We can spend a lot of time creating content. In doing so, we hope to get results. These results include more traffic to your website, more conversions, more subscribers to your email list, etc. If you aren't sure if your content is working for you, this episode is for you!

What you'll learn:

→ how content can support your organizational goals.
→ how to reverse engineer your content for better results.
→ ways to maximize Google Search Console
→ the importance of collecting data (even if you aren't ready to use it yet).
→ give people next steps in your content
→ researching content ideas your audience wants to hear about.

Want to skip ahead? Here are key takeaways:

[5:47] Content marketing is a long term strategy. If you aren't getting the results you want start by evaluating the content you already have. Think about your user journey and reorganize it so that it's presented in a way that speaks to them and is easy for them to find. If you're just getting started, you can speed up the process by running digital ads to your pillar content.
[5:17] Reverse engineer your donor journey to see what content is working or what might need to be added. Use your analytics to see what content people are consuming before the make a donation. Also, what pages they are leaving from and not making a donation. This will help you determine how to organize your content as well as what pages might be good for promotion via the Google Ad grant or paid digital advertising. It will also help you determine what content to update, consolidate or write.
[11:43] Build trust with search engines. One way you can do this is to prominently feature your authors and build out their profiles on your website. This allows search engines to trust that you are an authority in that area.
[15:43] Make sure people have somewhere to go once they've ready your content. When you understand how people use your website before they make a decision you can guide them to additional resources, guides, pieces of content and important pages on your website for a faster decision. You can do this in your content through links, buttons, forms etc.
[22:34] Researching to find topics that your audience cares about. This can come from simple things like google searches. Use different types of prompts like “donate to” or information searches. Also use the information that shows up in the search results to show you what people care about and are looking for. 

Resources

Google Search Console

Full Transcript

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] How are you feeling about your content marketing this year so far, it's definitely a priority in your business, I hope. But if it is something that you're feeling like isn't quite getting you the results that you want that this episode is for you. My guest today is Aaron Burnett. And he's going to be sharing ways to really think about your content in a different way, so that it works for you and starts generating more conversions and business just depending on the goal of what it is that you're trying to create.

Aaron Burnett is the CEO and founder of wheelhouse Digital Marketing Group, a fast growing digital marketing agency recognized by Inc Magazine as one of the best places to work in the United States. And by both Seattle magazine and the Puget Sound Business Journal as one of the best workplaces in Washington State. Erin delivers an engaging, inspiring conversation about building a thriving values lead business whose growth and culture are fueled by helpfulness generosity and joy and about the current state of digital marketing lens of a leading digital marketing agency.

He's going to talk about a lot of tools that maybe you're using, maybe you're not maybe you're leveraging maybe you're not. But the beauty is, is that they're all free resources that you can use to generate better content ideas, to understand more about why your content isn't performing, and tactical things that you can utilize to ensure that you're getting the most out of the content that you're creating. This is something that long term is going to be such a benefit to your organization, and something that just needs to keep pumping and thriving. But if you're feeling like it's just not doing what it needs to, this is the episode for you. And I hope that you will tune in and listen.

And before we get into it, this episode is brought to you by our digital marketing therapy workshops. We have a another amazing workshop all about content coming up soon. On June 15, and 16th. We'll have our next virtual two day conference, that it's all about generating content and building a content plan that you can live up to and execute on consistently because we know that consistency matters. So I hope you'll head on over to https://thefirstclick.net/workshops, grab your spot, grab the details about this upcoming workshop. And I can't wait to see you there. Space is extremely limited because we want to be able to work hand in hand with you to make sure you're getting a perfectly crafted plan just for you and your organization. Now, again, the URL is the first click dotnet slash workshops. Can't wait to see you there. Let's get into the episode.

[Intro] You're listening to the digital marketing therapy podcast. I'm your host, Sami Bedell-Mulhern. Each month we dive deep into a digital marketing or fundraising strategy that you can implement in your organization. Each week, you'll hear from guest experts, nonprofits, and myself on best practices, tips and resources to help you raise more money online and reach your organizational goals.

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] Hey, everybody, welcome to another episode of digital marketing therapy. My guest today is Aaron Burnett. Aaron, thank you so much for joining me.

[Aaron Burnett] Thanks very much for the opportunity. I'm excited to chat with you. 

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] And we're talking content all month. So Aaron, why don't you share with people why? Why is content marketing something that excites you and something you think is important in our organization?

[Aaron Burnett] Sure, there are a few reasons I think the most compelling is that content marketing done well has the capacity to completely change the performance of an organization and to create value that accrues over time. So unlike digital advertising, other forms of media promotion, which are dollars in and hopefully business value out and it's entirely transactional and the business value out, drops off very, very quickly after you stop spending the money. Content marketing is sort of the inverse, you will invest early on. And you the value that's driven by content marketing in isolation may seem small at the beginning, but it will accrue over time and can become a juggernaut that almost completely drives the business outcomes that you need to achieve achieve as an organization.

The other reason that I love content marketing, and that we really focus on it as a firm is that it is sort of a beautiful combination of art and science. You have to start by deconstructing user intent and user want, which you can interpret through search results you can interpret by reverse engineering conversion, conversion paths and analytics. And then you have to marry what you understand through data and through empathy with what a user is attempting to achieve with what you have to offer and build a content environment. Build the presentation environment and the right kind of content that meets a user where they are in what we call an intent based awareness framework gives them what they need. And then also anticipates what the next need is going to be so that you can move them down funnel to the outcome that you're hoping to actually achieve together.

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] Yeah, I love that. And I want to touch on something that you said at the very beginning, which is like, you know, it's investment upfront for long term gain. And so the biggest, the two biggest pain points that I hear from people are, well, we don't have time to start building content content, or they start building content, and they don't see results fast enough. And so they're like, well, this isn't working. So we should just stop. So what would you say to people that are? Maybe like, you know, we've been building content regularly for a few months, and we're not necessarily getting to where we maybe thought we would be? We're just going to quit doing it like, what would you say to those to those people?

[Aaron Burnett] Yeah, so, as in most things, digital marketing? The answer depends on the specific context. But I can give a couple of general answers. One is three, we're both talking about nonprofits. So particularly a large nonprofit, any organization of any size, typically has quite a lot of content. And typically, that content just isn't organized in a way that is suitable and drives value for end users. And so one answer could be it's great that you've been creating content. But let's look at, again, user journeys, the path to conversion, what you're hoping to achieve, what the visitors to your site are hoping to achieve. And in many instances, rather than suggesting or requiring that an organization produce mountains of new content, what we do instead is reorganize the content so that it's presented in a fashion that much more efficiently moves people to conversion to the business values shown. The other answer that I would give is that that we not infrequently work with organizations who are newer to content marketing, by helping them to create content, and then accelerating near term business value with some paid promotion, those two channels should work in complementary fashion. So if you're starting new with content marketing, you've created that first sort of locus of content that you feel confident delivers your message and has value, but it hasn't yet begun to rank or perform organically, you still can promote using digital advertising, which proves the value. And another way, you can have confidence that what you're going to see is this intersection of diminishing spend on the digital advertising side as organic performance rises.

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] Well, and as nonprofits, they have the opportunity to use the Google Ad grant, which gives them $10,000 A month in free advertising. So the way to accelerate that path for them is so much faster than any other small business that's just getting started. So that's a huge perk. But I like what you're saying about, you know, organizing your content. Because if if we've been pushing out a bunch of stuff, but we're not seeing the results we want. You know, we want to layer in that linkage between different pieces of content. So would you say like, the first step would be maybe taking an inventory of what you already have created? And understanding what's performing well, and then mapping that with kind of your experience of your visitors in your sales funnel or your donor journey? Or where would you get started with kind of that process?

[Aaron Burnett] Right. So again, broad generalization because it will depend on the specific organization. But let's assume that we're working with an organization that has some history and some substantial amount of existing content. And they also have been trying to achieve the same outcome over some period of time. So it's a nonprofit, trying to focus on fundraising. And that path is pretty clear, I would actually start by reverse engineering the donor journey, and looking at the content that people consume, the points of interaction that occur, pre donation. And then as you look at that body of information, clear patterns will emerge, you'll see that people maybe came to you via some form of promotion, and they went to a landing page, and they didn't convert, then they went to pages that describe the research or mission of your organization.

And then they went and they looked at case studies. And perhaps they looked at the about the about page on the site as well. And only then and perhaps not even on that visit did they come back and actually convert to making a donation. As you see that pattern emerge. That tells you something about the way that you need to organize your content. And even more explicitly, there may be content that's consumed early in the process. That's all about the context in which the organization is serving the people they're serving, the mission, the types of research and outcomes, and that tells you the sort of content that needs to be included the sort of content that should be invested in and suggest the way in which that content perhaps should be organized on the site. The second thing is to reverse engineer that competitive landscape.

We can take a look at search results. And you can see exactly what performs and what doesn't. And there are some specific things you can do there, as you identify topics and content types that are accelerants to content performance. One of those is called a topic depth analysis. So let's say that we're working with a nonprofit that specializes in a specific form of cancer research. And they've developed some content for that it's, again, fragmented content, it's not presented in the way that we want, we want to consolidate that content and figure out how to move it to the top of search results very, very quickly, you can deconstruct the top results in search. And you can identify topics and subtopics. And really map them out and create a superset of those topics and subtopics, aggregate your content into a single consolidated piece and write just a bit more right with better quality and greater depth in a single piece of content.

And you can actually use Search Console to resubmit that content for index and ranking. And we not infrequently see content and jump several pages in search results within 24 to 48 hours using that sort of an approach as well. So I would start with those kinds of things.

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] Well, I think the critical thing about that is you're not copying and pasting what other people are doing, you're putting your own spin, you're putting your own vision mission values, like the way that you do the work. But you're taking what people are searching for. And taking a look at what's showing up so that you have kind of that roadmap for how to make your content a little bit better. And that's right, that's all free stuff that you can do.

[Aaron Burnett] That's right. There's there's one other key ingredient to content, particularly in the nonprofit space. And it is that because of the search context, the search engines will index even more heavily than they do for other content on expertise, authority and trust. And there are things that nonprofits can do that signal that more clearly than a commercial enterprise might. So if you're in a nonprofit, and again, let's use this example of an organization that focuses on cancer research. The content creators, the people who are experts who contribute to that content should be figured prominently, they should be authors on that content. And there are things to do behind the scenes with something called schema, where you can declare this is the author, this is their LinkedIn profile, this is where you can find their author page on our site. And a credentialed author associated with a piece of quality content is significantly more valuable in search, then piece of content that's written by the research team, the marketing team, the the content team, that sort of thing. So there are tricks like that.

And then the final quite important thing that I'd suggest is that, you know, we were talking about moving people through a funnel, and we've focused on using an intent based awareness funnel, which is exactly what it sounds, we identify user intent, and the awareness that they have at that moment in time. And then we strive to serve the right content to the person in the right channel at the right time, based upon their intent and their awareness position. And then to anticipate the next awareness level and move to the next level. It's super valuable to instrument a site with analytics, so that you can identify using what's called a custom dimension, you can you can declare, this is the awareness level of this visitor. And if you do that, now, when you bring someone in through content marketing, to bring them in organically, and you want to move them down funnel, you can remarket to them using digital advertising. And you could do it at a much lower cost. Because that's an audience that use you have aggregated, you're not bidding in competition with someone else. So now you have quite an elegant and efficient sort of symbiosis between organic content marketing and digital promotion. That works quite well.

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] Yeah. And so you're talking about utilizing, you know, some more customization inside your Google Analytics that's gonna link with like your Google Tag Manager and your Google ads and or pixels that you've got running for Facebook and Instagram, or betta whatever we want to call it, right, so that all of those things are connecting. So I guess my question is, even if you're not to that point where you're ready to use that data, how early should somebody be implementing some of those systems just so that they're at least collecting that data to us at some point?

[Aaron Burnett] Always earliest possible? If that could be the first thing that we did after identifying a strategy, we're happy. And in fact, that is the first thing that we do after identifying a strategy. And even better if we can begin to work with a new client, and they already have some of this data. That makes our job so much easier.

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] Yeah, Oh, no, I love that. So if your so that kind of talks about, like ways that we're going to utilize the content that we're creating and kind of clean it up, make it work more for us, which is the goal, right? So as we think about developing that sales funnel, how important is it for us to kind of make sure that we are always dictating where people should go next? Because I feel like that's the biggest mistake people make on their websites is that they don't actually give somebody next step. So I come across this great piece of content, this is awesome. And then I'm done with it. And then what so how, how do we, you know, kind of utilize that to keep people moving and engaging through the content that we've created?

[Aaron Burnett] Yeah, that's critical. And I think you're right to ask that question, because that is the part that so often gets forgotten. And all of this content marketing is typically thought of as let's figure out the topics for which we need to create content. And then let's publish it. And sort of often in a worst case scenario, let's publish it on our blog. And the blog is exactly that experience that you just described, this is great. This is one piece of content, there's nowhere to go from here unless I want to read the rest of the blog. And so one of the key things that we do that makes our content strategies really perform is to figure out the right presentation manner, the right architecture, and the the right integration with the rest of the site, again, based upon a reverse engineering, user journeys, conversion journeys.

So for example, we created a content strategy for a very large network of senior living facilities. And they were another example of an organization that has been in business for decades. And they have a lot of content, and none of it lead anybody anywhere else. And you could see that before people converted, it took multiple visits, and they would go over here and look at facilities, and then they'd go look at case studies. And then they look at estimates of cost. And then they come back and look at the company and maybe look at pictures. And you could see real consistency in what people needed before they converted. And so what we created for them was not so much new content, what but a reimagining of that content in the context of what's called a content hub.

So there is a central point, which is the departure, it's the way that you can get to everything that you need to get all the information you would want before you make a decision. And it is from that hub and all of these spokes that then offer a lot of depth in a particular topic that a user gets whatever they need. And the value of that optimization, and restructuring and re architecture was profound for them, it increased visits to that content, aggregated by about 20, to 25%. And just that work delivered $63 For every dollar invested. That's amazing.

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] That's huge. And I think that's also called pillar content, you know, that might be another term that you might use. So if you have multiple core categories, you might have a pillar piece of content that talks a lot about the generalization of all of those things, right? Like, maybe you're typing that your cancer research example, maybe you're talking about all of the different types of cancer that you're doing research on, but if they click on those, they're going right, they're self selecting, this is the one that I care the most about, which is taking them to that piece of research, which is to take you know, so I think, um, I love, like sitting down and organizing and taking what you have, so you're not having to re create a bunch of new things. But the next hurdle we hear a lot is but then I can't repurpose stuff, people have already heard this before, they've already seen this before. So if I share it again, or if I promote it again, or if I just update this, it's gonna be old news to people, and they're gonna get sick of us.

[Aaron Burnett] Now we get to the, to the nature of the content, right? So what are you trying to do? Are you trying to drive clicks on LinkedIn or Facebook? Or are you trying to create content that delivers business value over time, if you've done your job? Well, in terms of developing content strategy, and then developing the content that's required to support the strategy, you should have, effectively what's known as evergreen content. This is content that you really don't need to update all the time. In fact, you probably shouldn't, you might refresh it to make sure that it's current. But this isn't stuff that you're likely going to go out and post about every week. You can you can respond to current events, you can make announcements, you can offer opinions, you can promote something else via those channels with much greater frequency, but that's not the intent of the kind of content that we were just talking about.

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] That's true. Um, so what other ways like if we're getting really tactical here, like what are some of the ways that we can add calls to action to our content to drive people to other places like what are some kind of fun ways that you've done that with some other clients, other than just like the generic sign up for our email newsletter, which I feel like is what a lot of people do, which doesn't really get any conversions because it's not like offering anything to anybody. All

[Aaron Burnett] right, yeah, well, so let's say you're doing this yourself, and you want to figure this out, you've already got content. And as you suggest, you just want to figure out better call stack. And there are a couple of different approaches that we use, it worked very well, sort of the the lowest tech version, is to look at your competitive set. And look at folks who are doing this really well and borrow from what you see that you know, is performing very well. The other approach that we use that works much better than that is to take a similar approach to that reverse engineering of conversion journey and apply it to a landing experience. It is not always, in fact, it's often not required that you move people from page to page to convert them. If you know what information people are required to convert, you can do that in the context of a landing page. And so what we'll do is build a visual hierarchy for a specific landing page that complements the content on that page. So that and this is kind of its borrowing from direct marketing landing pages, we're going to start by giving you what you need to know first, and we're going to answer that with some depth. And then we'll give you what you need to know. Second, and we know that this is an instance where visuals perform very well, and will move you down this single landing page with increasingly specific calls to action that might move from, you could learn a little bit more about that. And that might anchor you down the page rather than taking you away from that landing page to make a donation or support or that sort of thing with increasingly specific and direct CTAs.

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] Well, I love that because you're allowing people again, you're allowing people to self select where they are in the journey, and you're not over complicating your process, because everything's all in one space. But you the user experience is strong, because you're clicking, you're able to click and get to where you need to go right, like if you want to just go okay, yeah, I've seen enough, I'm ready to donate versus No, I think I might need a little bit more. So you know, could you maybe speaking of user experience, talk a little bit about some of the mistakes that we make when we think about, like, creating content that we think is important versus like really setting up our content for the user, that's going to be consuming it. Like I think a lot of nonprofit organizations tend to talk about themselves a lot, as opposed to like making it about the person who's consuming the content and how it solves their problem, or helps generate a solution for what they need.

[Aaron Burnett] Right? Well, you framed it perfectly. The right way to do this is to start with the user and not with yourself. And to start with data that is readily available. And again, you know, you can start with search query information on a particular topic. That will tell you quite a lot about what people want to know. You should look at things like people also as you should look at featured snippets in search results, right? So Google's attempt to answer the question before you even click anywhere on the research. That's right, that starts to tell you quite a lot about what people are interested in. And then you should vary the kinds of queries that you're using to test as well. Use informational queries. So this is what is or explain sort of queries, use transactional queries. So donate to, you'll get very different results. Use research questions about the space in which you're serving or the community that you're serving, you'll get very interesting results, and you can start to explore again, even just using those search features, will give you quite a lot of information on not just the kind of content you should consider. But the lens through which you should consider creating that content as well. Now, if you're working with a good content strategy team, or an agency, they also should be performing pretty serious competitive analysis. And what is called a content gap analysis as well, which shows you overlap with top competitors, those competitors, you might view as your competitors and those competitors who simply are because they're outperforming you in search, and they'll show you overlap, and they'll show you gaps. And then they'll be able to tease out those opportunities. That if you think of a Venn diagram, that are the overlap, the intersection of what you want to say, and what you can actually rank for what you can perform for, and all of that, again, through the lens of reverse engineering, that conversion journey starts to give you real clarity with regard to content strategy and the architecture in which that content strategy should be presented.

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] Yeah, and I I like what you're saying about the reverse engineering and all of that and taking things back to your goals because as you're doing this research, and you're figuring out what you want to rank for and where you're going. I think a lot of times we can get in our own heads about different numbers and metrics and competitiveness and yada, yada yada that we can lose sight of like, well, yeah, sure I can rank for this term really easily. But then when you think about how that actually relates to your customer journey, it doesn't, it's like still eight steps extra that you need to create in order to kind of move them through. Right. So I think, like, we need to be careful about the way that we're using those terms and not getting excited about oh, well, this one has 10,000 searches every month, I'm gonna go for that, versus maybe something that only has 200. But it's easy to rank for, and it's completely aligned with who your audience is and where they're at.

[Aaron Burnett] That's exactly right. And in fact, we pay almost no attention to search ranking. Yeah, anymore. When we work with clients, we're focused on business value, what are you trying to achieve? If it's donations, then we're focused on that. If it's signing up to receive content from us via some newsletter, we're updates, then we'll focus on that it's all about the business value. Because I mean, for lots of reasons. One of them is most of those metrics are vanity metrics. Yep, I can show all sorts of fantastic vanity metrics for organizations that aren't performing at all from a business perspective.

The second is that search results are so sophisticated, and so tuned to your location, device, search history, all of those sorts of things. That saying you ranked third for something isn't really meaningful. But if you know, we ranked third, for me sitting in my office in this geography, with your search history, you might very well have an entirely different presentation in search results, though, it's it's not super meaningful. If you're interested in that sort of performance, the way to find it is not in ranking tools. It's in your in diagnostics, it's looking in Search Console, which tells you about your visibility for searches, which by the way, I should have mentioned is also a fantastic source of information for content strategy. Look in Search Console. Search Console tells you what happens before people click on your site, what you were visible for what queries in what geographies on what device is in what search position and takes into account all of the variability of search history and all those sorts of things, and gives you great fodder for content strategy. And then analytics takes over when someone actually clicks on your site. So if you were to just look in Search Console, you can see that ranking tools have almost no validity anymore.

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] Yeah. Well, and I think that's good news. Because it's, you know, it's, I think everything is just moving to quality of content, quality of user experience, quality of reaching the people that you're, you're trying to target. And so I think every time people flip out about an algorithm change, like it really is just about like, Are you being a good human, and trying to reach out to other humans and providing information that they care about? So speaking of that, we can't have a conversation about content without talking about AI. And I don't want to get too into the weeds here, because it's like an ever evolving, always changing. You know, by the time this podcast goes live, who knows what's going to be out there within the AI space? But I'm just curious, your thoughts on how things are shifting with this, and how many companies are providing AI ghost writing tools? We don't need to talk about any one in particular. But like what you see, is that, that that playing a role in the content space? Yeah, it's a very loaded question. I understand.

[Aaron Burnett] It really is, and I have strong opinions on it. So I think I'll answer directly and in delicately. So I think I think AI is likely to eviscerate the bottom of the Digital Agency Marketing. Because those low level taxes, including low quality content generation at scale, which has been core to some kinds of content marketing for a long time, now don't require people in that same way. And, you know, as with every other aspect of digital marketing over time, immediately on the scene are scammers who want to figure out a way to game the system and do it at scale, make as much money in a shorter period of time as they can because they know it's gonna get burned down in 12 to 18 months. Those people are coming out of the woodwork. But I think that I feel pretty confident that detection of AI generated content is very close on the heels of what we're seeing there already are API's that allow for detection against some large language models. Chet GPT is working on implementing a watermark for its content. And, and so I think that that will be detected. I think that the risk for low quality agencies, agencies that aren't focused on quality and expertise as their core deliverable is that they will rightly be seen as commodities. Yeah. And their their market will disappear.

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] I agree with everything you're saying. I think they're still in is nothing better than using your own voice and connecting with people in the way that that you your values and the way that you show up that robot just can't ever fully replicate. So I just, you know, we have to bring it up. It's just a hot topic these days. Well, I'm Erin, thank you so much for bringing some additional ways for people to uplevel their content. We haven't talked about that a lot on this podcast. And so I think that that's great. And just a good reminder to just use the free tools that are here for you. It doesn't have to be overcomplicated, but use them. To help you up level. If there's any kind of piece of advice or last thing that you'd love to mention about content and marketing. What would that be?

[Aaron Burnett] If I could impart one thing it is start with the user and what they're trying to achieve.

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] Yep, reverse engineering is a common theme in digital marketing and a common theme on this podcast. So that sound advice? Well, Aaron, thank you so much for being here. If people want to connect with you more or learn more from you, how do they do that?

[Aaron Burnett] They can reach me by email aaron@wheelhousedmg.com on Twitter. I'm at Aaron Burnett. And my wheelhouse. I started my website is https://wheelhousedmg.com

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] I love it. And we will have all of this linked up in the show notes at https://thefirstclick.net/203 Aaron, thank you so much for being here.

[Aaron Burnett] Thanks very much. It was a fun conversation.

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] I am so glad that you are here with me for this month of content. Thank you so much for joining us for this episode. All of the amazing resources and tools and links that Aaron mentioned in this episode will be linked up at https://thefirstclick.net/203. I'm excited to have you listening and up leveling your content this month alongside us. If you have any questions, please reach out to us hello@thefirstclick.net. But in the meantime, new episodes released every Tuesday so make sure you subscribe where you listen so you don't miss a single one and leave us a five star review while while you're at it so that we can get in front of more nonprofits just like yourself and support them in their content marketing journey for now, I'll see you in the next one.