How to Create Expert Content: Multi-Channel Fit

• Updated on: 2017-12-07
• Read original article here

To make the most of every expert content piece you publish, you should design it in a way that fits most distribution channels. Organic search, newsletters, social posts – wherever you publish content, it should drive maximum conversions.

This post will share some tips to ensure your content performs well across all channels.

In my previous two posts, I discussed two pillars of a solid content strategy:

The third pillar is that unless you’re at liberty to pump money into content, everything you create should be inherently multi-channel.

At the very least, your expert article needs to be adapted for search engine optimization, social publishing, and email promotion.

Let’s start with SEO. We’ve already laid out the solid ground for this when we collected keywords and based our work on them. There are still a number of things to keep in mind:

Some of our travel projects receive 80 percent of their traffic from mobile phones and tablets. That “mobile-first” mantra has been here for half of a decade, but thousands of e-commerce websites are still not optimized for mobile viewing. Don’t be like them, make your article mobile-first.

That means readable fonts, full-width images, and no horizontal scrolling (pretty please). In addition to making it easier for your clients to read the text, it’ll help you rank higher compared to your desktop-only competitors.

Consider implementing the AMP standard. Google is obsessed with page loading speed, and while being AMP-ready is not a ranking signal yet, my hunch is that the resulting customer satisfaction already is.

For many competitive keywords, we’ve been able to rank pretty high just because of using a sane internal linking scheme. If you publish the article on your website, create internal links:

There are two models when it comes to broadcasting content over social networks.

Some companies craft a separate piece of content for each network, trying to achieve maximum performance.

We practice more cost-effective approach, under which we create multi-channel content right from the start. That helps us align all the efforts across different social channels and avoid repetitive tasks.

To save everyone’s time, the first photo chosen by the expert at the outlining stage should be suitable as a cover image for your social posts. That also prevents the common issue when an SMM staff selects a beautiful (to his or her taste) but absolutely irrelevant picture for a post.

The same goes for the first few sentences of an article. Ideally, you should be able to use them as a post teaser without any modification. With a bit of work to instruct copywriters, it’s perfectly doable.

Depending on your acquisition model, you either drive customers to the full content published on your website and try to convert them there, or you make your social posts actionable by themselves.

In the first case, check that your web pages have proper OpenGraph meta tags. These provide attractive and thumbnails when you link your article on third-party sites.

Remember the first part, where we were trying hard to get an experts’ buy-in? Now it’s time to reap the benefits.

As our experts have participated actively in the content creation, they will be more than eager to help promote it on social networks. The only thing you might want to ensure first is a couple of ground rules to follow the brand identify and exclude inappropriate language.

Email marketing is praised by many professionals as one of the most effective channels, especially in B2B.

But if you don’t have a dedicated person to manage the mailing list, the main problem you would run into is who is going to create adapted content. Like with the social channels, we work around this issue by using the first image and a teaser of the article in emails. It goes without saying that it requires copywriters to give particular attention to this part of the content, making it attractive and engaging.

Every piece of content you create should be crafted with the target action in mind. To ensure that customers perform the desired action – subscription, add to cart, inquiry – place several call-to-action (CTA) blocks throughout the article.

We prefer to situate a non-intrusive block after each section of the article. The benefit of this approach is that you can craft your message to be relevant to a section, boosting the conversion rate and growing your number of potential prospects.

For example, if you have an article about planning a vacation in Mexico, and you have different sections on best luxury, cheap, and family hotels. It stands to reason you should make three different call-to-action blocks with specific links and value propositions.

As with any other sources, track conversions from your content.

Be careful, though, with placing UTM marks in your CTAs. Unfortunately, Google Analytics splits a visit when a visitor clicks the UTM-marked internal link. Instead, you might want to set up JavaScript-based goals.

After reading this three-part series you now know what it takes to create a scalable expert content strategy that involves you subject matter experts. So base your efforts on demand, engage experts in creating content, and ensure multi-channel fit.