mind games: the hidden art & science of creating kick-ass content

Mind Games: The Art and Science of KPI Driven Content

Understanding the Mind Games

• How we learn and understand content

• How we react to content• Let’s Build a Strategy

How We Learn and Understand Content

Infobesity

It is a real thing.

Content has become the high fructose corn syrup of the web. It’s everywhere, and while we consume it, we don’t think much about it outside of that consumption.

How to get noticedamongst the sweets

Marketers need to tell stories,

amongst a sea of stories, that

not only capture attention, but

lead to an action.

It’s Like Tricking Kids Into Eating Healthy…

You can mold great information into amazing content that matches what the reader is looking to consume, or even better, draws their attention in even if they happen by it.

The Key: Find People in “Learn Mode”Understanding what readers are looking for in the first place

Readers are looking to:•Acquire facts or procedures

•Understand reality

•Make sense of the world

Sure there are users just wandering aimlessly looking for entertainment, but this isn’t

the segment we want. We want active participants in the content relationship.

Learning Styles• Visual: Using sight

• Auditory: Using songs or rhythms

• Verbal: Speaking the information out loud

• Kinesthetic: Using touch and taste to explore the information

• Logical: A more mathematical approach to concepts

• Interpersonal: Learning in groups

• Intrapersonal: Learning alone

These learning types are called modalities.

Research has shown that because

most educational content is stored in

terms of meaning, there is not a true

value in teaching an individual based

on their own, individualized modality.

However, modality when it comes to

content is incredibly important.

For example, if you want to get someone to

remember the bones in the human

skeleton, a teacher may use a faux

skeleton that the class can see and touch.

They wouldn’t expect only kinesthetic

learners go down this path, even though

the content and context of the lesson is

overall better suited for this modality.

The more modalities you can pack into your content, the more likely

your content is to stick with different content consumers.

Visual and interactive content gives you the best opportunity to

explore multiple modalities.

Integrating Modalities

Let’s look at ways you can integrate modalities into your content to

effectively get your message to stick

Chunking

Chunking is a way of learning that does what it says; it takes larger

concepts and breaks them into smaller digestible concepts. This can

be done most effectively through the auditory and visual modalities.

Chunking

Interacting ImagesAn item is much more likely to be remembered if it can be shown interacting with another item. In this case, we are compiling items together to create a whole memory. In the infographic below, the artist uses a simple use case of cows to explain complex government and economic models.

Interacting Images

Dual coding assumes that there are two cognitive sub-systems. One is

specialized for dealing with processing imagery, and the other for

dealing with language. A good example of dual coding is the utilization

of graphs to represent numeric data. People can relate two different

fractions more quickly in graph form.

Dual Coding

Dual Coding

Kinesthetic Learning

This modality is action based. Learners retain information by

interacting with the item. Take our skeleton analogy above for

example.

https://www.bestlifequote.com/living-with-diabetes-interactive/

Kinesthetic Learning

Practical Tips for Using Cognitive Science

Understanding cognitive science can allow you to create content that

is more effective by matching the right modalities with the right

message and data. However, understanding modalities and learning

techniques can also allow us to optimize content we are already

creating for it to reach maximum effectiveness.

Make It Concise and Scan-able

By making your content concise and scan-able, you are not only making the content visually appealing to intrapersonal learners, but you are also battling the infobesity issue. This is the reason really strong white papers should be presented via abstracts with the actual white paper being a downloadable or in some other format. Give consumers the gist and structure with concise data in a way that entices the consumer to read more.

Learn to Tell Stories

By creating a story for readers around your complex data concept, you are utilizing

multiple modalities and cognitive concepts.

Do you remember Aesop’s Fable about sour grapes? It taught us how easy it is for us

to grow to despise what we cannot have. Fables were a way to utilize storytelling to

teach complex moral concepts to children. These stories use a mixture of interacting

images and top-down processing to help consumers use existing information to fill in

the gaps of their understanding about a topic.

Visual Metaphors and Analogies

Similar to storytelling, adding metaphors and analogies to your content

can help clear blind spots in your consumers’ understanding. “The

Tale of Two Cows” infographic above did a tremendous job of using

this concept to help make complex economic concepts easy to digest.

Make it Personal

People understand concepts better when the concepts relate to them

directly. “How does this concept affect me?” is the question you

should look to answer. Taking the neuro-science one step further, you

should look to influence the emotional reaction of the consumer.

Going viral is a great thing, there is no debating that. However, as marketers, we need to think about not only how our content gets shared, but how it is digested. We need to plan around our consumers and think about how our minds work in relation to the information we are trying to get out there.

Complex data and concepts are simply something marketers will need to learn to work with as they develop their content strategies. Not all content can be quick hit, buffet-style content. The key is learning to shape the content so it doesn’t get passed by in the buffet line, and making it good enough that people want to eat as much as they can get their hands on.

How We React to Content

Plutchick’s Wheel

Important Points to Theory

The concept of emotion is applicable to all evolutionary levels and applies to all animals including humans.

Important Points to Theory

Emotions serve an adaptive role in helping organisms deal with key survival issues posed by the environment.

Important Points to Theory

There is a small number of basic, primary, or prototype emotions.

Important Points to Theory

All other emotions are mixed or derivative states; that is, they occur as combinations, mixtures, or compounds of the primary emotions.

Emotional Self Regulation

“being able to properly regulate one’s emotions. It is a complex process that involves initiating, inhibiting, or modulating the following aspects of functioning”

Emotional Self Regulation

1. Initiation Point – For this particular

conversation, this is content.

2. Result – This can be a number of

things, but the most basic concept is

traffic.

Example: Terror

http://www.rehabs.com/explore/meth-before-and-after-drugs/infographic.html

Example: Joy, Interest

http://www.buzzfeed.com/donnad/the-legend-of-zelda-a-history

What About Boring B2B Topics Though?

1.32 Ways Your Employees Waste Time and Money

2.Survey: Small Business Tax Landscape and Effects

3.Small Businesses Lose $30,000 a year in Lost Sales: Stop the Bleeding!

1.How to Hire and Motivate Like Tesla

2.Warren Buffet’s Tips for Small Businesses at Tax Time

3.The Marketo Model: How they built their sales engine, and how you can copy it

1.120,000 Employees Rated Their Employers Negatively on Glassdoor in 2016

2.120,000 Small Businesses Miss This Basic Tax Tip to Save $5,000 Annually

3.US Companies Lost an Estimated $150m in Sales Last Year Due to a Basic CMS Issue

The Key: No One and Done

The likelihood that a single emotion will get the job done is highly unlikely, just as a single piece of content is unlikely to get you where you want to be.

No time for back patting … only more work ahead

Let’s Build a Strategy

I Love Content Plans Focused ona Time Period and a Theme

Step 1: The timingQuarterly or Monthly? That is the question.

The answer will be based on resources and KPIs.

Step 2: The ThemeRegardless of the length of the time period, all of your content for that period is going to be themed around a single concept.

Embrace it!

CopyPress Example of Theme

ALL!!!???Yes I said all , shut up and listen!

WhitepapersEbooksInfographicsArticlesEmails

Step 3: Create an Editorial CalendarMaybe the most underutilized concept in marketing.

Your calendar should plan out the production, QA, publishing, and marketing of your content.

Step 4: Ideation

Note in Step 3 you are planning content types, not specific content.

You want to create about 2 to 3x the ideas that you actually need for your calendar. Refine and drill down

Some Tips on Ideation

1) Create personas for your content consumers. Who are you writing

for?

2) What ways can you carve up the same information to reach

different learners?

3) What emotions can you trigger in these consumers?

Personas

Personas

General Tips on Ideation

Step 5: Content Planning

Build an internal questionnaire to get all the information out of yourself and key stake holders and over to content creators. A basic idea is not a good idea.

Important Concepts for Questionnaire

1) Why will this content exist? If you write “drive traffic” you

deserve to be fired

2) What problems typically drive someone to find this type of content,

and what decision do they make?

3) Samples of competitor content that gets done what you are looking

to get done

CopyPress Example of Questionnaire

http://intake.copypress.com/form-956987/COPY-QUESTIONNAIRE

Step 6: Content Creation

Really this is the easy part. Really the key is to create a system that produces quality and consistency:

1)Build team2)Build QA System

CopyPress Example of Content

CopyPress Example of Content

CopyPress Example of Content

CopyPress Example of Content

Step 7: Publish

This can mean a lot of things, but one note I have here

A Blog Does Not Fix All Issues

Emails, locked content, resource sections could be better

CopyPress Example of Publishing

Step 7: Market

Your job isn’t to click Publish it’s to market. Your content needs to be pushed, and throwing it up on Twitter isn’t enough

1)Email2)Syndicate

CopyPress Example of Marketing

Step 8: Measure

Set up measurements all the way down your funnel

Step 8: Repurpose

Use old content again. Refresh and republish

Put It All Together

Identify Your Audience. Don’t Just Think, KNOW!!!

Put It All Together

Understand How They Think, Digest, and Share Content

Put It All Together

Think About KPIs Beyond Traffic

Put It All Together

Hit Your Audience Over and Over in Different Ways

Put It All Together

Measure Your Wins and Fails

Put It All Together

Regroup and Repurpose

Dave Snyderdsnyder@copypress.com

1 (888) 505-5689

by the end of Dave’s presentation...

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