{PODCAST} In-Ear Insights: How to Avoid Running Out of Content Marketing

In this episode, Katie and Chris discuss ways of avoiding running out of content marketing. How do you keep things fresh and relevant once you’ve tackled the major topics that you want to be known for? Follow along as they look at analyzing competitors with predictive SEO forecasts, and even develop a new product idea from the search data.

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${PODCAST} In-Ear Insights_ How to Avoid Running Out of Content Marketing$

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Machine-Generated Transcript

What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode.

Christopher Penn
In this week’s in your insights we are talking about doing competitive keyword research and SEO. Now, one of the things that we’ve been doing for a while here at trusted insights is taking known keyword phrases like predictive analytics or time series forecasting and putting that into an SEO tool, we use the RF tool, but really this will work with RF spy foo, sem rush Mas, the vendor of your choice. And we look at phrase and uses the same words that so to give us a more expanded keyword list of things that people might type in. But last week, we were meeting with one of our clients, we were saying to ourselves, well, what’s our blind spot? When you type things into a keyword tool? Like predictive analytics, you have a good sense of like, this is what we do we know generally about our audience. But in many cases, competitors may because of the especially the high volume content ones maybe ranking for things that we don’t even think about. So one of the things we came up with last week was let’s scan seven or eight different competitors. See which terms they at least two of them rank for. That we don’t. Now we want to look at. So Katie, taking a look at the seven the seven competitors, we have SAS word stream martech, advisor, Chief martech NG data, HubSpot McKinsey size sense, IBM, in your point perspective, do you feel like those are good aspirational competitors for our company?

Katie Robbert
for our company, in particular, I do. Because we’ve always had this challenge of describing ourselves because we strongly have one foot in marketing, and we strongly have the other foot in true data science and finding ways for the two to come together has always been tricky. So I think that where we stand right now, we really need to make sure that we are thinking about competitors on both sides of that fence. So I do I think this is a strong lyst for us,

Christopher Penn
for us. So let’s take a look at the actual results of the terms that people are going to be searching for what we did, of course, we fed this to our predictive analytics software to do a time series forecast, and came up with the terms that people are most likely to search for in the next 52 weeks. And we’ll put a screenshot of this just of the term list of maybe a couple of weeks in the show notes so that you can get a sense of the follow along a little bit about this. But Katie, what do you what do you see when you look at at this lovely mix of over 10,000 terms

Katie Robbert
that the top 30 or so terms have to do with social media, specifically Instagram, which I find really interesting given our mix of IBM and other, more data science, heavy competitors, but what it really says to me is that marketers and other businesses in general are struggling to figure out how to reach consumers how to reach their specific audience. And for right now, social media, specifically Instagram seems to be where everybody is headed. So I do find that to be really interesting. Instagram is such a hot topic at the moment because there’s such limited capabilities with Instagram, but yet people are really trying to get every speck of you no value out of it that they possibly can.

Christopher Penn
It really is weird because especially given the list of companies like yes, HubSpot service b2c, but everybody else is very much like a hardcore b2b. Scott drinkers blog is very about you know, marketing technology tends to be very, very b2b, IBM and SAS, it’s I know these other companies are, are clearly very b2b word stream is is b2b, but with a mix. But yeah, you’re right, it is all Instagram all the time, we have Instagram insights, best time to post on Instagram, Instagram giveaway rules, how long or Instagram stories and stuff but it’s a you would think, particularly for some of these companies that there would be other stuff in here like, I don’t know, tick tock or LinkedIn or YouTube or something. But it’s it seems like this is one blind spot that everybody has?

Katie Robbert
Well, you know, so you do have a couple of other things in here that are amusing, like Gen Z, and Facebook, creative hub, and slack code snippets and blockchain use cases. But really, what this is telling me is that companies are looking at the younger generations as influencers and decision makers. And a lot of those people are on Instagram, and yeah, you’re scrolling down the list. And we’re still seeing Instagram, social media platforms, best times to post on Instagram, Instagram marketing, as very prevalent in this list very heavy. So I think that no company, rightly so is immune to social media trends, because it’s one of the easier ways to stay relevant and competitive. If you don’t, if your company is not on social media, it we’re of a generation of a culture where we don’t believe you actually exist, we don’t believe you’re real. And for a long time, Facebook was the place where all the companies had to be. And now it’s well, Instagram is where all the companies have to be, we want to peek inside the doors, we want those visuals, we want to know what you’re doing. We want to know what you’re selling. We want more information, more transparency. And companies that are more tech heavy to your point like IBM are going to struggle with that, because what is their visual story? What do they put on Instagram?

Christopher Penn
That is a very, very, very good question. And one that we’re not not qualified to. Yeah. Now, given this, given this, list it you know, as, as the person who’s ultimately account accountable for the company’s performance, should this be changing our content strategies? Like, should we be doing more content about Instagram? I mean, clearly the the general transitions, but is that something? How do how do you think about blending? what the data says, with what we want to be known for?

Katie Robbert
I think that we can take this list of keywords, and we can think about the different aspects of Instagram and the questions that people have, and tie it back to the things that we are the best at and the things that we want to be known for. So we’re a company of data and analysis and insights. And so for example, how long are Instagram stories? Okay, you could answer that question in about two sentences, maybe less. But what our company would probably do is do an analysis of, on average, how long our Instagram stories that people are posting, what is the engagement like people want to know that type of information? How long should my story be in order to keep people engaged? What type of content should live within these stories in order to keep people watching it all the way to the end? Are people clicking on links with it? Are people interacting with it when you put a pole so there’s ways to pick it apart and create a valuable piece of content? versus just the well someone asked how long’s an Instagram story? And I’m going to tell them that it’s 10 seconds,

Christopher Penn
right? And I see the the term that I personally always want to smack people for asking, repeated six different times and six different ways here, which is, what’s the best time to post on Instagram that on Mondays on Tuesday is the best time to post the best time two times to post when to post on Instagram. Do we? Do we do that analysis, take the 5000 brands that we’re currently tracking on Instagram, extract their posts, dates and times. And show at least when engaging is hired to early show when people are posting most often so that you can do a calendar cycle what’s what’s your feeling on? tackling that topic that again, I just want to smack people for asking. And do it in a way that actually lend some value? How do we add value to a what is essentially a valueless question?

Katie Robbert
Well, I think you just started to go down the road of the answer is, you know, you answer you answer the initial question of the best time to post Well, there is no such thing. It depends on your audience. And so what you’re really doing is giving guidelines for different segments of different audiences. So someone can say, okay, that segment kind of looks like mine. Now I have a better sense. And so that piece of content was valuable to me, because now I know what to do on Tuesdays or on Thursdays, or I know that my audience is between the ages of 15 and 19. And none of them are up before 10am. So there’s no point in time hosting my desk content at seven o’clock in the morning.

Christopher Penn
You just gave me a really interesting idea that we know that the time series forecasting libraries we use can resolve at different levels. Typically, we do like you’re seeing here, a week level forecast like these are the best times these are generally speaking, what trends are going to look like per per for the next each week for the next 52 weeks. But the software is agnostic, as long as the time unit is sensible. What if we took the top say 20% of Instagram posts by engagement from the last, say 90 days, because we know there was a major algorithm change in March. And we used our same time series forecasting but down to the hour level and said in the next week, these are the hours to post.

Katie Robbert
I think that’s absolutely a valuable piece of content that a company like ours should be creating in order to answer some of these questions that people have about. because really what it comes down to is, what do I do with Instagram? How do I reach my audience on Instagram? It’s it’s just asking the question, a dozen or so different ways. And so our job is to answer that question with useful data with actionable insights. That’s the basis of our whole company. I would even take it a step further and say, how do we do any sort of audience analysis on Instagram? So you know, this is something that we do for our clients on Facebook and on Twitter, when they’re talking about reach engagement? Are you even reaching the right audience? Do you have the right followers? So if you’re getting a lot of engagement, that’s great. But if 90% of your followers are people that you’re related to? Well, then your family’s proud of you. That’s great, but they’re not about to buy something from you. So I would say that there’s the down to the hour time series forecasting. And then also, how do I do an audience analysis on Instagram so that I know that I’m even reaching the right people?

Christopher Penn
Yeah, I wonder. The giant list might be too much, it might be too generic, I wonder. So if you’re listening to this episode, and your company has an Instagram strategy, send us an email, send us an email to marketing at trust insights.ai or just join our slack community, go to trust insights.ai slash analytics for marketers. And let us know what industry you’re in. And maybe if enough folks respond, and we have a clear, like, you know, fashion or food and beverage or you know, wine and beer or whatever. Maybe we run a test case for a specific industry with like 20 brands, instead of trying to cover you know, all 5000. But use the time she was forecasting for that, because that might be more useful gradually, if we know for example, a wine and beer brand is going to have very different activity cycles than, say, an electronics brand because the wine and beer brand. I’m guessing this is speculation, but I’m guessing that will be more popular in the evenings will be more popular on the weekends, then, you know, but then they’ll say a consumer electronics company that presumably would have more daylight business hours activity? I don’t know.

Katie Robbert
Well, you know, what’s interesting? I follow a decent amount of these consumer brands on Instagram. And I would actually say, I don’t know that that’s necessarily true. I think what some of the beer and wine brands, for example, they are, for lack of a better term, they’re promoting that day drinking, they want to get you thinking about them. No, I’m serious. Yeah, they want to get you thinking about them first thing in the morning, not to create sort of this sense of alcoholism, but more of like, Oh, you know what that sounds like fun. Let me go, I’m on my way to the beach, let me grab a six pack of that, that’s going to make my day more fun kind of a thing. And so, you know, there’s so many meetings and you know, gifs, about like, Okay, I have two speeds, coffee and wine. And so they want you they want to be part of that conversation, the second you wake up so that they are a part of your day somewhere ingrained in your brain. And so I would be really interested to see that kind of analysis of when they’re posting versus when it’s getting engagement,

Christopher Penn
right? Yeah, we would need we need some sector that has a decent number of brands, because obviously, for many companies, they struggle to post more than, you know, a couple of times a day as so you need really a wide spectrum of of, you know, 2030 4050 brands to just just to cover around the clock and just get an relatively even distribution of sampling.

Katie Robbert
Well, and I, you know, I think that we can absolutely lately, come up with what that list looks like. But you know, what, what we’re talking about, and to sort of bring it back to why people are listening to this episode is, you know, we did a fresh keyword list of the terms that we don’t necessarily rank for, but that our competitors rank for. And now we’re trying to figure out how do we insert ourselves into a conversation and provide value that everyone else is already having, that we were that we didn’t know what’s happening. So now we have to do that awkward. Oh, hey, guys, let me just put into your conversation. But don’t worry, I have something important to say. And this is a struggle that a lot of companies have, where, you know, International Women’s Day was a really good example of that, where you had millions of people talking about International Women’s Day, and we actually had the internal conversation of do we bother posting anything? No, because it’s not important, but what value are we providing to that particular conversation. And so, as a company, we need to make sure that we are being very picky about which terms we’re inserting ourselves into, because these aren’t necessarily terms that we wanted to initially be known for. But these are terms that we should probably have a piece of the conversation.

Christopher Penn
Yeah, the market is here, the audience is here, even if these are things that out of the box, we would not have thought up. So how do we how do we do something that is on brand,

Katie Robbert
I think it sort of goes back to that golden rule of advice of, you know, don’t just wait for your turn to speak, you know, actually listen to what’s going on around you, and provide some value when you are actually talking this, you know, just good life lessons for everybody. Don’t just talk for the sake of talking,

Christopher Penn
I thought you’re going to there’s a there was a different rule that came to mind, which was never take criticism from someone you would wouldn’t take advice from.

Katie Robbert
That is also a really great Golden Rule.

Christopher Penn
Alright, so if you are listening to this episode, and you would like to participate in this, join the free slack group at trust insights.ai slash analytics for marketers reference this episode that you’re listening to about, essentially building new keyword forecasts and what to do with them. And we’ll we’ll be asking the question and our slack group is like so you can just jump in on the Fed there. As always, please subscribe to our Youtube channel and to our newsletter over trusted insights.ai and we’ll talk to you soon take care. Thanks for listening to in your insights, leave a comment on the accompanying blog post if you have follow up questions or email us at marketing at trust the insights.ai If you enjoyed this episode, please leave review on your favorite podcast service like iTunes, Google podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify. And as always, if you need help with your data and analytics visit trust the insights AI for more

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