TJ19 – Content Marketing Like A Rockstar – Lee Odden

Hello welcome back to another episode of Traffic Jam, the podcast show where I, along with my podcast guest each week teach you how to get more traffic and build a profitable audience for your website. This is Episode#19.

Coming up on today’s show, I am talking with Lee Odden from toprankmarketing.com who is the author of Optimize, how to attract and engage more customers by integrating social media and content marketing. It’s actually Joe Pulizzi that introduced myself and Lee so I do want to say thank you Joe for putting the two of us in touch, and to you the listener, if you enjoyed the episode I put up with Joe which was #16 of Traffic Jam, then I am sure you are going to enjoy this episode with Lee as well. Not only do we pick up on the conversation I had with Joe about integrating content marketing in to your business, but we also talk about content marketing in relation to SEO as well. Lee really dishes out some great marketing in this interview; some really good proven concepts that he’s used in his own business to achieve such things as over 125,000 views of a slide share presentation and tens of thousands of downloads of an e-book. We speak about the importance of design and marketing, we talk about writing a physical book, and if the payoff is worth it because Lee has done it himself, as well as some easier to implement content marketing strategies such as using lists in your marketing and co-authoring with others. That’s all coming up with my interview with Lee in just a moment so stay tight for that, but don’t go anywhere after the interview because I’ll be giving you some more advise in the section I call the one minute traffic tip, plus of course we have this week’s news in traffic, we have some listener comments and feedback, and of course we end the show with the Traffic Jam jam which will be chosen by my guest, Lee Odden.

Before I get stuck in to the interview, let me give Lee the introduction that he so rightly deserves; he is a former member of the US Army, has been with TopRank Online Marketing for 12 years, and TopRank are a digital marketing agency that help companies, mostly Fortune 1000 Companies in the B2B space attract, engage and convert more customers by integrating content, search, social, and online PR. Lee is a coveted speaker, he is the author of Optimize and in his spare time he’s big in to sports, travel, and food. So there you go, that’s a brief introduction to Lee, my guest today, so let’s get stuck in to the interview.

James: This is Traffic Jam Episode #19 and joining me on the hot seat today is Lee Odden from toprankmarketing.com. Lee, welcome to Traffic Jam!

Lee: Hey it’s great to be here James.

James: Great to have you on the call. It is an early start, but I hear not so early for you because you’ve actually been up for 5 hours despite the fact that it’s 8am where you are. Sounds like quite a long day.

Lee: Yeah, well you know, it’s the price of being a dad and having kids and lots of work to do

James: Yeah rolling all in to our businesses, it’s got to be a challenge. Good, well at the time of recording this we are at mid-September 2013 and I understand you’ve just gotten back from content marketing world where you probably presented to several thousand guests, but more interestingly to me from what I understand, you published there a slide share presentation that’s had over 40,000 views already. I’d like to start the interview by asking you a few questions around that. From what it seems there might be quite a few marketing lessons in there that might be good to share with our listeners. So tell me a little bit about what the concept was to put this presentation together and some of the results that you’ve achieved so far.

Lee: Definitely! We are big fans of content marketing world conference. This year was the third year; I had spoken on all three years and last year in talking with the event Joe Pulizzi and how we’ve worked together, I presented the idea of what if we came up with a promotional vehicle that’s a win for everyone and so the idea of an e-book that would feature speakers and draw attention to their sessions was developed. The first e-book was called Content Marketing Secrets and it had a secret agent theme and we literally solicited the speakers in character, setting the tone that they just had a rendezvous with their handler, their secret operative back from a dangerous mission and now they’ve got a secret, a content marketing secret but what secret is that they can share to save the content marketing world, and ironically enough, some of these big brands, they answered in character as well. and so we have constructed this e-book that was designed to do a couple of different things. One, be an aggregation of useful content that anyone can find value in, whether they attend or not, but certainly to draw attention to the event and also to draw attention to individual sessions, and as a result, the conferences incentivized to promote the e-book, certainly the speakers were incentivized to promote the e-book. And we picked speakers based on the combination of their subject matter expertise and the depth and reach of their own network. This year we repeated that exercise with a different theme- rock n roll was the theme because the conference happens in Cleveland, Ohio which was the home of the rock n roll hall of fame. And so content marketing rock stars is what we went with.

James: So what sort of avenues did you use to promote this? I guess there is A- the event that you are going to be promoting themselves, that is a real benefit to them. I would assume also the speakers would probably put a little bit of light on to it as well. What are the channels you are using to get that content out there?

Lee: Part of what makes a co-created content object like this work is that built in incentives that participants can be motivated by to share and that is all factored in to the content planning so months in advance, speaker selection, looking at who their connections are and what topical relevance and authority that they have according to our objectives present and then making it attractive through email communications and romancing them to be involved and letting them know how we will be promoting and how they can help. So planting lots of seeds in a timeline of communications and ultimately giving them things like pre written tweets, giving them the embed code from slide share, and then of course we deconstructed the e-book and popped it in to Pinterest, in to Flicker, we did it for long form interviews and on blog posts and things of that nature, and lots of people liked it.

James: I love it! I mean I see a lot of similarities actually to what I am trying to do also with this podcast. I carefully select who are going to appear based on quality of the content and how much of that is aligned on to my audience but also in terms of how much reach that that particular interviewee has themselves and then kind of post interview, it really does make sense for that interviewed expert also to share the content because they also want to make themselves good and I try and make that as easy as possible for them by giving them templates to share to their own audience, I am a true testament to this because I can see things happening with my own stuff so it is great to see it at play at a larger scale through what you have done at Content Marketing World, it is fantastic!

Lee: Yeah, we have done similar projects for companies like Dell; their last e-book had 6,000 views and we did a co-created e-book and 120,000 views, same brand, same slide show channel, the magic in this is not just the idea of picking the well-known individuals who have reach and incentivizing them but the fact that what you are creating together is really awesome. They’ve got to want to belong to it, it’s got to be something that they’re proud to be really associated with, and I think that’s what really separates professionals like yourself and a lot of other link bait people are doing right, when they are just going after the famous and not after the quality.

James: Yeah. Well one thing that really struck me while looking at that slide share presentation which we will of course link off to within the show notes is the actual quality of it. Not just in terms of the content but also in terms of the lay out, the design- I mean it is high quality stuff; it’s not the presentation that has been thrown together in a few hours, there is a lot of thought that has been to it. How important is getting that sort of brand design force right to make this thing become successful?

Lee: It is absolutely huge! The hook is essential not only in the messaging but also in the aesthetic that communicates it. You have to think not just about the interestingness of it or the usefulness of it but how is the thing you’re making going to make people feel because people take actions based on emotions right? And you’ve got to align that aesthetic- the visual elements of the thing with the hook, right, with the ask so to speak. What do you want people to think and how do you want them to feel, after they consume this content what do we like them to do? Very, very important.

James: And what sort of result has this gotten for your own brand Lee? I see it sits up on slideshare.net and there is a link off to your website, how much business or direct result have you been able to attribute to exercises like these?

Lee: We view and evaluate content marketing projects like this. At the campaign level we look at them as key performance indicators, so any metric associated with it as a campaign is only a key performance indicator to the broader scale of things, so for example, our buyer is going to interact with multiple pieces of content over a period of time before they ever decide to hire us. We don’t employ sales people so everything is inbound for us and so from a KPI standpoint, having over 40,000 views, over a thousand download and sending over a hundred people to the conference is all good for the event. But as far as us, numerous people mentioned the e-book on their sites, software companies that would be perfect customers for us for example, and many of them actually embedded the deck on their site. Over 50% of the views of the deck of the slide share – e-book are the result of embeds and many of those are companies that we would like to do business with.  So we have been able to work with some pretty formidable companies as a result of people seeing from TopRank speak, from seeing our blog which is quite popular, from seeing contents like this and this is an annual thing now; we are doing it again next year and people look forward to it so I can’t say that I’ve got six customers because of that one e-book but what I can say is that we are now providing content marketing services for LinkedIn and LinkedIn, according to content marketing world is all in on content marketing going forward, so that alone is a tremendous thing. A little bit of that decision is influenced by the kind of content we create.

James: Yeah, got it. Well I’d like to a bit of extend this conversation around content marketing a little bit further; this is pretty much I think the third interview and in succession that we have spoken on the subject. Joe Pulizzi was the first, then I had Mark Schaefer on the show last week. I would guess though that perhaps as a kind of a social marketer and an SEO at heart because you do cover SEO at your range of services at TopRank Marketing, what’s your take on content marketing as a discipline because I’d like to kind of see whether it differs to those views that we had already.

Lee: It is interesting, having come from – I grew up so to speak in the digital marketing world from a webdev/ SEO standpoint – ’97, ’98, ’99 and so forth is when I started doing SEO stuff and from a search perspective people are countable for organic search traffic right? It just makes sense and so a lot of folks are identifying content in the SEO world as just creating more content, and you have PR people who think of content in terms of earned, and owned and paid media. What I think of content is that it is information that is designed for a specific audience and is intended to affect  a certain business outcome, so it is intentional. That is really the big distinction. And so if I start to understand a customer segment, if I begin to understand who my best customers are and what the buyer journey is like, what the experience is like for them when they seek out, evaluate and ultimately purchase products from a company like mine, what is that journey like? What kind of questions do they have and how can they architect content to answer those questions so that they think we’re the best answer no matter where they look, and that’s an elaboration of course but it’s that intentional design of content for a specific audience empathizing with their journey designed to affect a certain outcome and then the continuous optimization of performance.

James: Got it! So I guess that would be perhaps, one thing we could point, and I know you wanted to perhaps kind of talk about this because it is something that you have quite invested in. SEOs quite often get content marketing wrong from your definition because quite often it’s purely content for the sake of content right? So create content to increase that online imprint and perhaps increase search ranking as the result. What you are saying is that every piece that has to have that clear intention and be designed for in order for it to be productive.

Lee: Yeah and if we do those things, we don’t have to of course, we can do anything, but if we do those things the performance of our content is more easily measured and optimized from a performance standpoint. In the search world of course, one of the challenges is getting companies to create more  content so they actually deserve to rank for the phrases that will attract more customers right? So there is always this okay we optimized what’s there, great. Now what do we do? Link build? But there is more to it than that so… You know what, if I look back, and even in doing SEO in 2001, the world is looking for other content that we can get clients to come up with, and so we are looking at public relations content and customer service content, or at least we were. And so we are looking at recruiting, who’s jobless, and blogging on any content that we can find so we have always had this holistic view towards optimization and content creation. Simply as a means to get more hooks in the water so we can catch those search fishers or search fish so to speak, so a lot of SEOs, because they are held accountable to certain metrics will see content marketing simply as a means of just a matter of creating more content or creating contents that will attract more links rather than designing content for a certain customer segment than even drilling down in to that, what questions do they have as they become aware, evaluate, consider purchase and so on and so forth. Another interesting element to this is the notion of personas because obviously when you do a direct marketing, identify different characteristics of a group of customers. You can create an archetype and call that a persona so we can better understand who that group of customers as if it were a person and of course in the SEO world personas are often fake profiles of people who you use to go and link build rather than representing a group of customers. So there is that common language but it differs a little bit.

James: Yeah, absolutely. Do you find this a challenge? I mean you have spoken there about creating valuable content that serves a purpose; like one of the biggest challenges that I am sure both you and I when dealing with clients is getting them to find the resource to come up with any form of content at all. Does it become a challenge in your mind to kind of get people to create this stuff because there are a few barriers in the way right?

 Lee: Well there are, there’s obviously resources, but more so, there’s a lack of confidence. And depending on the size of the organization there may be other factors like executive sponsorship and the perception of risk or the perception that it can’t be measured, and traditional or legacy attitudes about marketing that everything can’t be directly measured to a lead and those types of things. There’s all kind of obstacles but a modern marketer is going to obviously think about things in terms of what the customer needs to buy and a legacy marketer is going to think of what kind of information the brand needs to push out there in order to be hopefully be persuasive enough to get somebody to buy and I think those who are investing in the customer experience are – they start to realize the value of content and there’s literally a content marketing maturity model we developed to help companies understand where they are now and help them plan for what resources they’ll need to capitalize on being the best where they are in the moment and then how to move forward. We look it a lot of times in Phases: Phase 1, Phase 2, Phase 3 and that sort of thing and that helps peoples understand – if I just start a blog or if I just start contributing articles to industry publications with a Twitter account, we can Masha that, we can go deep with that and then we can start to expand; that sort of thing to build the business case.

James: Yeah, I got it. Good! Well one of the agreements Lee that I have with my guests here at Traffic Jam is they have to share their most successful current traffic strategy. You’ve mentioned at the top of the show you are getting great success with these co-authored e-books, what else is getting success with you right now?

Lee: Well, one of the things that we’ve been doing is developing lists in a really meaningful way and making them an annual event so there’s this adage that people will work for a living but they’ll die for recognition you know and there’s a lot of really talented people doing some great work on specific vertical markets that are unrecognized and maybe they don’t have time to spend much on Twitter and Facebook and Google+ and LinkedIn and that sort of thing yet. Their peers know about the sort of thing that they are doing. We can shine a light on people like that and tell their story in an interesting way. Wow the propagation of that kind of thing is just wild. So an example of this is a couple of years ago I read an article in Clicks, I was listed in a social media something list or whatever. Anyway, I noticed that there’s no women in this list and I’m like I know all kinds of women who are kicking butt in social media! I’m like, are you kidding me? And so I made a list of 25 that I knew and I wrote the bios myself based on what I knew about them so they were personal. When I published that listing, Kabaam! It was a massive, massive exposure for that. 9 months went by and I am like I will do that again. So what I did was I went back to the people who were named on the list and I was like, could you nominate three people that you know to be considered on the next year’s list? And this really impressed those folks and many of them connected me with people that I never ever would have connected with otherwise. And so we narrowed down that list of 60 down to 25, we did it again, again I wrote the bios based on my research, and some of them I knew. And it’s happened a third time, and it’s happening a 4^th time this year and it’s women who rock social media. You can Google that and you’ll see this list and they’re widely popular because not a lot of folks are narrowing on that.  I see Forbes and other public magazines do that sort of thing but it’s very superficial. They are not doing a ton of research it looks like, or they are relying purely on a tool of some kind to algorithmically determine who’s popular but again, what about the people who are not really active on the social web but they are doing amazing work? How can we shine a light on them? So lists like that are another thing that we have done that are really, really successful.

James: Love it, and I am sure those listeners out there are probably getting some great ideas for their own markets and verticals because this sort of content, it would be something that most businesses could take on right? I mean you can find top performers in your market or the rock stars in your industry to create in to a slide share, I mean I love that it’s transferrable across any vertical in any industry or it will almost work everywhere I guess.

Lee: It’s very duplicatable and what stops people from doing it is the sheer amount of work to put up with a quality product, that’s it.

James: Yeah, I can imagine. Good! I mean I love it, I’ve got some great ideas for myself Lee so if no one else takes anything from this call, I certainly will! Some fantastic stuff! Now I want to ask you a little bit about your approach over at TopRank Marketing because you’ve actually got what could be a proprietary method, I don’t know, but you have a name for a process that you call optimize 360, tell me a little bit more about what that is and how you actually do it for your clients.

Lee: This notion of optimizing for customer experience is a huge driver for how we provide content marketing services and of course those are integrated with search and social and email and ads or trying to be the best answer wherever the customer is looking and so the start of that is this empathy with the customer doing how do people discover, consume and act on information. And when we answer those questions, we can implement a strategy of attract, engage and convert meaning all of the content objects that we are creating are accountable to how is it that we are going to attract a traffic meaningful to a certain audience with this content object, what messaging is going, and what platform, and what media type; video/audio, text or whatever is going to engage them best for a specific audience and then what messaging or hook or ask is going to be most meaningful for helping them to take action. An action doesn’t have to be a sale or lead, it could be a social share, it could be a referral, a recommendation, so our work in this way, this attract, engage, convert is applicable not only to customer acquisition but it’s also applicable to growing a network, growing brand visibility. And it’s also relevant not just for the buying cycle from awareness to purchase but also throughout the entire customer life cycle. So when we talk about retention, we wanted to retain our existing customers, what type of content can we do to do that and then we want to inspire advocacy of course. The best form of advertising is word of mouth, right? What can we do to facilitate word of mouth and referral through content marketing?

James: Got it, and of course you’ve written the book on this topic, Optimize, is that correct? It kind of covers the optimize 360 process?

Lee: It does! Especially if you are in the US, you can type optimize and I’m sure we registered the s as well but yeah that book has done really well for us in terms of exposure vehicle but it also educated a lot of folks that weren’t like really clear on connecting the dots in searching social and content.

James: Great! I actually wanted to ask you on that point in terms of a medium for getting you out to a large audience, how successful has an offline – your traditional printed book been for you because you’ve obviously had great success with e-books. Was the work involved in creating Optimize worth the payoff in terms of what you’ve got out of it?

Lee: Well, I think so, absolutely. I am very glad that we did the book. I’ve had a couple of folks within our own team help contribute to it so it’s really great help from the team in TopRank, and there’s just something about a tangible thing and also there’s cache to being an author so apart from the way we create a positive signal for the brand and that effort to be the best answer, what we do involves public speaking, and we do a lot of conferences and so having a book is beyond to doing solos and keynotes as opposed to a panel where you compete with other people, so that is a huge advantage just because of a book. Another thing, but this is kind of a tactical thing, some thing anyone who is an author of an e-book can do, I have been doing this  for a while since the book came out, during a session I’d say hey you know, we got his book and that’s a great book and whoever does the best tweet during my session will win a copy. And it’s unbelievable, when I’m on a session there’s 250 tweets that have happened only in my Twitter handle and things related to what I just presented so it is a very, very effective mechanism for many different reasons beyond what I just said but I’m definitely glad I did it.

James: And of course you’ve got a family Lee and taking them down to Barnes and Noble to share daddy’s book that was probably pretty cool too right?

Lee: Yeah that was pretty cool too.

James: Good stuff! Well, before we close out, I want to get your kind of viewpoint on where you think content marketing is heading because you have been in the industry quite a long time, you’ve been on the online space probably 16 years or so, where does content marketing go from here?

Lee: I think there’s two angles to that, one is of course where it’s going as an industry and I think obviously there’s a lot of convergence happening between different disciplines, advertising, public relation and marketing, a lot of those folks are being held accountable for each other’s deliverables and so content is really a vehicle to make that happen. Clearly, when you think about things in terms of how people discover, consume and act on information, it is easy to see I think mobile is a huge driver for the future of content. And not just mobile but any internet connected device really, I think it’s Ericson that and Mike Graham from Incisive Media that says a lot. By the year 2020 there will be over 50 billion internet connected devices, that’s clearly far more than there will be humans and that then powers people to do lots of things 24/7. So that’s one angle of the industry, wide, clearly visual and interactive and dynamic, participatory, the community owns the brand so to speak thing and as well and creation I think is what I see in the future. Companies will compete with industry publications than their same vertical. We already see this in some examples of American Express and Adobecmo.com so I think those are some of the future trends and clearly I think they’re going to move from a sort of status quo as just creating the content they have to be creating the content more SEO like and then moving in to more utility and storytelling and actually being able monetize content not just from customer acquisition but through syndication, through advertising, and so they can make money coming and going because their content is so effective.

James: Great stuff! Well I am sure you will be speaking about some of this stuff at your upcoming very busy October, it looks like you’re speaking at a few different places Lee, what do you have coming up?

Lee: So, on October- Social Media Examiners Social Success Summit, there are in fact, 3,000 to 4,000 people on it already, really amazing portfolio of names, Mark Schaefer, the fellow you had on previously, and Joe Pulizzi I believe will be there, Chris Brogan, Mark Smith who’s going to be talking about social media, so we are doing that on October 3^rd, Marketing Pros in Boston, there’s a B2B Conference there that they’ll be doing and several others, there’s on in New York City, in Iowa, and the International Conference of Philadelphia at the end of October.

James: Wow! It sounds like a busy month or so coming up for you, what about any overseas travel plans? I know you’re an avid traveler.

Lee: Oh yeah, in November I’ll be doing a Keen OM Expo in Madrid on November 5^th and then I am doing a workshop in Moscow for a small social media conference there in the 3^rd week of November.

James: Very nice! Well if you ever make it kind of further east over towards Dubai, it would be fantastic to see you in this neck of the woods Lee.

Lee: That would be great!

James: Good stuff, well I think we should close it out we’ve got a pack full to a 25-30 minutes of content, there’s plenty of resources for the listener to go off and find and they’ll be linked to within the show notes for Traffic Jam episode #19 but for now Lee I think we’ll close out. Thank you for such awesome content. It’s been an absolute pleasure speaking to you today and enjoy the rest of your day.

Lee: Thanks James, appreciate it.

This week’s news in traffic; Facebook has made some updates in their ad formats this week, mostly in relation to Page Posts, Link Ads, Offer Ads, and Event Ads. Most of these updates relate to ensuring ad units display in exactly the same format across all placements on Facebook thus having more consistency plus and more excitingly, larger images. If you have been keeping a close eye on your news feed, you may have noticed that the links you post now display with a larger image. This has been rolled out now to ad units too which is fantastic news!

On to Google+, they’ve introduced embedded posts. After embeddable tweets, Pinterest posts and Facebook updates, you can now also embed your Google+ posts on to your website or blog; text, photos and media posts are all supported and the embeds are fully interactive. So visitors can +1, comment, and follow you on Google+ right from your website.

In event news, the social media success summit is coming up, several of Traffic Jam guests will be appearing – Chris Brogan, James Wedmore, Pat Flynn, Joe Pulizzi, and my guest today Lee Odden will all be appearing at the summit. It’s from the 1^st through to the 24^th of October and if you’re worrying about having to jump to a plane to attend, don’t, because it is actually happening entirely online. For more information, go to SocialMediaExaminer.com.

Finally, to celebrate helping 100 companies reach on top of Google, my SEO agency SEO Sherpa are giving away to one lucky winner a three-month SEO package valued at $2400. Full details of the competition can be found at veravo.com. To register, all you need to do is enter your name and email until the 6^th of October to be in the chance to win. If you want to get your website ranking and attract new customers, what better way than to enter the competition, full details can be found at Veravo.com or by searching for my fan page on Facebook and then clicking on the competition tab, entry is free.

Thank you I have a couple of great 5-star iTunes reviews this week and the first of which comes from Jeff Ross  from the United States who says, great resource, great content for anyone looking for a boost for traffic to their site, so thank you Jeff.

The second one, Rick Noblet, he’s also from the USA and he says, James, I love Traffic Jam! The entire idea of it, the format, content; awesome! This show has a ton of actionable content people, you need to subscribe. Thank you Rick, also a fantastic comment; I really do appreciate your feedback and if you the listener would like to leave me a comment or feedback on Traffic Jam, you can head on over to iTunes, search for Traffic Jam, and leave a review or rating there. And of course you can post on the episode page of TrafficJamCast.com as well which has now moved to Veravo.com but still the best way to find it is by heading to TrafficJamCast.com and you’ll be redirected to the right location. So I look forward to receiving your comments and reviews and reading them out on next week’s show.

This week’s one minute traffic tip will help you get more clicks and thus more traffic from your online display ads, also referred to as banner ads; and the tip this week could not be simpler. Make your banner ads not look like banner ads. Consistently in testing we found that banner ads that don’t look like banner ads outperform fancy banners often by two or even three times. And the logic is pretty simple, people are basically turned off by these fancy banners as it’s blatant advertising. They’ve become blind to them and thus become more difficult to create a fancy ad that stands out and gets clicks. However, if you ad looks like a part of the editorial on a site, it bypasses people’s aversion to the advertising and it is far more likely to garner interest and thus clicks to your website. So an action step this week, if you’re doing banner advertising, go create a banner ad that is plain simple text against a white background and test it against your fancy ad and see which one wins. I’d love to know what results you get, please post your comments on the episode page over at trafficjamcast.com.

That rounds out episode#19 of Traffic Jam I’ll be doing it all again next week with another action packed episode. For more tips and training to help you get more traffic, leads, and sales from your website, check out this week’s post at veravo.com. This week I report on the new mobile ad format Google are testing that will have a huge impact on your Google ad click through rate. I also expose some cowboy SEO practitioners in a classic example of how not to do SEO, and as I mentioned earlier in the show, when you head on over to veravo.com you’ll find details of our amazing competition where you can win a three month SEO package from SEO Sherpa valued at $2400 USD just by registering your name and email before the 6^th of October.

To close out this week’s episode, of Traffic Jam, we have a musical jam chosen by my guest today Lee Odden, the artist is called Skrillex and the track is called Bangarang. See you back here again real soon for another episode of Traffic Jam.