Stephanie Beadell's Posts on the BuzzStream Blog

59 Resources for More Effective Content Promotion

Stephanie Beadell — Thu, 25 Sep 2014 12:00:06 +0000

The world of content promotion changes extremely rapidly. By keeping up on the day-to-day changes, you’ll not only be able to advise your clients and colleagues more effectively, but you’ll be able to jump on new opportunities before the competition knows they exist. Here are some of our favorite resources for content promotion.

Table of Contents:

Books (sort of) About Content Promotion

Blogs and Online Resources

Books (sort of ) About Content Promotion

It’s important to remember things in this field change incredibly fast, so many books are outdated by the time they’re published. However, there are many timeless marketing works – as well as many books that focus on the strategic & psychological aspects of marketing – that are incredibly valuable.

Books About PR & Positioning

While these books aren’t strictly about content promotion, understanding how to create effective content and connect with people in a way that generates action is a key facet of content promotion. (While we’ve focused mostly on the tactical in this post, sometimes stepping back and making a strategic study of psychology can be very worthwhile.)

Positioning

Al Ries & Jack Trout show you how to find white space for your product, and explore how you can create a position that will generate a response.

It’s worth reading this book to understand how to position your content – in a crowded field (and all the profitable fields are crowded, the only question is how crowded your space is) so it stands out and gets found.

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

Robert Cialdini wrote the definitive guide to persuasive psychology with this book. Now part of the core canon for marketing books, Cialdini writes stories about data-backed principles of persuasion like social proof, reciprocity, and more. If you read just one book on this list, read this.

Made to Stick

The Heath brothers take a deep look at what causes ideas to spread and succeed, and they conclude the key criteria are Simplicity, Unexpectedness, Concreteness, Credibility, Emotion, and Stories. This is a great book to read to understand a) how to make better content, and b) how to pitch more effectively.

Father of Spin

Larry Tye walks through the life of the notorious ‘Father of Public Relations’, Edward Bernays. While many of Bernays marketing stunts may be considered deceptive in today’s society, a lot can be learned from them. Bernays never let people tell him he couldn’t promote something.

Consider bacon an essential part of a true American breakfast? You can thank Bernays for that. He conducted a skewed survey to make it look like he had the backing of thousands of physicians. When Lucky Strike cigarettes needed more market share, Bernays put together a “freedom walk” to get women to march down the streets of New York City, cigarettes in hand. The press covered the event, smoking became socially acceptable for women, and Lucky Strike sales went up.

Books on Paid Media

Paid media platforms change every day. (As I’m writing this, Twitter just rolled out some powerful new ad targeting functionality.) When you study advertising, it’s best to study the timeless aspects – the psychology and creative techniques of how to get a response from paid broadcast messages – which haven’t changed much in hundreds of years. In fact, the best books on this topic were largely written by people who never touched a computer.

Advertising Secrets of the Written Word

Joseph Sugarman (creator and populizer of, amongst other things, Blu Blockers) writes about how to create powerful advertising copy, including a detailed way of how to write appeals to different human motivations. A lot of this book is strongly geared towards long copy direct response advertisements, so you’ll have to do some translation in your head.

My Life in Advertising

Claude Hopkins was one of the first direct response marketers of all time. This book talks about how he ascended to the top levels of marketing (then quite a new discipline) from humble roots. It also discusses how to write great direct response ads and headlines, which, despite years of technological advances in how they are delivered, the core human response hasn’t changed that much.

Ogilvy on Advertising

David Ogilvy was one of the first famous advertising men of the large agency era, and he produced extremely memorable campaigns for Schweppes, Hathaway Shirts, Rolls Royce, and Puerto Rico, amongst others. If you want to learn how to create ads that convert while improving your brand, read this book. Given its focus on glossy magazine-style articles, as well as DR advertisements, there’s a lot modern content marketers can learn from this old master.

Books on Earned Media

Earned media models change quickly, and many of the books in this space are either far too theoretical (“be a purple squirrel & crush it!”) or so tactical they rapidly become out of date.

That being said, here are some of our favorite more recent books, although sections of them are becoming less applicable as the digital landscape changes. Make sure you grab the most recent version of these, or get the ebook version that can dynamically update.

The Complete Social Media Community Manager’s Guide: Essential Tools & Tactics for Business Success

Marty Weintraub is one of the smartest digital marketers working today, and he and Lauren Litiwinka have written one of the few books on social media that’s heavy on actionable advice and short on meaningless platitudes.

This is the best book we’ve read for tactical social media advice, including how to manage your community, how to promote your content in a way that’s welcome, not spammy, on other sites, and how to amplify your content with paid and organic marketing.

Trust Me, I’m Lying

This book is radically at the other end of the spectrum. Ryan Holiday has run PR campaigns for authors like Tim Ferriss, Tucker Max, and Robert Greene, as well as for brands like American Apparel. In this book, he presents his insights for getting media coverage, ‘trading up the chain’, and using the economics of blogging to your advantage.

While this book begins with stories of less-than-savory media relations tactics, it ends with a thorough analysis of how media business models impact earned media strategies. Well worth reading, and a far better book than it initially appears.

Technical Delivery, Search, Social, and More

This is another area where the tactics rapidly go out of date. However, if you think about traffic pathways and user experiences critically & up front, you can dramatically improve your results.

Web Form Design

Luke Wroblewski writes everything you could ever want to know about how people online fill out forms. (Chances are if you’re an online marketer, at some level your entire job is getting people to fill out online forms, so it can be very helpful to know as much as you can about them.) If your content includes forms (let’s say it’s behind a lead form), or if maybe you’re trying to get people to fill out forms (like getting them to opt-in to future communications from your brand), you’ll want to read this book.

Optimize

Lee Odden consults with leading content marketers like Marketo, McKesson, LinkedIn, and other B2C and B2B companies. His strategies combine modern social and search techniques with classical marketing thinking.

This book talks about how companies can optimize their content for the customer discovery process across its lifecycle, and has some very valuable material, especially for people who are newer to SEO and social who don’t know every tag and attribute by heart. If you want to learn more about integrating many different search, social, and promotion channels with your business goals and your customer journey, this is a great book.

As Lee says, “Great content isn’t great until it’s discovered, consumed, and shared.”

Other Recommended Books

Web Analytics 2.0

Avinash Kaushik is one of the best writers on web analytics today, and this book is a masterwork. It will change how you think about measurement, and ultimately, online marketing as you learn to measure and optimize for the global maxima.

Managing the Professional Services Firm

Many readers of this book work at marketing agencies, which range from exceptionally well managed to ‘could be doing a few things better’. This is the best book we’ve read about managing a professional services firm, and we think everyone that works in or manages agencies should read it.

You’ll get some good ideas about how to differentiate and grow your firm, how to make different staffing models work for you, and understand how professional services firms in other industries are managed.

Buying In: What We Buy and Who We Are

In Buying In, Rob Walker coins the term ‘murketing’ to describe the way certain brands represent themselves to consumers. Walking through case studies from Red Bull, PBR, Timberland, and iPod, Walker makes the case that we are what we buy.

Blogs & Online Resources

Keeping up with the daily changes in the content promotion landscape can be challenging. Here are some of our favorite blogs, presentations, influencers, and resources that can help.

Content Marketing Blogs

Paid Content Promotion Platform Blogs

Paid content promotion units change exceptionally frequently – the best way to understand the shifts in the field are through the respective platforms’ blogs:

Presentations

Sometimes you need to send something to a colleague in another group, a new client, or someone who’s asked a quick question on Twitter or email. These SlideShares are easy to consume and packed full of insight:

Crap. The Content Marketing Deluge. from Velocity Partners

Doug Kessler takes on the future of content marketing, the forthcoming deluge of crap content, and how to stick out.

Simon Penson_SearchLove London 2013 from Distilled

Simon Penson talks integrated campaigns & content promotion success.

The Changing Face of Content Promotion [Pubcon 2013] from Fractl Agency

Kesley Libert shares her strategies for getting high-end content placements and winning the earned media game.

Content Promotion from WordStream

Larry Kim explains how his business found success via content promotion.

How Content Promotion Changed Our Inbound Marketing Forever from Chad Pollitt

Chad Pollit explains how the content promotion ecosystem can work together to drive results.

People to Follow

If you’re on Twitter, these people regularly tweet good insights about content promotion. To make it easier, we’ve organized everyone into a Twitter list.

Jay Baer – President, Convince & Convert
Matthew Barby – Digital Strategist, Wyatt International
Michael Brenner – Head of Strategy, NewsCred
Lisa Buyer – Author, Professor
BuzzStream -We try to share great posts, too
Joe Chernov – VP of Content, Hubspot
Kieran Flanagan – Marketing Director, HubSpot
Matt Gratt – Former BuzzStream-er
Kane Jamison – Founder, Content Harmony
Doug Kessler – Founder & Creative Director, Velocity
Kelsey Libert – Partner, Fractl
Rebecca Lieb – Analyst, Altimer Group
Isla McKetta – Content Crafter, Moz
Jason Miller – Sr. Manager Content & Social, LinkedIn
Lee Odden – CEO, TopRank
Simon Penson – Founder, Zazzle Media
Chad Pollitt – Co-Founder, Relevance
Cyrus Shepard – SEO & Content, Moz
Marty Weintraub – Founder, aimClear

How to Measure Outreach Success Using a Meta-Analysis

Stephanie Beadell — Tue, 04 Mar 2014 11:55:49 +0000

How did that last outreach campaign or template perform? It’s easy to find out; just check response rates or count up all of the links you earned.

But smart marketers want to dig deeper: What sort of outreach is working best for the company, overall? What are the best practices when doing content outreach? How do I write a good subject line? These questions are much harder to answer, and most of us rely on our intuition and experience to do so. Today, I’ll show you how to instead answer with data.

Step 1) Brainstorm

Make a list of what you’d like to measure. Include the things that experts tell you are “best practices.” Include things you believe to be true or not to be true. Think about the questions that your boss and your colleagues always ask you. Include everything.

Here’s what my list might look like:

Outreach tactic/type (e.g. content, product review, announcement)
Subject line length
Message length
Use first name in greeting?
Refer to their blog name or blog URL? In subject? In body?
Use our brand name? In subject? In body?
Use our URL? In subject? In body? In signature?
Subject line is casual? Is vague? Is formal? Is data?
CTA: Ask for link? Ask for share? Don’t ask for anything?
Has a compliment? Talks about a recent post or article? Doesn’t talk about them much at all?
Description of our brand/product/site or no description?

Step 2) Organize

Next, organize the brainstorm into an outline. Give each research question its own line. These will be your variables. I find it’s helpful to sort them into categories, too. I usually use message type, subject line, and body.

Also, make note of what type of answer each question will need. In my example above Brand Name in Subject is a Yes/No question; Outreach Type requires picking from a few categories, and Message Length is a count.

Step 3) Build Your Spreadsheet

Now you’re going to create a spreadsheet to track all of your variables. Your first four columns are where you’ll enter your template/campaign information. They are: Subject, Body, Sent, Response. (Add a fifth column for Linked if you have that data.)

After that, each variable gets its own column. I usually make a short variable name in Row 1 and then describe the variable in detail in Row 2.

It should look something like this:

Once you’ve got your template sorted, you can start entering campaign information. This is often the most tedious part of the process, so grab a coffee and find a good playlist to get you through it:

Step 4) Format the Data

Here’s where the fun begins. Take your spreadsheet and make it a table. (You can delete the row with the variable descriptions now.) In Excel, select Insert -> Table or use Ctrl + L.

Now, make it a pivot table:

Step 5) Start Analyzing

Place the variable you want to look at in the “Row Label” section, and add “Sent” and “Responded” as values. You can add a column to calculate response rate if it helps you mentally process the results (That formula is =responded/sent).

Step 6) Check for Statistical Significance

In the above example, it looks like emails that use a blog’s URL in the subject line perform much worse (11% response rate) than emails that don’t use it (56% response rate).

This is good information, but we need to figure out whether or not the difference between those two numbers is actually statistically significant. To do so, you can use chi-square calculators in Excel, or your can plug your data into this calculator by Rags Srinivasan.

In this case, I learn that, even though 56% vs. 11% seems like a huge finding, it’s not statistically significant. Therefore, I can’t really say whether or not it’s a good idea to use a blog’s URL in the subject line. This data set is telling me that it doesn’t make much of a difference either way.

Step 7) Take Lots of Notes

Keep a running list of what you’ve tested and what you’ve found. Note all the variables you looked at. Mark the ones that were statistically significant, and write out corresponding insights for each one.

Step 8) Share Insights

Share your findings with the rest of your team. Create a list of best practices that you can refer back to and/or use to train others. (Here’s mine.) Incorporate your findings into future outreach templates.

Notes & Conclusions

If you have a large enough dataset, you can pivot by person or by message type. This will help give you an idea of what types of response rates to expect when you’re planning future outreach campaigns. You may also find opportunities to recognize high performers or to train lower-performing folks.

This is very much an imperfect science, and it’s not meant to provide black-and-white results. (It’s research, not reporting.) Use it as an opportunity to figure out what’s working for your team and what isn’t. Hopefully, you’ll find some things that surprise you. (Let me know if you do!)

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