Doug Kessler

Doug is one of the pioneers of content marketing in B2B. He’s published a lot on the topic and is a front-line practitioner on behalf of tech clients such as Xerox, Sprint, Informatica and lots more.

Expert session

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

Maximizing Chalk Talk videos

Result if you follow the steps in Doug’s session

Build an audience and get the highest engaged traffic

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

Expert session snapshot

Transcript

It’s such a sensible thing to do high value, it’s in that sweet spot high value, low cost technique. And I think even if your viewers are one, two man bands, you know, you don’t need a production crew for this, you need a smartphone, you know, and the like.

So a chalk talk or a whiteboard is a smart person with something to draw on. Talking to camera about a topic and to doing it right into camera. You know, presenting right to camera and sometimes drawing as they go other times, it’s already drawn up there, and they just talk to it and go maybe circle key topics as they go.

So it’s that simple. It’s the simplest of all video techniques. Maybe simpler is just the interview but it’s close. You need someone who’s comfortable talking to camera and presenting. Some people are brilliant interviewed and not great talking to camera. They’re just not natural, relaxed authentic presenters. But you know, once you’re over that, it’s an easy thing to do.

So we recommend it to pretty much every client, not all of our clients take us up on it. And none so far have committed to it as a medium in a long running series that never ends, which we’re big believers.

And I wrote a blog post recently, I do a series called let’s steal from and it’s about great content that I love and what we can steal from it, what we can learn from it. And the last one was let’s steal from Moz Whiteboard Friday.

So Moz did an unbelievable, it still does success, incredibly successful series, which is just every Friday. Rand or a guest host does a chalk talk to camera whiteboard session on an SEO topic. And it’s hugely successful series. So I’ve kind of, in the post, dive into how it works, why it’s successful, you know, that some of the metrics behind it and how we use it.

Yeah. So okay, we’ve given I suppose a foundation for people like, what is chalk talks. Now what kind of results is possible from doing this style of video?

Okay. So you know, results for any tactic is always going to be a function of what you put into it. And for Moz and random and the Moz team, the results have been pretty spectacular. I mean it’s, I think it’s their top performing kind of content now right up there for views and traffic and things and their highest engaged traffic.

So all their engagement metrics are 25-30% higher on the whiteboard sessions than any of their other content. The big guides they do them, the Moz cast service they have or the blog posts themselves which are hugely popular. So you know, they get, their average is 20,000 views which is fantastic.

That is a really good audience in essentially a niche market SEO. Their highest is 200,000 views for when there was the Panda update for Google. So and they just constantly rocking, building the audience. And it’s an audience they own. They’re not paying for that audience. They’re coming regularly. They’re coming back.

It’s become kind of the watercooler of the SEO community. SEO agencies gather on Fridays to play and eat lunch and watch the next, the most recent edition. So they’ve built a medium, they’ve built a magazine show format that people come back for over and over and over again, and they’re not paying anybody to reach that audience. So this is hugely valuable.