Are you creating content that educates your audience? Content marketing is not a buzzword. It is a fact of life. Buyers are trained to search for information and insight before making big purchases. Our guest is Jill Schiefelbein who wrote the book on Dynamic Communications. She shares how to create content that educates and gets the audience to move forward.
In this episode we’ll cover:
- Why a catchy title is meaningless in the online world
- Common mistakes on the content people put out there
- How people search for stuff online these days
- How to restructure your content so it can be found!
- Tips on where to go that will guide you
Target Audience: Jill brings theories of communication, education and technology together and teaches others how to put them into practice. Making it all applicable for people is her passion.
How Do You Know If Your Content Educates People?
There was a time when Jill started up a video series. And it is when she began to learn about effective communicating to educate. What are people looking for online? What do people tend to click on, etc? How are they finding what they are consuming? Jill says, it is about creating content online that can easily be found in an organic way when people search for information.
It’s Not About The Catchy Title!
People are lead to believe they’ve got to make attractive titles. Jill fell victim to this and once entitled one of her videos: “The Penguin”- after a year it had only gotten $1,200 views which was disappointing to her because of the time and money invested in what she knew to be quality content.
So, she started to do her research to understand human behavior online. And also how computers read data. She then changed “The Penguin” title to: “Calming Your nerves Before Public Speaking: Do the Penguin.” That video now has over 78,000 views.
This is all because she was able to better communicate to a computer how to position it for other people when they are searching for answers to their questions. The rules of writing are different for a digital interface.
Getting to The Root of Why People Search Online
When people do a search online it is because they have a problem they want solved or they want an answer to a question they have.
So how did Jill make the leap to 78,000 views?
A few things:
- She changed the title
- made unique and universal descriptions on all of her videos so that YouTube could interpret the keywords.
- Asked herself: What questions does this video answer?
Your positioning has to be all about not only answering that question but also stating that in your titles, headlines and descriptions in a way that the computer can also recognize that this is an answer to a specific type of question.
Other Mistakes & Restructuring How We Create Content…
When we do a search on google, we’re not typing in one or 2 words anymore- we’re are typing questions. SO- you’ve got to focus your content around questions people are actually asking.
People are more of the DIY mentality than ever before because we have access to that type of information. DIY inquiries increase every year!
Writers will put way too much information rather than being more concise at answering a question or follow up.
People want to be the expert now. 10 years ago- they’d call the expert. now people do their research FIRST and have it confirmed by the expert later.
So, to sum up, you want to create educational content that emotionally resonates with your audience.
Practical and Actionable:
Look at the content that you already have out there. How can you rephrase and retitle it? Add more descriptions to it- so that you can add to content that already has credibility online- but will be able to be found more easily for people who are looking for answers.
Use google suggest – it will tell you what’s trending and what’s relevant. Be sure to do this INCOGNITO!
Answer the public- gives you up to date questions people are asking to whatever topic you are thinking of. Then you can use those words/descriptors in your marketing.
