because they think that's being more biased. We don't trust shill. If there's only good reviews, we think it's bad. We expect to see a full bell curve of people liking and disliking a product. We also know that social proof exists out there. If there were no people commenting on something, if there's a few people it's less trustworthy. If there are many people, we tend to believe what's being said by the crowd. If one person's writing biased reviews, we would tend to ignore them. If a lot of people are writing stuff, we find that's much more credible. We're very, very prone to a kind of BS filter and we're constantly filtering out the noise that we hear. One of the ways that people do that is by, they look for curated lists. They look for 10, the top or the best or alternatives. These are lists, hand-‐curated lists that other people have written and created for them to find the information they're looking for. That piqued my curiosity when I first discovered that, and what I've learnt is it's actually much bigger than just moving to hand-‐curated lists. People search visually. There are a lot of people who will only now search on © 2015 Genoo, LLC.
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Instagram. If you want to discover what a city looks like, or what a product is, go and search with hashtags onto Instagram, and you can really search visually. That's not using Google. You can search visually through Google as well. People do search for images on Google. You can also search on a map. If you want to explore a city it's not necessarily that you will search through Google search results. You can pull up a map and discover connected and related information. We'll also search for infographics. The reason people search in these ways is based on their personal needs, their personal preferences, and their personal biases for learning. Some of us will be very prone and we'd ask friends. Recommendations, what would you recommend? You would see what people are saying. We're using the network, the people, the content to help us discern and filter and drive us where we want to be. If you're not inserting content into this as...If you're not creating lists, if you're not outputting video, if you're not outputting podcasts, you won't be listened to. It's guaranteed. Somebody else is going to be, another brand is going to be biasing the conversation. If you don't think about this stuff, how do I insert myself into the conversation? The thing is when someone's feeling pain, they don't search for your brand. They search for a solution to their pain, and that doesn't involve your brand. You need to get way more basic, way more simple, way more solve the beginner problem pains that people are facing in terms of the content you create. Tips and tricks how to? Answering questions on how people, how do I fix this? How do I solve this problem without actually being so product-‐focused, but more educational. Because these are, curating, list people that aren't just yourself. List your competitors. Be useful. Be a resource for your industry. Because how we search has definitely changed. One of the other things that's important about how we search is that, media is very structured these days. It's changed. If you don't follow this whole structured content model, then the way you're communicating your ideas and the way you're approaching media will be missing out. Really, there's four types of media in my mind. Paid exposure. That's buying adverts. Driving traffic to your controlled media properties. There's the owned media. You have to have your own blog. That is your media. But earned media is another massive area where people search. Because if people write about you or you get included in other people's lists, they mention you as one of the solutions to a particular problem, that's the kind of thing people are searching for, and that kind of media you earn earns you free, organic search forevermore. You can write about your own stuff and promote your own stuff, but it carries way more credence if other people pick up and write about, and rave about your brand. There's a fourth element here called social content, that is another way that we actually search. I've mentioned this before just a few seconds ago talking about people can search on Instagram for images.
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But there's three types of social content to me. There's basically shared links. We share a lot of links through social networks. There's places like reddit, Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon sources. There's collaboration platforms, like Listly is an example. There's platforms Triberr. There are social platforms where we can share links. If you're using blooferland or you've got Tweetdeck, these are all ways of getting access to that information. Then I've mentioned, and we talked about this a lot last week, media networks. Videos, slides, images, lists, et cetera. If you're not putting your content, really what you need to do if you want to get found is author your content once. Decide how you're going to tell your story, and then output it as a list. Output it as a podcast. Output it as a video. Then put these contents on these different channels, and then you can get found forevermore. Because if you just work on your blog, then the only traffic you're going to get is the stuff that comes to your blog, your owned media. But if you put your content out through these platforms, then, you can get found in many ways slowly over time, as more people link back to you and mention you and cover you. Another big group of social content are curated content platforms. Maybe you've heard of Scoop.it, Paper.li, Storify. Listly's another choice in there, obviously, and Pinterest is another content curation platform that we've all heard of. These are places people go to look. This is why search has changed, and why Google isn't as dominant as it once was. If your strategy is solely about getting onto page one of Google, you're really probably chasing the wrong goal in my mind. That's still there. That doesn't go away. But there's much more to it. When we actually drill into search, I've been explaining a bit of this about how we search. I talked about people search for the top, the best, alternatives. Because when you don't know what you're searching for, you describe your pain. As you get closer to that problem, you begin to pick up keywords that relate to the industry. That changes how you learn and what you learn. The interesting thing is if you as a brand think about what are the terms your buyer is actually using, before they become technically competent and learn your vocabulary. If you put out content that describes your product and the problems you solve in the words they use, you're the one that gets found first. Getting onto somebody's short list earlier means they come back to you, and they come back to you for more content as a trusted source to help them on their journey. Just being mindful of how these paid, owned, earned, and social content platforms play together. Learning how we search for content really should change the way about what you think you're creating. It's less about your brand, and it's more about knowledge on the questions your customers will answer. Really, you can't assume anything too sophisticated about what people will be. Because you live and breathe your brand, but your average consumer is not a brand expert. They are just getting by trying to solve problems using, and they discover you in that process.
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If you think about how people find you, you can create content that makes you easier to find. I've read lots of research talk about 15, 20-‐plus touches to convert a customer. Just to pick up on this snacking metaphor that we're focusing on today, think of the consumer experience as a banquet. Multiple snacks that I'm going to consume slowly over time. Each snack building on the last. Building trust. Earning more permission for more time to consume more. If you provide a service to that consumer as a problem-‐solver, then they're more and more inclined to trust you. Because everything they found you said was true. They begin to recognize that you're not biasing them, you're open, you're intelligent, you're useful, and you're communicating the industry as they see it and solving their problem. One of the things that are important as a consequence of this is, recognizing that you need to build a body of work. Which basically means create lots of entry points to your content. Many snacks, and start very, very basically from the problems and pains people are solving. Think about the life cycle of our content. To be with the journey throughout their journey, the buyer's journey cycle as they solve their pains and create a desire for your product. We've definitely moved to a self-‐service economy today. Because we can. Basically, marketing people have blown all prior forms of communications with over-‐bombarding people with print, and mail, and fax, and SMS, and emails. People are switching off. They go out there and anonymity is a consequence of that. So they're very, very skeptical. By the time people turn up to you, they've already done the research. They've already found you. They've already made decisions. If you're not thinking that way, then it's not your content that's biasing them, and helping them choose you. You can dislike self-‐service. You can be the one that wants your brand to be in control. But you ignore it at your peril, because the consumer is doing this, whether you like it or not. If you're not inserting your content into the mix to be problem solving-‐centric, not about your brand, not about features, not about the benefits you offer. But more about the problems you solve, and the words that the consumer is using. You are going to be missing out in the whole experience. My experience here is definitely, we get, all get too advanced. We get too intellectual. We forget that what people really don't know is the really, really simple stuff. Answer very, very simple, basic questions. Be the trusted voice that people turn to. You've got to do that by providing value, and they'll come back for more. There will be snacking. Looking at just a simple example here, moving from awareness to consideration to decision. People start with arriving with some basic, their own words, a description of what they're looking for, what they're trying to solve. As they do a bit of research they begin to pick up more vocabulary, and they begin to learn what to look for and search more smartly. They're self-‐serving. They're judging. They're evaluating. If you're not there providing content, they've shortlisted somebody else. You've missed out to be their assistant, their sage on their journey. © 2015 Genoo, LLC.
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Today, really, customers do choose us. If we embrace that, we can make ourselves more choose-‐able, more findable. 70 percent of buyers turn to Google. I think that's, actually, as I've been saying. I think that stat is a little confusing. I think people turn to Google, but then they've actually created mechanism to bypass the algorithm. If you understand the different media types, you can get found more effectively over time if you actually create content in the different media platforms, and appeal to the different types of learners that we all are. We're all different, and we all have a different perception and a different base set of knowledge, which we turn up to. Over time there is a hierarchy to your content. This is based on the Maslow hierarchy of needs. At the bottom end, you basically need to be found, be seen, be heard. That's basically having text, having video, or having audio. Moving up the levels, you need to have your own home. Have your owned media. You need to dabble with paid and earned media to get the mathematics right. You need to get your content linked and embedded, and you can move up this, up to basically being an expert. Being seen as this master of your content. Helping your customers by being useful. That's really something of that hierarchy of content. That's a really quick flyby of that mindset. But that's something where you build to that over time. Really, in conclusion, the questions are for me is, are you creating content? Are you curating? Are you answering questions? Are you asking questions to find out what it is people are actually thinking? Are you making lists? Top, best, alternatives. These are the greatest ways of finding out. Nobody goes to Google and says, "Coffee shop, mailing solution." They type in the top, the best. They're looking to see what other people have said. They don't take it as gospel. They filter from that and choose. But if you're not on those lists, so you need to work to be created, added onto other people's lists. But you can also be the voice. Be the person that provides a useful resource to people to show them, what are the top best alternatives? Tell people, what are the questions that they can be asking, and provide answers. Be useful, but be very, very basic, and build up, build from the ground up. Don't start where your brand is today. You must go as low, as low, as low as you can and build up your content from there. That's really a conclusion. I've mentioned checking out Listly as a way of creating socially compelling lists. It's a really great way of getting included, and including other people. I think we are in an age of collaboration, so if you want to be remembered, it's easier if you work with more people. You'll be more trusted. I think we're ready for some, if there's any time left for questions. Operator: We have had a couple of questions come in, but we are out of time to answer them on the call. I know that Kim has some wrap-‐up that she's going to do, so why we don't turn it back over to Kim? Any questions that came in, we will get to you after the call with your answers.
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Kim: Thank you very much, everybody, for participating on the call. We will get all the answers out to people. I did want to let you know that next week we're doing a webinar called using content to attract customers. It will talk about the content, the lead generation formula. Because there is a formula, and we're going to talk about it and explore it next week. Go back out to ContentZap/events, and you can register for that next. Again, Nick, thank you so much for the three webinars and for all your content and your thinking. I really appreciate it. If anyone has other questions for Nick, go out to Listly. Sign up, start to explore lists. That's the way that you can start to master it and start to really see what you can do. Well, thank you all very, very much. We hope to see you on a webinar soon, and thank you Nick. Nick: Thank you.
Check out the other webinars in the series: No Such Thing As Social Media? Turning Lurkers Into Leads
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About ContentZAP ContentZAP! Is a professional services digital marketing agency. We understand marketing technology and how to leverage it to help grow your business. We work with companies of all sizes to develop and implement content strategies, plan nurturing and follow-‐up sequences, or to augment content development. We sponsor events and webinars that provide practical, very useful ideas and strategies that will help marketers be more effective quickly. Sometimes reverent. Sometimes irreverent. Always relevant. contentzap.com
About Genoo Genoo is one of the most full-‐featured marketing automation solutions available, and targeted to the small and midsized business space. We love helping companies succeed with their marketing, and we are committed to building the best and most useful integrated digital marketing tools available! Inquire about a 30-‐Day initiative. www.genoo.com
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