Consider This Season 1, Episode 2: You Never Have to Write Again

https://soundcloud.com/considerthispod/season-1-episode-2-you-may-never-have-to-write-again/s-Kn9MY

Transcript

Lauren Siler: Hello and welcome to Episode 2 of Consider This. I am Lauren Siler. I’m the director of content strategy here at Newfangled.

Julia Vanderput: I’m Julia Vanderput and I’m a content marketing strategist at Newfangled.

Lauren Siler: And wow! We are so excited about the launch of this show. We’ve gotten a lot of feedback from all of you listening, so thank you for those of you who have written in and expressed your support and sent us questions. It’s just been such a fun journey already.

Julia Vanderput: It’s been really fun to hear what people’s questions are.

Lauren Siler: Yeah, yeah. As we introduced last time toward the end of each episode, we’re going to be doing a bit of a Q and A session and Julia and I both felt like that was one of the more interesting parts of the episode last time, so I think we’re going to be getting to that even faster this time.

As some of you may well know, but this might be your first time, your first introduction to Consider This, this is a podcast that’s designed to take common misconceptions about content marketing today and to present them, talk about the nuances that are involved in them and to introduce a new way of thinking about content marketing for experts.

Once we, Julia and I will show up with a topic in mind and then toward the latter half of the episode, we are going to be introducing some questions that we hear from listeners and from our clients all the time.

Julia Vanderput: So today we’re going to be speaking about how there’s this idea that creating content looks like someone with a pen and paper writing out a blog post and how that’s not really the case. There’s actually a lot of different ways, creative ways, that you can come up with content.

Lauren Siler: Yeah, it’s one of the biggest objections that we hear at a content marketing all the time. It relates to making time for your marketing. It’s just difficult to do. Admits to crazy work day where you’ve got client deliverables or just managing the day-to-day operations of your business. It’s difficult to think about carving out some time to quietly sit in a corner and put pen to paper.

Today we want to talk about, yeah as Julia mentioned, other ways to come up with content. Other ways to actually develop your expertise in a way that can be both indexed by both search engines on your website and also consumed perhaps through other media.

Julia, where should we start?

Julia Vanderput: I think what’s most interesting to me there with this idea of what are some creative ways to come up with content is that where content teams are at. Usually they don’t realize that content already exists.

Lauren Siler: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

Julia Vanderput: They’re sitting there thinking “Well, oh we have to come up with new content. We’re pressed for time. We’re coming up on holidays or a lot of people traveling. What do we do there?” Actually, they already have a lot of content. It’s just all about finding where that is and being really creative about that.

Lauren Siler: Yeah, so rather than feeling like you have to recreate the wheel every time, maybe use some of the assets that are at your disposal.

Maybe we just go ahead and get into some ideas, throwing out some ideas of how you might leverage some of the thinking that you’ve already put out there and some of the assets at your disposal.

I can start with that. One thing that I hear a lot of the time, as I mentioned, one of the objections to creating content is “I’m just so busy with client work.” And we understand that. We manage clients here at Newfangled, but one of the things that I found to be really helpful fodder for our own content team here at Newfangled was we do a lot of consulting with clients and some of that happens back and forth via email throughout the day. We get really thoughtful questions from our clients and one of the ways that I started creating efficiency in my own content creation was just coming back through my email and finding the different questions that I had answered that would definitely be on the minds of more people. And realizing that I basically already had an outline ready to go just from the response, the email that I used to respond to that person.

That was one way that you can take that kind of thinking and then start to transform it into something that could be a written blog post on site.

Julia Vanderput: Yeah, I think there’s definitely a couple questions that you’re expecting to hear from every content team as they ease their way into content strategy. Their questions tend to be about the same and so that alone, just from looking at your emails and what your answering, that’s going to be good content because you know that the interest is there. That your audience wants to hear about that. That wants to learn about that.

Lauren Siler: Yeah, it’s how you’ve developed your expertise. You are noticing trends and patterns because you are applying your expertise to similar situations. Not that they’re cookie cutter approaches but that you’ve encountered the same types of business challenges and that’s how you got good at your job.

Taking that expertise and realizing that you’ve already written about it most likely, so that’s one practical approach. Just go back through your email and just look for those little gems, those little nuggets of knowledge that you’ve delivered to your paying clients over the years and see if there’s not something there that you can really just give a heavy edit to and publish to your site.

Julia Vanderput: Yeah and it’s interesting also, it’s not just the questions you get when you already have a client. It’s also the questions you get when you’re kind of in the sales side of it, right?

Lauren Siler: Sure.

Julia Vanderput: When you’re over there presenting to a potential client or you’re at a kickoff and the questions that they have would make for great content that would be kind of latter-stage. Perhaps you even have materials ready for that presentation that you could repurpose as kind of your content.

One of the questions I got this week from a client was “We love our content that we currently have. We love our thought leadership that we’re developing with Newfangled. Can we use it for our sales?” I’m thinking “Absolutely!” And also you can do the other way around, right?

Lauren Siler: Sure, yeah.

Julia Vanderput: Anything you’re presenting already would make for great content.

Lauren Siler: Mm-hmm (affirmative) yeah. No, that’s a good point because you’re exerting this effort just through keeping your doors open, right? Through the regular biz dev operations or through day-to-day client interactions. Definitely leveraging what you’re already doing just as a part of that busy day that’s keeping you from developing content, I think that’s a really good approach to trying to create some efficiency there.

What’s another way that we might recommend somebody create content apart from the standard sit down at a blank Word document and hope for the best?

Julia Vanderput: Yeah, absolutely leveraging working relationships. What I mean by that is perhaps there’s someone like us, for example, we’re constantly talking about content strategy. We can easily talk about it and we know what our opinions are and we can evoke that in a conversation with a client and so we decided to do what? A podcast! Create content out of that, leveraging that working relationship.

You can do the same for something like a webinar. If there’s a partner or a client that there’s great chemistry there. That you guys can talk really easily about something. Oh my gosh! Put a camera in front of those two people or a few people and you’ve got yourself some video posts. Transcribe it and now you have your indexable word count and that’s a great content piece.

Lauren Siler: Mm-hmm (affirmative) Yeah, you’re tugging on the thread of something that we covered briefly in our first episode which has to do with the method by which you create content. But if you want to get an article up on the site, there is this thinking that you have to be very traditional about how you approach that so that means you need to sit down and you need to write it out. And that just doesn’t always speak to the strengths of your thought leaders.

Thinking about people, if there are people are more comfortable in different media. For instance, what you’re saying is maybe it’s a webinar and they’re out there talking about it and you’re bringing in a knowledgeable partner. That’s a creative way to get that expertise onto the website without actually sitting down and putting pen to paper. That’s definitely one way to think about that.

Julia Vanderput: There’s also the beauty of just showing people the personality that you have and a face to the name and how you think through things and what it’s like to work with you and the culture that you have, the words that you use. It’s going to be different client-to-client, brand-to-brand. Are you academic? Then that shows when you talk or are you really approachable or conversational and that’s going to show when you talk, right?

Lauren Siler: Right. Just illuminating the truth inside of your organization through different types of content.

We’ve got a recent white paper out about this. It’s all about understanding what your natural engagement and communication style is. Just when you’re out in the world. When you’re engaging with your prospects and with your clients, how are you most naturally going to be expressing yourself and educating these people?

For some people that looks like doing a ton of research ahead of time. Walking into that meeting or walking into that interaction with just every “t” crossed and “I” dotted and a ton of research in the bank that they can pull from in the midst of that conversation or in that presentation or whatever it is, having that fodder for the conversation.

Other people prefer a more improvisational style. They like to get in, to connect with the human in the room across from them on the table and that’s going to inspire them to express themselves in a more elegant way.

There are many other communication styles in between. Some people really need to be the type who sit carefully and think deeply about how they might express their expertise in the written form. Something like writing a blog post or writing a white paper works very well for them because they aren’t asked to be improvising on the spot. They’re instead getting that time to be methodical about their thinking.

I think one way to approach this first is to look at the members of your content team and say, “Okay, what are our natural strengths and weaknesses? Who’s most inclined to talk about their expertise and engage with people kind of on the fly? Who needs more time to sit and think and develop a cogent argument that is then going to be turned into a piece of content?” And don’t force people into a mold that doesn’t make sense for them.

Julia Vanderput: Yeah and I think also what we’re talking about here is kind of the difference between also people who are natural spokespeople can do a webinar and can do a video presentation, that’s an easy, creative way to put things on your site, but there’s also going to be people who are just better at sitting down with a pen and paper and actually writing it out.

I think another thing that we haven’t yet touched upon is taking big meaty pieces of content, say a white paper like you just mentioned, we have a white paper up, but taking a white paper or even an annual report and then breaking it out into different blog posts or the opposite, the inverse. Get a bunch of different blog posts that are under the same topic and make one big gated content piece.

Lauren Siler: Can you walk us through what that would like maybe in an editing of that?

Julia Vanderput: Yeah, so there are two approaches to that method. We’ll start on each side.

One, you’re suggesting “Okay, you can take a meatier piece of content, something like a white paper or webinar or a research topic, a research report, that kind of thing and you can break that out into other discrete pieces of content that you can kind of dribble out over time.” I think that works really well particularly for the blog format so if you have something that’s already in the written form that you’ve invested a ton of time in, there’s this inclination to put all that effort in, promote it once and then that was it. You’ve gotten all of the equity that you’re going to get out of it and people think that’s kind of done and tired, especially if you did a heavy promotion of that piece of content.

When what we really see is that that is not true at all. The shelf life of these things is a lot longer than the typical firm assumes that it is, so taking something that you’ve already chosen to invest your time in in that particular quarter and then taking a particular piece of and breaking it out into different smaller pieces of content and using it actually as an opportunity to cross promote back to the white paper or what the original resource was is a great way to get more longevity out of the work that you’re putting in.

You asked for an editing process, I mean that doesn’t really need to be that complex, right? Once you’ve got the initial asset, really the main editing should happen at the beginning when you’re deciding “Okay, where are the natural break points here? How many pieces of content can actually come out of this big asset, whatever it is?” And then you just take it through your normal editing process. That’s that first step.

Lauren Siler: Now the other step would be the opposite as you’re saying, right? So having multiple say blog posts and can you weave that into a larger asset. Where I think that would be really helpful is when you’re struggling to create gated content. When gated content feels like this massive mountain that you have to climb, as you’re saying, maybe you don’t have to recreate that wheel either. Maybe you’ve already gone on the record enough times about a particular theme or a particular category of your expertise and you can find a way to weave that together with minimal editing so that you are spending less time creating that content from the ground up and you’re actually just being more thoughtful about how you weave together the narrative across multiple pieces of content.

What do you think?

Julia Vanderput: Yeah, I think that’s a great point you’re making there with also thinking of what our overall goal is here with this particular gated content piece.

One of the things that I see clients struggle with somewhat is thinking of what kind of … of taking those little pieces of blog posts and then making that into a gated content piece. The idea there is, when we talk about an editing component to this gated content piece, you can take some blog posts that are under this big theme and make that big theme this white paper, this gated content piece and just look through those blog posts and making sure that with very minimal editing, you’re just reading it through, making sure it’s just cohesive. But the idea here is that you’re speaking so much about your thought leadership, that ultimately you’re going to have a lot of smaller pieces of ungated content that can together become one big, gated content piece.

Lauren Siler: I think that’s great advice because and Julia and I kind of went on a rant about this on our first episode but gated content is just so important to incorporate into your content strategy because it is what is enabling the conversion points on your site and you need multiple points of conversion on the site outside of something like your contact form in order for people to regularly engage with your brand at earlier stages of the buying cycle. Gated content is what allows you to do that, but we also know that that’s a big hurdle and for a lot of firms because it feels like it’s a much bigger deal. It feels like you should be investing a lot more time into those particular assets. I think looking back and kind of combing through what you’ve already created is a nice way to do that.

Let’s see, other ideas for creating content that maybe we’ve not yet talked about.

Julia Vanderput: I was thinking video posts.

Lauren Siler: Yeah, talk to us about that.

Julia Vanderput: Just because when I say video posts to our content team, they’re thinking “we’re going to go into a room and we’re going to record footage for one video that’s going to be five minutes long.” In fact, what ends up actually happening is they have enough video, enough footage to make several video posts. That’s something else to consider when you’re going into do one video, that might become several just because you’re sitting there naturally speaking about something. If your end result is “I’m going to go for a five minute video,”realistically you’re going to come out with two, maybe even three video posts.

Lauren Siler: Yeah and I would say that should be the plan going into something like that because it can be a lot easier to just get inside of the room when everybody’s there, everybody’s ready to go. Go ahead and plan for a few topics and Julia and I are big fans of these sort of short videos that get embedded on the site. You can upload them to something like Vimeo or YouTube and then just embed that code onto the site, but you can transcribe the audio so that you can get the SCO equity out of the transcription. That works really well, but in order for that to be a meaningfully long post, you don’t need that much content. I would think five minutes is a great place to start. So if you’re going to the trouble to block out everybody’s , to figure out what you want to write about, to get the tech set up and we’re going to talk about that later, then go ahead and make use of that time and record several of them and then throttle the release.

Maybe you block out 90 minutes, just a 90-minute window and you record four or five of these things and then you release them maybe once a week and that’s four or five weeks of content that you produced really in one felled swoop.

Julia Vanderput: Let’s talk about the tech because I believe that’s one of our Q and A questions, right?

Lauren Siler: Yes. A common question we get is “what’s the tech setup that we need for a video post?” Similar to webinars, we get this concern that the tech setup is going to be overly complex, but what we found is that it doesn’t have to be. This kind of relates to being really how precious are you going to be about your content? Of course, you don’t want to put content out there that doesn’t meet your brand’s standards or that doesn’t look pro, so that’s obviously a consideration. But you don’t need to have a professional video studio or be a video production company in order to make this happen.

In the past for videos, we, at Newfangled, have tried a number of things that have all worked out pretty well. We have a Canon 5D that we’ve used just to shoot video of a couple people talking. We’ve also used various smartphones so the Samsung Galaxy shoots really nice video. That’s what we’ll be using to publish our podcast on the YouTube Channel that we’re creating. That’s works pretty well.

I think the other thing is that the type of video posts that we’re describing, it’s not about the scenery. It’s not about going out and capturing a bunch of B-roll, doing a lot of heavy editing, making sure you’ve got supers at different stages of the video. You can create a brand video like that if you want to, but videos that are intended to give you a platform for your education for your prospects, it’s really about getting you and maybe a colleague on the screen talking the way that you do around your four walls at your business every single day whether or not there’s a camera pointed at you.

You don’t need to be investing a ton of time into the atmosphere. People are interested in what you’re firm looks like. What the day-to-day reality is. Just tell the truth. Just be where you’re going to be. Be in somebody’s office. Be in a conference room. Be in your kitchen. Wherever you’re likely to be standing around having these conversations with your colleagues, make that the set and then be done with it.

Julia Vanderput: Yeah, I really like Skidmore Studios branding bytes video series where they have two creatives who have clearly worked together for so long and they just mesh really well. It’s very obvious that they have this chemistry going and they sit down in front of a camera. It’s a straight shoot. Not a lot of editing involved and then they just talk about the topic of the video between the two of them. Sometimes they argue. Sometimes they don’t agree and I think it’s such a great example of how a video post can go so well because behind them is Skidmore Studio. You can see what it looks like. You can see what they wear to work. You can see how they’re talking to each other. It’s just a great example to do that.

Lauren Siler: And before we even jump into the next idea, I will echo that by saying I really like those too because it’s just so honest. Those guys, you can tell that that’s just how they come to work and interact with each other. It’s nice because it’s a window into how they operate and so they are talking about all this stuff that’s really thoughtful and interesting and smart, which is great, but what I really like about it as a consumer is I feel like I’m peeking behind the curtain at Skidmore and there’s something so authentic about that that makes it more memorable for me.

Julia Vanderput: Exactly. Exactly. Before we jump into the next question, we mentioned tech setup. Royalty-free music is available out there in the world. We’ll link some places for you to go find music that can accompany maybe a video or even a podcast or anything that you’re doing that’s not necessarily going to be pen to paper. If it’s going to have any audio component to it and we love rev.com. R-E-V.com for transcriptions. Not just for a video or webinar, but also if you’re doing an audio post and transforming that into a blog post which is a great creative way to get content up on your site. That’s an excellent one.

Lauren Siler: Rev.com works really well and we talked about this a little bit last time, but if you’re not already infusing transcripts into your content plan, it’s a great way to make sure that you’re publishing enough indexable content on the site.

I think the big takeaway here from the tech side of things is that it doesn’t need to be overly complicated and you might surprise yourself at how simple it can be. You need a smartphone that can shoot some decent video. Some royalty-free music if you’re going to do some sort of bumper at the beginning and end and that’s kind of it. Beyond that, you just need your expertise.

Julia Vanderput: Our next question here is “Does it make sense to use public speaking engagements for content?”

Lauren Siler: Right, yeah. That’s something that we hear a lot because we work with a lot of firms who are invited to go speak at different associations, such different events that are relevant to their industry and they spend a lot of time preparing for these things. The big answer there is “Yes, of course!”

You are creating these beautiful presentation decks. There are a number of ways that you can use those assets after the talk. One option that you can and should do is you can upload it to Slideshare which is searchable and so that’s one way just to get your brand presence out there.

You can also have a teammate record the session that you’re giving and you can either post a transcription of that onto the website or, as we were talking about earlier, what I’ve seen work out even better is to break that presentation up into meaningful chunks that could then be developed into their own discrete topics like blog posts that come from this holistic presentation that was given.

Julia Vanderput: Yeah and sometimes even if you’re maybe a guest on a webinar in someone else’s webinar, you might be able to talk to them about having it hosted on your site. There’s a lot of discussion there when you’re setting up a talk that you can leverage. You can say “Can we host this on our website? Can we have access to the people who attended this webinar?”

Lauren Siler: If it’s a virtual event, like a webinar, yeah.

Julia Vanderput: Yeah. Definitely. Always try to do that. The more you can get these assets into your system like your marketing automation system and onto your website, the better that’s going to be for your own lead development so always shoot for that, for sure.

Lauren Siler: One thing that, also just going back to the public speaking side of this, I’ve noticed in the talks that I’ve given and the talks that I’ve seen, is that some of the most meaningful content, and this is true of webinars, too, actually comes in the Q and A section. Make sure that even if you don’t have somebody there recording the entire presentation that you are finding some way to catalog the questions that come through at the end of your presentation, because there’s no better direct market research as to what’s on the minds of your prospects than the questions they are asking you within the context of that presentation.

Julia Vanderput: Absolutely. Now there are definitely content creation no-go’s also, right? Which is our final question for today. One of the things that I keep hearing a lot lately and maybe it’s conference season or I don’t know what’s going on, but I get this question a lot lately and it’s that “Where we’re going to go see this conference. Can we go ahead and write a post about us going to this conference?” And the answer to that is: Well, if you’re going to write cliff notes about your conference, right? About going there, attending, that’s not going to be enough for your content strategy. Just because it’s simply not about leadership, right? It’s almost news. You’re letting them know. “We went and this is what we saw.”

There is a way that you could spin that into content that is going to be helpful for you, that is going to be strategic. If you do it highlight your own thought leadership. For example, “This is our perspective or our take on what we saw at this conference.” But simply going and taking notes and then posting those notes, is just not going to be content.

Lauren Siler: Do you find your clients pushing back on that because it seems like you invest this time, you’re “Okay, well we paid to go and we’re all gearing up” and inside of that particular firm, that event is a big deal. They’re looking forward to it and it’s “Yeah, everybody is talking about it. The buzz, everybody’s talking about this particular event.” Does anybody ever push back on you when you saw “Well, I don’t think it would be a good idea for you to be investing your time into writing up a summary of what was covered there?”

Julia Vanderput: I do get some especially because my content teams at this point have heard me say this so often: that content needs to be useful to their audience. In a way, you could argue that talking about this conference that your audience did not attend is useful for the audience, but here’s the catch. It’s not just about it being useful for your audience, it’s also about marrying it to your thought leadership because you want that connection to be pretty strong. You want your audience to go “Well, okay. This is useful to me and they offer this.” You’ve got to kind of turn that conference post so that it is highlighting your thought leadership.

Lauren Siler: Yeah and I would say that in a lot of cases, it’s not that useful for their audiences and they think that it is. Because a lot of these industry conferences, it’s about bringing together industry peers who are delivering similar services so that everybody can learn from each other and kind of elevate the market as a whole, but the end-user, the end-customer of the people attending that trade show or that conference aren’t all that interested in what was there. So you’ve got to be really careful here because it can be a little navel gazing, to be honest. You go and you talk about all of the amazing things that are relevant to your business on the day-to-day, but is that really going to be relevant to the people who you are trying to do business with? Maybe not.

So your advice of how can I take something that I learned here and offer up a new perspective on it or maybe turn it on it’s head or debate it or pick it apart, really have a perspective before I choose to write on it. That’s really the only way that’s going to work.

Julia Vanderput: Absolutely. Yeah, put a stake to the ground. Make it yours. Yeah.

Lauren Siler: Another sort of content creation no-no that I would throw out there is that for the most part I tend to advise my clients not to publish posts about their culture.

Julia Vanderput: Absolutely.

Lauren Siler: Because it’s just … so the argument that I get in response to that is “No, no, no. You don’t understand. Our culture is part of what differentiates us. It’s also a really handy recruitment tool. We want people to understand why we’re different and that we love and care about and invest in the people who choose to spend the majority of their conscious time by working here” which I understand, but I think how that tends to manifest itself when you actually go to write is just the fluffiest pieces of content. You end up writing about a particular employee’s vacation or your supercool pets at work policy or games that you play at lunchtime together, whatever, which is awesome that those realities are there and awesome that that culture does exist. I can see a time and place for trying to make sure that that is available for potential hires to know about, but publishing it on your thought leadership platforms is a waste of really precious real estate. When you’re trying to build credibility among your prospect list, that is not the best investment of your time.

Julia Vanderput: Right. Your website is a lead development tool and it should behave that way so culture posts don’t have a room there.

I mean there’s definitely value in it and I see it as valuable, but …

Lauren Siler: Is there a context that you can think of that it would make sense to publish something that was strictly cultural on the site?

Julia Vanderput: So on your site, I was going to say that there’s a place to do that and that’s going to be in social media.

Lauren Siler: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

Julia Vanderput: To share your culture there. That’s definitely, I think, when people are looking for to assess what the culture is for a particular firm or if they want to work there, they’re going to look at those places anyway. But on the posts, I can’t really think of … I mean unless your strategic goal is to recruit and we have a content team that does that. That’s their whole thing for this content strategy is to recruit, get better recruitment. It would make sense for them to highlight their culture, for sure.

Lauren Siler: Yeah, I struggle with this too. I hedge on it sometimes, but I agree that social media is the best platform for developing or for demonstrating a culture and your recruits are going to go to your social media page, so keep that in mind.

Also keep in mind that people who want to work for your business, they also want to know that you’re really good at what you do. They want to work for a business that is a thought leader. That is on the cutting edge of whatever it is that you are an expert in. I would argue that spending time for the most part developing thought leadership instead of posting cultural posts does contribute to the recruitment effort.

Lauren Siler: The final question that I want to cover off on today actually, it was one of the ones that was submitted to us after our first episode. On our last episode we were talking about how blogging in itself is not in and of itself a full content strategy. We talked about how there are two primary roles of your content and they are to attract the unaware prospect to your website so that they can learn about you and that happens through organic non-branded indexable search, so blog posts are really great for that because that’s essentially what that medium is.

And then the second role is to engage. To engage your prospects at various stages of the buying cycle until they are ready to get in touch. The argument that Julia and I made during our last episode was that blogs are really great for the attract role, but they aren’t great at the engagement role. The question that came in from one of our listeners was “Why? Why would you say that blogs aren’t great engagement tools?” What do you think?

Julia Vanderput: Yeah, I think that blogs can be engagement tools if you think of them as there are definitely going to be touch points for your audience, right? Then there’s also this kind of … so we in our reporting here for content strategy services, we always look at things like are people signing up for your blog digest? Which implies that they really like your thought leadership and they’re signing up to learn more and to always get fresh new thought leadership from you. That really is engagement. We’re tracking engagement there for that particular post.

Lauren Siler: It is. I think the point is that blogs are not engagement tools at all, but I would say that they are weak on the engagement side.

Julia Vanderput: Right.

Lauren Siler: Here’s why. When a user comes to your site and they read some of your blog posts, the conversion points which is really, when we talk about an engagement strategy, we’re talking about points of conversion, are there forms on the site that people can be submitting? The blog doesn’t really have many that are associated with it so if I come and I read the blog and I decide I regularly want to receive the blog, I can submit a signup form to get that blog delivered to my inbox regularly.

But once I’m on the blog list, I’m on the blog list forever more. I’m never going to sign up for it again because I’m on the blog list already. So beyond that, a blog can’t really engage me further. This is where gated content comes in because every single white paper, every single webinar, every ebook that you produce is going to have its own discrete form associated with it.

Now this is important because of progressive profiling. If you are using progressive profiling, that means that every single form that a user fills out is asking different pieces of information about them. The first time that I submit a form, I might submit my name and email. The next time I’m presented with a form on the site, you might ask me something like my title or my job responsibilities. The next form I submit on the site, you might ask for my company name or what my marketing budget is or whatever it might be, but progressive profiling enables you to be a better marketer because you’re learning more and more about me with every single form submission. But in order for that to happen, those conversion points have to exist on the website and blogs can only get you so far.

Julia Vanderput: Absolutely, yeah. You raise a great point there in talking about the role of gated content in engaging your audiences for sure.

Lauren Siler: I think that pretty much covers what we wanted to get into today. Before we wrap up, one thing that I’ll mention, just going back to this idea of how to creatively create content, we do have a white paper up on the site right now. It’s called Five Communication Styles That Lead to Better Content Marketing. You can go to newfangled.com and go into our white paper section and that might give you a sense of what the five most common communication styles are that we see on content teams and then it breaks down which types of content are best suited for those different communication styles. In addition to the ideas that we’ve throw out today, if you’re looking for better understanding what the strengths and weaknesses of your team are from a content development perspective, check out that white paper. It might be helpful.

The other thing that we’ve got coming up is a webinar on this topic so on December 6, we’re going to be talking in more detail about the five communication styles and how to identify which communication style you are and which styles are on the rest of your team and then how to go about creating content that’s best suited for the way that you naturally engage with people. You can go to newfangled.com and register for that webinar. It’ll be December 6 so definitely check that out.

Julia Vanderput: And send us questions for our next episode so you can find us on Twitter and Facebook at considerthispod or you can also email us at considerthis@newfangled2020.wpengine.com. Send us your questions or even just drop us a line. Let us know what you think so far of Consider This.

Lauren Siler: Yeah, we’ve loved hearing from you so far so thank you for the support that you’ve already shown. If you enjoy the show, please go to iTunes, give us a positive rating, leave a review and don’t forget to share with your colleagues and your friends.

Julia Vanderput: Thanks you so much.

Lauren Siler: Thanks everyone.