Cyrus Shepard will be speaking on Content Strategy at the Engage Conference, which will take place March 9, 2017 in Portland. For more information, or to purchase tickets, please click here.
1) Please give us your background and let us know what you do for a living.
Until 2015 I worked at Director of Audience Development for Moz, where I had been for four years. After leaving, I founded Fazillion Media, which generates revenue using content marketing through multiple revenue streams, including affiliate marketing, advertising, and direct sales. I also consult SEO clients part-time on a limited basis.
2) How can a big brand optimally provide relevant content for their target audience?
Too often, brands measure the wrong things. They are primarly concerned with generating pageviews to their latest article, and resort to click-bait type tactics which can only result in a quick turn-and-burn. Can we fault the poor performance marketer who has to turn in these metrics to her boss at the end of the month? Instead, brands should focus on the problems their customers are actually trying to solve, and focus on the fat long-tail of the demand curve instead of short-term Facebook-esque bump and grind. It’s better to have 100 motivated visitors with problems to solve visit your site per month, than 2000 simply curious lookie lous who fly by night.
3) When would you recommend paid promotion for content pieces?
Paid promotion makes sense in many environments, but it is particularly smart in situations when trying to build email lists, remarketing, build custom audiences based on demographics/interrest, set Facebook pixels, or in general anytime you want to target a very specific audience profile and your platform of choice has that data to help you target.
Todd Mintz knows PPC…knows Social Media…knows SEO…knows Blogging…knows Domaining…and knows them all real well. He runs growth marketing for )and is also a Director & Founding Member of SEMpdx: Portland, Oregon’s Search Engine Marketing Association, and he can be found here on Twitter and Facebook.