How can do content marketing

 What do you get when you combine Jell-O, Doritos,and Spiderman? Three things. Billions of dollars spent on marketing, somefine content, and a nasty snack. Huge companies like these have the peopleand resources to experiment. And even if there's little impact, it barelymakes a dent in their profits. Now, for people like you and I, we probablycan't afford a SuperBowl commercial or make a blockbuster film. But it doesn't mean you can't create impactfulcontent marketing campaigns. So in this tutorial, I'm going to show youwhat content marketing looks like and how you can use it to grow your business. Stay tuned. [music] What's up marketers? Sam Oh here with Ahrefs, the SEO tool thathelps you grow your search traffic, research your competitors, and dominate your niche.

 Now, content marketing is more than justblogging or creating videos for YouTube. According to CMI, content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attractand retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action. Now, let's break these down into some key points. You need to create content and distribute it. In terms of content attributes, it shouldbe valuable, relevant, and consistent. On top of that, you should know exactly who you'retargeting so you can attract and retain them. Most importantly, the content should driveprofitable customer action. Now, content marketing isn't exactly new. It's been around for centuries. For example, in 1904, a relatively unknown brand,named Jell-O, created their first recipe book. And of course, the main ingredient for everyrecipe was their jelly product, making their content relevant to their business. They went door-to-door distributing free copies and this contributed to over a milliondollars in sales by 1906. With inflation, that's nearly 30 million dollars today. Now, in 1964, Hasbro created a line of military-themeddolls and action figures called G.I. Joe. The toy didn't do so well and was eventuallydiscontinued in 1978. Then in 1982, Hasbro partnered with Marvelcreating a new series of comic books, called "G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero," whichbrought the action figures back to life. When high-quality content and stories integrateyour products, it influences purchasing decisions. And that's content marketing in a box. But successful content marketing ideasfor your business don't exactly fit in a box. Every business is unique and there are otherexternal factors that can impact your campaigns. So to heighten your chances of executing asuccessful content marketing strategy you can use a 4-prong strategy that I call"The CART formula." C is for content. The content requires you to think of a topicand format you'll use.

 For example, will it be a blog post, video,commercial, infographic, or whatever. A is for audience. Having a clearly defined audience is goingto help you refine that format as well as your distribution strategy. For example, a personal finance guide would likelyresonate with married couples, aged 25 and older. Probably not as much for teenagers that arestill dependant on their parents. R is for relevance. Content marketing isn't about virality. It's about driving profitable customer action. So keeping your content relevant to your productswill ensure it's serving your business. Finally is timing. Being in the right place at the right timecan increase your chances of success. Generally speaking, the more criteria it fits,the better your campaign will do. For example, a CART is better than just a CAR. Let's look at a few examples of companiesdoing content marketing that I don't think were crazy expensive to execute. I'll break them down through my lens, andgive you ideas on how you can replicate them. The first example is a YouTube series called"Will it Blend." This series was a wildly successful brandcampaign where Tom Dickson, founder of Blendtec, was able to showcase the power of his blender.

 The content was simple, yet brilliant. Create videos of putting random objects intoa blender, and see if it'll blend to dust. They took the boring topic of blending andmade it exciting. The videos entice curiosity, disbelief, anda lot of dust. And it's pretty clear that they nailed relevance. Their product is the star of the show. And without it, the videos wouldn't have hadthe effect they did. The place where they fell short in my opinionwas the audience aspect. If you look at their YouTube videos, you'llsee that their "will it blend" videos all have a crazy number of views. But then they tried creating helpful recipetutorials to go after a more relevant audience. And you'll see that they barely gotviewed in comparison. Their current audience isn't there to learn recipes. They've subscribed to watch them destroy things. As for timing, blending is an evergreen topic. But they've done something clever to leverage timing. You'll see here that the iPhone 6 Plus wasreleased on September 19, 2014. 4 days later, they blended it. Amazon Prime day was on July 16, 2018. So to "celebrate," they blended an AmazonEcho just 3 days before. While the novelty of blending objects has clearlydied down, you'll see the number of searches for the brand itself stayed strong forquite a while after. 

Now, I wish that I could give you tips onmanufacturing virality, but I'd be doing you a disservice by trying. Reason being, I don't think it can be doneconsistently. So let's move on to a more repeatable example, and that's Superdrug's "Perceptions of Perfection" campaign. Superdrug is a company that sells health,beauty, and skincare products. In June 2015, they launched their "Perceptionsof Perfection" campaign. Their content was actually crowd-sourced. They asked female graphic designers from 18different countries to retouch a photo of a woman to "make her more attractive." As you can see, cultural perceptions of "beauty"were quite different depending on culture. And that was their point. Beauty can't be judged objectively.The topicwas controversial, personal and emotional. To me, it seems like they were targeting womenaround the same age as the person used in the photo. And with 18 perceptions of beauty, I'm surethey were able to impact a diverse audience. Relevance was there too because the campaignattracts their target demographic and builds both brand awareness and trust. And the timing couldn't have been more perfect. This was right around the time that the bodypositivity movement was gaining traction. And it only continued to explode since then. This campaign has racked up over 837 links fromunique websites and over 34,000 social shares. But this campaign wasn't completely unique. About a year before, a freelance journalistsent an unaltered photo of herself to 40 photoshop experts from around the world. It blew up and she was featured in numerouslarge publications and also gave a TEDX talk on her experiment. So let's talk about finding replicable topicsyou can apply to your content marketing. You can use a tool like Ahrefs' Content Explorerwhich lets you search through over a billion pages of content and filter and sort by metricsthat matter to you. So I'll enter a topic like "beauty." And you'll see over 10 million pages thathave this word in the title or body. Now, let's narrow down the results to only pagesthat have at least 100 links from unique websites. And we'll set one more filter to show pagesthat also have at least 1,000 social shares. After about a minute of skimming the articletitles, I was able to find some great ideas to draw inspiration from like: "See Why We Have an Absolutely RidiculousStandard of Beauty in Just 37 Seconds," and "The Beauty of Human Skin in Every Color." 

The next content marketing example is fromTasty's YouTube channel. Tasty is a YouTube channel with recipes andother food-related content run by Buzzfeed. And I'm sure you've seen their creatives oneither YouTube or Facebook at some point. They popularized this super-simple format ofvideo recipes done in just a couple of minutes. And the audience they hit hard was anyonewho cooks at home, specifically busy moms and dads that want to make something easyand delicious fast. Buzzfeed monetizes through several channelslike branded content, ads, and affiliate commissions. So relevance in this case comes down to creatinginteresting videos people want to watch and then have those people share it so they canget more ad impressions. Now, something I really like about the TastyYouTube channel is that they don't clickbait you into their videos. In fact, a good portion of their most popularvideos are clearly targeting keywords like, "how to cook perfect eggs every time." "how to make perfect chocolate chip cookies," and "how to cook with cast iron," which all get searched on a regular basis. This allows them to get consistent trafficto these videos since they're evergreen topics.

 Their videos on YouTube alone have rackedup over three and a half billion views. Plus, they're getting millions of new viewseveryday and about 100,000 subscribers every week to week and a half. Now, Tasty's success on YouTube comes downto three things: They publish great content consistently. They use eye-catching thumbnails. And they use a unique video format that servesa need in a timely manner. So something that I love about their strategyis that they started off by targeting keywords that get searched. And now that they have a targeted audienceof around 16.6 million foodies, they can create new types of content like this serieson making really big food. To find keywords that get searched on YouTube,you can use a tool like Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer. Set the search engine to YouTube and entera broad keyword related to your niche. So let's look up "recipe" and "recipes." Next, I'll go to the phrase match report,where we can see over 260,000 keyword ideas containing one of these words. Alternatively, you can use different phraseslike specific ingredients. So let's switch this up to "shrimp," "tomato,""rice," and "chicken." Now, this time, I'll use the Include search boxand search for a modifier like "how to." And now we have even more great ideas assumingwe had a YouTube channel with recipes. The next example is an Auto Loan Calculator by cars.com. Cars.com is a website that connects sellerswith buyers. They created a simple auto loan calculator,which has collected over 18,000 backlinks from over 570 unique websites. And this has helped them rank for competitivekeywords in Google like "car payment calculator," "car loan calculator," and "auto loan calculator,"which collectively bring in over a hundred thousand visits from Google each month.

 Their content is a tool. It calculates car payments over the life of your loan. Just fill in the form like so, and you'll seeyour estimated monthly payment amounts. Now, the best part about this calculator isthat it's super-relevant to their business. If you scroll down a touch, you'll see a headingthat says, "Search for Cars by Price Up to..." and whatever value you entered. Then enter your zip code, click the searchbutton, and it'll take you to their listings of available cars. And just like that, they've turned searchvisitors into potential buyers. The timing here is two-fold. First, the topic of car loans is evergreen. People are always in the market for a car. And naturally, cars are pretty expensive,so most will have to get a loan. But since most people are likely finding this pagethrough search engines, it adds an additional layer to timing. They're reaching potential buyers right inthe exact moments that they've searched for keywords like "car loan calculator." Someone searching for that is likely in theprocess of buying a car or seeing how much car they can afford. Tools are a great way to help potential buyers. And since they're already on your site, youhave the opportunity to control the experience that comes after. A great way to find tools that are worth creatingis to search in Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer for broad keywords related to your niche. So if I had a health and fitness website,I might enter phrases like "body building," "fitness," "health," and "weight loss." Next, I'll go to the All keywords report. And to find tools, I'll just click the Includefilter, select the Any word tab, and type in words like "tool" and "calculator." 

And now we have a bunch of content ideas alongwith all keyword metrics like Search Volume, Keyword Difficulty, and CPC values. Now, I wouldn't recommend just recreatingthe exact same tool as everyone else. Instead, look for issues with the current results andsee how you can improve the experience for users. And if you hope to get discovered throughsearch engines, you'll need to get backlinks to that page so you can rank high. To do this, I recommend watching our videoon replicating your competitors' links. I'll leave a link in the description. The final example is one close to my heart,and that's Ahrefs' content marketing strategy. Yes, a bit of a shameless self-plug, but I'mnot sharing this with you because I think we're the best at content marketing.

 But I do know a little more details on theimpact it's had on our company's growth. At Ahrefs, our content for the most part iscreated as blog posts and videos. And the topics we cover today are data studies and evergreen tutorials on how to doSEO and marketing. Now, the reason why we chose these two formatsis because they appeal to our audience, who are SEOs and website owners whowant to get more traffic to their site. And our #1 promotion method is to rank ourpages high on both Google and YouTube. This has led to traffic for both our blogand YouTube channel. Now, while we can't attribute 100% of ourgrowth to our marketing efforts alone, we've been growing around 50% year on year. And aside from a great product, I like to thinkour content contributes because of relevance. Nearly all of our content is on topics wherewe can naturally plug our products as a solution to a problem, making our tools the star ofthe show. As for timing, you may have noticed that wenever publish content on news-related topics like Google Algorithm updates. While doing this might lead to spikes in traffic, it's not in-line with our overall contentmarketing strategy.

 We're a pretty lean team, so we focus on publishingevergreen content and keeping those pieces always up to date. So the way we choose topics for YouTube andGoogle are similar. First, we start with keyword research. For YouTube, I'd use Keywords Explorer, selectYouTube as the search engine, and type in broad queries like "seo," "keyword research,"and "link building."

 Then I'll go to the Phrase match report to seeother keyword ideas that contain these words. From here, it's just a matter of picking keywordswith search volume that are relevant to our business, and then optimizing them for YouTube search. I'll leave a link to our video on doing YouTubeSEO and YouTube keyword research in the description which goes into the step-by-step process. As for our blog, we follow a similar processwhere we enter a few seed keywords, go to the Phrase match report, and then analyzethe SERP for standout keywords. Since Keywords Explorer shows the estimatedsearch traffic for the top ranking pages, we use "traffic potential" as a way to bettergauge whether a page is worth creating. We have quite a few detailed tutorials ondoing keyword research, so I'll link those up in the description too. Now, all of the content marketing examplesthat I've shared with you don't require multi-million dollar budgets. In fact, if you're doing the work alone orwith a partner, some won't require any money other than your time.

 Remember that content marketing is a longplay and as you successfully execute for your audience, you should see traffic, brand awareness,and revenue grow in tandem. Now, I know that there are a ton of examplesof great businesses doing great content marketing. So let me know of any examples or companiesthat you love in the comments. And if you enjoyed this video, make sure tolike, share, and subscribe for more actionable marketing tutorials. So keep grinding away, and I'll see you inthe next tutorial.