Aaron Agius

Aaron has worked with the largest companies in the world on SEO & Content Marketing, from Salesforce, to LG, Coke, Ford, Land Rover, Unilever, Intel, IBM and many more.

He created 10 – 15 pieces of thought leadership content on search and content marketing each month on places like Forbes, Content Marketing Institute.com, Hubspot.com, Entrepreneur.com, business.com, fastcompany.com and dozens more.

Expert session

Tactic that has had the biggest impact on Aaron’s success

 Using a process to create a content strategy that works best

Result if you follow the steps in Aaron’s session

Nail your content strategy document ‘primer’ that will guide all of your decisions when it comes to implementing your strategy

Full session with video, notes, audio and discussion inside EHQ Club. Learn more

Expert session snapshot

Transcript

So the first thing we do with clients is to really outline things like, tone style, voice, language used. So understanding if you want to come across as professional or if you want to come across as authoritative, funny, conversational, really, most of the time, this is editorial content that you’re talking about.

And you want to have the broadest range possible. So you kind of want to speak in a conversational tone that still have some really good factual information.

So our recommendation is speak conversational, write conversationally in your writing. Don’t try and use crazy big words or complicated sentences or anything like that.

Write in a way that’s going to be easily digested by most people so that you’re removing the barriers to them, actually wanting to share it or distributed on your behalf. So that’s definitely where we start off time style, voice language.

And then we go on to things like content, length and structure. So part of the work that we do as an agency for clients is when we take them over as a content audit. So you think about these big sites with thousands and thousands of posts and editorial content.

We go in and we analyze their content from analytics through some web scraping through social data, link profile data, and we’re able to come out with some really big insights to say what content actually works for the business.

So what we do is, wherever the most common things we pull out, our content of this length performs best by line, by links, and social shares and time on site and engagement and comments, and so many things, you know, publishing on this day or that day, writing content about these sorts of topics, these authors might be better.

So we’ve got a really big database of information that we’re able to pull out. And what always happens, I’d say 98% of the time is, the longer form content outperforms short form content with links with time on site was social shares with engagement with all of the key metrics that you typically use to see if a piece of content is performing just on that.

So with that information, like, in terms of long form content has always been the case or is it something recent, I’ve certainly been saying it for seven or eight years now. And I’m sure there were people saying it before me that there are plenty of cases of short form content doing well, newspapers and those sorts of things. But they’re the different beast altogether.

They have the authority, they have the traffic, all of those sorts of things, if you’re going to come out and create a brand new site, will start creating editorial content on your own website with the purpose of driving some sort of engagement or results, you’re going to win by doing long form over short form, just from all the data was saying.

Okay, and can you tell us or explain what is the long form and short form?

Yeah. So the thing I hate about content is when people come and think they’re doing content marketing by putting three to 500 words on a page about their product, service or company. And that’s it. That’s short form content. And it’s terrible short form content, and it’s not going to do anything for you.

Long form content, everyone, just sort of picks a number. But the longer we’re saying, the better.

So we’ve created content for clients, it’s been 30, 40,000 words long, like a proper book. And that outperforms the 2000 word pieces. The sweet spot that we found, where it matters, in terms of the content length and getting results is around 2000, 1500, 2000 words, per post.

And that’s where we see the biggest uptick and the biggest amount of engagement and, you know, it climbs from there. But that’s the way you can try and position all of your pieces of content that you’re gonna see better results and you’re able to do it on a regular basis.

Okay, great. So when you say gets better results, are we talking about like, I heard you mentioned engagement, they’re like clicks length of time on page versus like, actual customers, like, what’s the thing we’re tracking?

That’s a great question. And that’s in the strategy you need to understand. Business objectives, what matters to the business, what the purpose of creating this content is, and oftentimes, they’re not necessarily directly aligned with leads and sales.

You know, some people might be, you might need to create a content marketing plan to do content marketing. For brand awareness, you might need to do it for credibility building.

So that when you are doing proposals elsewhere, that you can prove that you know what you’re talking about, because you thought leaders, you might need to do it because creating editorial content on your blog means that you can get links because people are going to link to your great content, which then means that your actual product and service pages are going to rank well therefore you’ll get laid.

So you really need to understand what you’re trying to do with this content and what’s actually achievable because different types of content will also matter because they apply to different stages of the funnel. Some will be just awareness, some will be about your industry, some will be closer aligned with your product.

Some of the calls to actions are going to be different all the way through. So understanding your calls to action, understanding what potentially results you’re going to see, and your business objectives are really keys in that strategy.