Ashley Ward will be speaking on Content Marketing at Engage which will take place March 7–8 in Portland Oregon. 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.
I wear many, many hats, but the largest hat I wear is Digital Marketer. My career first took off as a journalist focusing on public relations and hard-hitting newsworthy content. Then, the digital age approached, which meant it was time to move from print to digital and fast. So, I quickly adapted my content producing skills to online content and opened up a digital marketing agency, Madhouse Marketing, in San Diego, California. Seven years later and Madhouse Marketing focuses primarily on social media and content marketing, as well as digital PR, audits, and digital marketing consulting. My absolute passion is in consulting where I get to really help a business and brand grow to its true potential.
2) What does content need in order to make it compulsively sharable by the target audience?
If you want your content to be shared, heck maybe even go viral, then it has to be shareable. Sure there are tons of other factors like producing interactive content, mobile-friendly content, topics that your demographic enjoys digesting, and plenty more. But, it doesn’t matter how perfectly crafted and unique your piece of content is if it’s not something that can easily be shared.
How can you make it “easily sharable”? Think about your audience and what device they’re primarily using when they first see your content. People are more likely to share your content on their first take, that first read-through of your headline. If that first take is usually done on a mobile device then the content needs to have buttons at the top, middle, and bottom to make it easily shareable. You also want to offer mobile-friendly sharing options such as shared as a text message, on social networks, or in an email.
3) How can paid social achieve optimal synergy with paid search?
A great way to utilize a paid social media campaign is to promote that social traffic to your website. Not only do you want to increase traffic to your site to generate ROI, but also to generate more visitors heading to your site. The more traffic you get to your site, and keep, the more search engines want to rank your site above your competitors who are hardly getting any visitors.
Go to Ashley’s Session on the Agenda
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.