September 28 2018 meant one thing for most digital marketing folk and Koozai were no exception – it was time for the annual pilgrimage to Brighton for the UK’s leading digital marketing conference, BrightonSEO.
As soon as I arrived, I grabbed a coffee and took my seat in Auditorium 1, ready for the Content Marketing talk.
My interest was piqued by Ross Tavendale, Managing Director at Type A Media who took the audience through a talk on “A Practical Guide To Winning Big Links”.
The talk centred around using data journalism to get links and how this approach has helped Type A Media build high quality links for their clients ever since.
The story started with the agency winning the contract of a big airline who were on a brand-new domain so needed links and had a big budget to play with.
Initial creative sessions resulted in a bunch of ideas before they decided on coming up with an infographic. They pitched the idea to the client and they approved. The team started outreach, and ended up with a grand total of zero links.
The failure of the campaign was due to several factors:
The next logical step was to come up with a new campaign and a better way of working moving forwards, and it was decided that a data-led approach was the way to go.
This started with RAP (Research, Angle, Pitch), otherwise known as creating a document detailing the research of new ideas and the data available, and defining the numerous angles that can be approached using these.
Ross explained that this will typically give you three angles, three headlines and nine attempts to pitch to journalists, meaning you actually only need to win 11% of the time to be successful.
With this new methodology in mind, the next step was to obtain as much data about the client’s audience as possible, and this is when first-party data is particularly useful.
Inputting this data into Facebook audience insights gives a holistic insight of your audience, meaning that you can not only see who they are, but you can also research what they’re interested in and what they’ll engage with. This, in turn, gives you the ammunition to say to journalists “if we create this piece, we know our client’s audience will be interested in it, so you should cover it”.
To summarise the above, there are three important steps you should complete before coming up with a campaign:
Put simply, your audience and their interests should shape the type of content marketing campaigns you should create in order to garner results.
What if you don’t have access to a client’s first-party data? There are multiple sources of data which can be used to get a better idea of your audience…
The above provides the initial steps to creating a data-led campaign, aimed at your audience, and considers the type of content they would more than likely engage with.
This should provide you with enough clout to say to a journalist that you know the idea will work, and so they should cover it.
Journalists are judged on page views, so the more eyeballs they can get on a piece, the more successful they will be. Give them the reason to cover your campaign and get the coverage/links it deserves!
You can find Ross’s slides from the talk here:
this article was really interesting
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