Content is an incredibly powerful integrated marketing tool. Among other things, content can:
- cultivate relationships
- increase brand trust and credibility
- build links and domain authority
- build your audience and your reach
- grow your community
- convert the right customers
If you’re using content to accomplish these types of goals for your business, you’re on the right track. But keep in mind that everything you write should serve a higher purpose. It’s not about creating content just to check it off your list of things to do for your marketing. It’s about using content to make a difference for your business.
Stepping into big content
Until recently, all of the content we had created for our brand at Mack Web Solutions had been blog posts, infographics, and slide decks. A few weeks ago we released the biggest piece of content we’d ever written: a 147 page guide on how to build online communities.
What follows is an account of the five major steps we took to release this sucker, what we learned, and the higher purpose this big content has served in our company.
My intention with this post is not to promote our guide. Rather, it’s to document the strategic stages we executed on our first path to big content in hopes of inspiring and informing your own similar journeys.
To date, we’ve had nearly 1,900 downloads and many other indicators of success. It has been quite the effort to pull all of this together. Here’s the strategic tips I’d like to share and a little about how the story goes.
Strategic big content step #1:
Figure out the who
If you’re thinking about investing in big content, definitely figure out the why, but also the who. We wanted our guide to be an accurate representation of the effort required to actually build a community.
We knew that at 147 pages not everyone was going to be willing to put in the work to read it. And that’s OK. We built it for the people who are. They’re the ones who we knew would put it to use.
And so it began
When I was at MozCon 2012, I had breakfast with Jon Henshaw, the co-founder of Raven Tools. I told Jon I was interested in speaking at conferences and wondered how I would begin to build a name for myself and my company in the industry. Jon’s advice was to build a tool and give it away for free.
It took several months before I had any even remotely clever idea that could be developed into a useful tool. I heard the word “tool” and started thinking way too literally. I was trying to come up with an SEO-type tool. Something that would need to be programmed and developed like an app or a plugin. Although that may come in another stage in our company, that just wasn’t going to work with our existing resources. Our tool needed to be something that naturally resonated with what we did, and it also needed to be something we were really passionate about, because we would be spending the next eight months working on it.
Once I thought about it that way, it was kind of a lightbulb moment. The one thing we both do and love the most is building online communities. What better way to help other people and businesses than to develop a “tool” that would help them build their communities?
As I discussed the idea with the team, we knew that if we wanted this tool to really work, that we had to follow the advice we had been giving businesses all along: It couldn’t be about us and what we wanted; it needed to be about our community and what they needed.
Going for it
We decided to redefine “tool” as “guide” and write one as our first piece of big content because:
- We wanted to fill a need
Before we decided to create a community building guide, we did some research and discovered there wasn’t another resource like it. What we were planning on building would add unique value to the community building knowledge that was already out there. Plus, with the pace at which the SEO industry evolves, we knew it would be something that would serve SEOs, marketers, agencies, and businesses who were trying to keep up with the evolution and think beyond keywords and Google’s algorithms. -
We wanted to drive a movement
Not only did we want to begin establishing our company as a leader in the industry, but we wanted to begin changing the way companies look at and value marketing. Our philosophy is that marketing efforts most certainly can accomplish company-wide goals and bring in revenue. But they can also change the way you run your business and engage with and cultivate a community of lifelong customers. We thought this guide would be a baby step in that direction. -
We wanted to provide an experience
Not only did we want to have a strong resource that would assist us in moving potential clients further down the funnel, but we also wanted this resource to be something that indirectly told the story of what it’s like to work with us. We wanted this guide to make a statement about our expertise, personality, quality of product, drive, level of service, and commitment to helping businesses reach their goals.
So who is your who? If you’re thinking about big content, whom do you really want to get your message in front of? Whom do you really want to connect with? What are your values and philosophies and how can you communicate that in your big content so that you’re attracting the right audience with your efforts?
Strategic big content step #2:
Focus on relationships
I’d definitely recommend using LaunchRock in your pre-planning efforts for big content, but even more important would be to build relationships. Not just for the sake of getting more people engaged with your big content, but to make some valuable friends.
I didn’t realize the power of this until the guide had launched.
The whole time we were building the guide, we were focusing on growing the email list via LaunchRock. Every blog post we wrote, every conference I spoke at, every chance we had we were asking people to go sign up for our guide. And in the end, we had 343 people who chose to be on that list. That’s really great for our first go at this, and for the size of our community, but we certainly were hoping for a bigger splash.
What made the most difference in the reach of the guide wasn’t necessarily the people on the email list. It was the people we had built relationships with during the 8 months leading up to its launch. So, instead of 343 people downloading the guide in the first week of the launch, we had more than 1,200.
It was really humbling to watch the effect of relationships on social media. The amplification of your efforts can be pretty remarkable if you’ve made the effort to actually care about people and be genuinely interested in what they’re doing (rather than always working on furthering your own cause). There’s no scientific way we can quantify this, but I know it’s made an enormous difference in the guide’s success.
Yes or no
So when we had decided on a guide, we took Distilled’s lead on their pre-outreach efforts with DistilledU and built a LaunchRock page. Essentially, the purpose of LaunchRock is to gauge interest, but also to build an email list that becomes your first marketing audience once your product is finished. For this project, the team decided that if we received 100 signups it would be worth building.
Within the first few weeks, we hit our mark, so it was a go. We then had eight months to build the guide and continue building that list. During the first six months we didn’t do a whole lot to build our list other than referring to the guide indirectly in blog posts, talking about it on social media, and telling people about it at conferences.
What really gave us the boost was our efforts in the final two months leading up to the launch and then once the guide was actually here.
It takes a village
Initially we had set a soft deadline for completion of the guide for the end of summer or early fall. After we put the LaunchRock page up, we created an outline and general schedule for completion, but then let it sit untouched for a couple months. It became pretty clear in the beginning that if we never set a hard deadline, this thing would never see the light of day. So in June when we were working through strategic operations and setting company-wide goals, we created a Mack Web Branding initiative and set a hard date for launch on October 15. Setting this goal helped us to get a big picture strategy down, since there was a lot more to do than simply write the guide.
We had a team of six to put this whole thing together, but we also had client work to take care of and a company to grow. So we assigned chunks of the project to each person on the team in order to start making some progress.
The writing chunk
We knew that Courtney (the voice of our brand and our lead content strategist) would do the majority of the writing and compile the first draft of the guide. But we also knew that I had to supply her with the actual bones. So Courtney and I worked together on an outline and agreed to a collaboration schedule.
Courtney lives in Chicago so we made arrangements to have our meetings and communication via email, chat, and G+ hangouts. For the first six months, Courtney and I would check in every few weeks on progress. It really wasn’t until the last 60 days that we would be meeting daily in order to ensure we were going to make our deadline.
(Sounds silly, but we also gave the guide a nickname. You’ll have to read it to get the full story, but when the project started, we didn’t have a title and we all kept calling it different things. So Courtney came up with the pet name, deemed him a llama, and from then on we affectionately referred to the guide as Arthur).
The design chunk
Natalie, our designer, would take on the design portion of the guide. Because Nat wouldn’t be able to design the actual meat of the guide until it was written, she worked on cover pages, section dividers, and promotional art for LaunchRock, social, email marketing, and the website.
The (pre and post) promotion chunk
The rest of the team was assigned to pre- and post-launch promotional stuff, including the re-messaging and re-designing of our website. Things like blog posts, social, video, and email marketing were scheduled and assigned to the team.
There’s no way that any of our big content efforts would have come together if we didn’t have the entire team working together to make it happen. We also never would have made as much of an impact, so soon after its launch, had we not built credibility with friends in the industry. In the end, it’s the latter that means more and will help carry a company further than one piece of big content.
Strategic big content step #3:
Get to that tiny little resting place between done and perfect
I won’t deny that I’m a bit of an over-achieving perfectionist and I certainly drive hard. I really have to work on exercising the just ship it mentality that many companies embrace. That said, there definitely is something to be said about putting in the extra effort to do what’s right for the customer.
We certainly could have left the guide in its original, first-draft, narrative form. And I’m sure people would have loved it all the same. But there would have been a lot more people who didn’t bother to read it.
The extra time we spent on structure, formatting, and design really helped us to improve the user experience and show our readers that they mattered to us. We didn’t want the guide to be stuck on a hard drive and forgotten. We wanted it to be used, applied, iterated, and re-worked. And we knew that wasn’t going to happen in its original state.
This was definitely one of those times where I’m glad we didn’t just ship it. I’m proud of the team for thinking about what would make it better for our readers and making the decision to put in the extra work to make it a better experience.
Addressing hurdles
After we had all the pieces assigned to the team, I worked with Courtney to get her all the bones of the guide. Because I had already written and spoken a great deal about building community on the Moz blog and at conferences, Courtney was able to take those bits and match it to the outline. After she wrote each chapter, I would review and provide feedback. Sounds like a brilliant plan, but as we got closer to our deadline, we ran into some problems.
Stuff was evolving
As Courtney was putting together the first draft of the guide, we were learning a lot as a company. So even though we were technically on schedule with the parts that Courtney had written, by the time I had reviewed the most important part of the guide (the how), it was missing some pretty important pieces that I hadn’t yet written or spoken about. Things that we had discovered to be integral to community building and had learned from experimentation with our company and with our clients.
We didn’t want to release a guide that was outdated as soon as it hit the streets, so just one month before the guide was to launch, we went back to the drawing board in a couple places and did what it took to get those more current pieces incorporated into the guide.
We figured this was going to set us back a bit, but not as much as the structural issues we discovered just weeks before launch.
The first draft was a narrative, not a guide
As Courtney and I worked back and forth with the first draft of the guide, we were really focused on getting the pieces in place which meant we hadn’t paid much attention to the actual shape of the guide and how it would read.
When the team finally read the finished first draft, we all agreed that Courtney had done an amazing job of putting the Mack Web voice to the information in the guide. The problem was that the whole thing read as a narrative instead of a guide. All of the knowledge and pieces were there, but it lacked the actual structure that makes the “how-to” of a guide. Essentially there was no consistent format that would make it easy for the reader to digest and actually apply the information.
At this point, we were 13 days away from launch. I talked with the team and we all agreed that we needed to make the necessary changes to provide a better UX. But in order to not completely re-write the entire guide, we decided that I would provide Courtney with a framework that she could apply in retrospect.
Because time was scarce and we were on such a tight turn around, Courtney and I would piggy-back. For days, as soon as she finished a section, I would go in and do any final edits and get the approved draft over to Natalie to style. We’d communicate all of this through chat:
Courtney, Nat, and I didn’t sleep much in the weeks prior to launch. Re-structuring the guide for UX was a huge feat at that stage in the game. I’m really glad we pulled it off and I’m really glad we put in the extra effort. Based on the feedback, I think our readers appreciated it as well.
Taking the extra time to improve your big content (or anything for that matter) so that your user will have a better experience isn’t about perfection. It’s about going the extra step because you know you should. That’s a reflection on how much you care and who you are as a company. And for us, investing that time was really important.
Strategic big content step #4
Know when to take a break
Big content alone takes so much effort. Then you add all the pre and post promotion to it and you have quite the project. Creating this guide has been incredibly rewarding, but it also has put a tremendous amount of stress on our team and our company.
During the final weeks of getting the guide ready, we pushed incredibly hard. Many of us weren’t sleeping or resting as much as we should have. We were working nights and weekends. And although we were all reminded to take breaks, none of us wanted to because we really just wanted to get the thing done.
So once we finally reached the finish line, the team scheduled a day to take a collective break and celebrate. We left the office and hit the trails. It was a well earned and much needed day.
This day was actually kind of a double victory for me personally. It’s really difficult for me not to drive forward all the time. It takes a concerted effort for me to slow down and bask in our accomplishments. I’ve asked the team to be aware of this and they remind me when it’s time to walk away for a bit.
Getting stuff done
We did all kinds of promotional stuff both leading up to and once the guide launched. Clearly our goal with all of our efforts was to build awareness and increase signups (and eventually downloads) to the guide. This is what we accomplished:
- We redesigned our website
I know, we’re nuts. We were hoping the guide would drive a whole bunch of traffic to our website and our existing website didn’t really say what we actually did. So, we hunkered down and re-designed and re-messaged all at the same time (and barely lived to tell the tale). We also redesigned the site so that we could effectively optimize a page on the website for the guide. We took Moz’s lead on how they structured their Beginner’s Guide to SEO so that it would be easy to access and build links to.The day the guide launched, we had nearly 1,200 visits to our site.
And we also had the same amount of traffic driven the day the guide made the Moz Top 10 (at #8).
Based on the traffic we received, it was well worth our effort to redesign the site alongside the launch of our big content. Just as we built the guide to be a reflection of what our company was all about, we needed the website to mirror our priorities and personality. A disconnect between the product and the shop wouldn’t have left a very good impression. Having our website, blog, social, and the guide completely aligned with design and messaging seems to have made a big difference in its success.
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We created some videos and held a hangout
For the final weeks leading up to launch, we used our blog to release weekly videos that communicated some key community building takeaways.It was our first time with this medium, so lucky for us Tyler had some video background, and we also had Wistia guiding us through a great deal of the pre-planning process.
The videos were quite successful. We got some great engagement for all five of them. They were really fun to make and it really helped to give our audience a new look at who we were.
In addition to the videos, we also held a Google+ hangout with some of the best community managers in the search marketing industry. The video of the recorded hangout received over 3,300 views. G+ alone brought 36 new guide signups. But more than that, we established new relationships with some pretty great innovators in social and community.
Our pre-launch efforts with videos and the hangout really helped to boost LaunchRock signups. Prior to those efforts we had 245 signups. At launch we had 343.
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We told our clients
A few days before the launch, we told our existing clients what was going on (both with the website and the guide). It’s easy to forget about the people who are already in the funnel. They might not care so much about the reading the guide itself since they’ve got us doing that work for them, but an accomplishment and milestone like this builds a whole lot of trust.In addition to spreading the news with our existing clients, I also reached out to potential clients that we had been talking with. Sending personal emails sharing the guide actually helped to get meetings scheduled and move some of those leads further down the funnel.
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We got into our community
The day of the launch the entire team worked to answer tweets, emails, and questions. We made a little breakfast party out of it and it was actually kind of fun. We were all extremely happy to have the guide finally finished and in our readers’ hands.
Throughout the weeks following the launch of the guide, Ayelet (our community manager) would look for people who had completed the guide and sent them a personal note from Arthur.
As you work on your big content, if at all possible, make sure you leave some padding and schedule in some breaks. Look for places where you can lighten your regular work load (I know I spent less time on social media during the month leading up to launch). Look for parts of the project that you can outsource and bring in some outside help. You certainly don’t want to drive your company into the ground just to launch big content. So be thoughtful of the stress it may cause and do what you can to alleviate the pressure.
Strategic big content step #5
Leverage
There are a ton of ways to squeeze more out of the big content you’ve built. Think of it as a product that you can evolve into blog posts, case studies, or maybe even new tools. Asking your audience is the first step in determining the pieces of value that can spin out of your original creation.
Right now, we’re listening to the reception. We’re talking to people and asking them what they really thought. We’re working on getting tangible feedback and real stories of application. These will be the seeds of what we do next.
Finally on the downhill
The week of the launch was the easy part. Of course there was a lot of excitement. It’s in the weeks and months following the launch of big content that really count. Now that we made the effort, how can we squeeze the most value out of what we’ve already done?
So we’ve got some stuff planned. We’re thinking it would be great to put together an HTML version that we would then update (just like Moz updates their SEO beginner’s guide). That’s a whole beast in itself, but we kind of knew that going into it. Generating the HTML version will also allow us to do any further structural work that we want to do for UX but didn’t have time for in the PDF.
We’re also thinking about doing some additional videos that will allow readers to work along with the guide itself. We can then address questions and challenges our readers have and create additional resources that would supplement the guide (and perhaps embed into the HTML version).
We’d also like to get some testimonials and further develop the landing page of the guide itself. We’re hoping that we’ll continue to build all kinds of links to that page, and if we do, it would most certainly be worth updating and adding more value through social proof and other community building resources.
We just want to make sure we get the most out of the investment we’ve made in big content. And that’s what’s so great about it. If you put in the strategic effort, it becomes an asset. It lives as evergreen content that will organically work for you for years to come.
Totally worth the ride
There are a lot of ways in which our big content continues to pay dividends. Hands down it has given us momentum to move forward and has provided quite the learning experience for our company. Our mistakes this time will lessen the pain next time (and perhaps our story will help you avoid the bruises altogether when it’s your turn).
Big content has also been a source of pride for the whole team and in the whole team. Not to mention all the things we’ve already pointed out: brand awareness, reach, trust, credibility, relationships, authority, and links.
But while we’re certainly not complaining about all of these benefits, they’re just side effects.
The real reason we built the guide—the real reason to put the work into big content—is that we wanted to further the mission of our company, which, in our case, is to help companies build better businesses by building their own communities. Lucky for us, our journey through big content has also made a really big difference in our own company
I’m hoping our story will inspire yours. What big content could you build to serve your company’s higher purpose?
