Meet Ashley Segura, an accomplished international speaker and the VP of Operations and CoFounder of TopHatContent, a distinguished content marketing agency. With a wealth of experience working both in-house and with various agencies, Ashley has played a pivotal role in driving online business growth for numerous clients.
Renowned for her expertise, Ashley regularly imparts her digital marketing wisdom through engaging workshops and presentations at esteemed industry conferences such as Pubcon, BrightonSEO, SearchLove, Digital Summit, Retail Global, and the prestigious SMS Sydney.
In addition to her speaking engagements, Ashley has co-authored the best-selling book “The Better Business Book V.2” and contributes her insights as a writer to esteemed industry blogs like Search Engine Journal and AuthorityLabs.
What truly excites Ashley is the remote lifestyle. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, her team had embraced remote work, and now, as companies across all industries are discovering the benefits of remote collaboration, the online atmosphere has been greatly enhanced. Ashley is thrilled to witness a surge in online engagement, with more eyes on content than ever before. Social engagement is on the rise, and content is being consumed for longer durations, showcasing the tremendous potential of the digital realm.
Join Ashley Segura as she unravels the evolving landscape of remote work and the thriving online environment. Benefit from her invaluable insights and discover the remarkable opportunities that await in the ever-expanding digital world.
Ashley can be contacted on Twitter @ashleymadhatter or via LinkedIn.
Recent Shows with Ashley Segura
407 | Content Reuse with Ashley Segura of TopHatContentInterview / podcastFor episode 407 of the award-winning EDGE of the Web podcast our special guest was Ashley Segura, VP of Operations and CoFounder of TopHatContent. Host Erin Sparks spoke with Ashley about how to repurpose and reuse content. Here’s what we learned:
00:03:28
Content Reuse: The What and Why
Ashley explained that the concept of content reuse means taking a piece of content you previously used and recycling it to be used again. For example, let’s say in the fourth quarter of 2020 you had a blog post about holiday marketing and you want to have another post about holiday marketing in the fourth quarter of 2021. Instead of reinventing the wheel, you can take bits and pieces from the original piece and do things such as creating social media graphics from call-outs, produce audio bites inside of it, and finding other ways to repurpose the original content. You might update it, or recycle it into a new content medium. The possibilities are really endless when it comes to reusing your content.
00:04:29
Challenges in Repurposing Content
One of the biggest challenges you’ll face in repurposing content is that it is very time consuming. Some discover that repurposing a piece of content can take up just as much time as producing a new piece of content, though it does depend on how you go about doing it. Let’s say you conducted an online webinar. You could take the video recording of the webinar and put it up onto your YouTube channel. You could embed that YouTube video in a blog post. And you can use the blog post to take an even deeper dive into the topic or a subtopic of the webinar. Every webinar or podcast episode could have gone even deeper into the topic, so there’s almost always an opportunity to do that with most content.
Going deeper in this way can be time consuming, in part because you have to carefully review the original content and identify questions that weren’t answered and subtopics that could have been covered in greater depth. And that takes time, but once you do that review and evaluation of the original content, then you’ll have a clear picture of how to repurpose the content. But the repurposing has to bring new insights and value to the table if you want it to actually perform for you in terms of driving traffic and conversions or satisfying user intent. If it seems like it’s just a re-hash of the previous content, then it’s not going to do anything for you.
00:08:08
When Should You Not Repurpose Content?
One question that comes up is about the stopping point, meaning when should you not be repurposing content or should you continually be working on repurposing content all the time? Ashley notes that this is where things get a bit complex, and it really depends on how well you’re able to measure content performance. For example, if you have a piece of content on an important topic but it has performed poorly, then you should definitely work on repurposing it because you clearly missed something, didn’t cover the topic in the right way or to a sufficient depth, maybe you didn’t package it quite right, or something else along those lines. Sometimes it’s just changing the medium. A blog post performing poorly might get better results as a piece of video content.
But this also applies to content that has performed really well. Some think, why touch it if it’s performing well? But what is that good performance is actually only the tip of the iceberg of what it could do for you? If you can trace a lot of traffic and high performance to three key blog articles, for example, then do more of that by repurposing the content in different ways and formats. Or go at the topic from a different angle, and this is where the SEMrush Topic Research Tool can come in handy to see what other questions people are asking about the topic, which can reveal potential new angles for you to approach the same topic that performed so well for you in the previous pieces. The tool will also show you the top 10 trending articles about that topic or keyword, so go take a look at how those pieces handle the topic and how you can tweak it in the repurposing.
00:10:00
Measuring Content Performance
This all presupposes you’re measuring content performance. Ashley strongly recommends conducting a quarterly content audit. The quarterly audit doesn’t need to be as full-blown or in-depth as an annual audit, but each quarter you should be looking at content performance from the previous quarter. This is how you know what to do in the next quarter. The goal of the quarterly audit is to get you thinking about what stance you need to take on the high-performing content versus the low-performing content. You build on the high-performing content with your repurposing. With the low-performing content it’s about figuring out what you missed and correcting for it in the repurposing of that content.
What about sharing decks of slides with something like SlideShare? How do you even measure performance with something like that? It feels like many people end up using it as an afterthought as just another channel to dump some content. Ashley notes that the number of people who actually go to SlideShare to seek out information is a very small percentage. You can make use of slide-deck style content but post it on your own site and digital channels. And sure, put it up on SlideShare. Some people find it does drive significant traffic to their site, though those cases are relatively rare. In other words, if you’re already on SlideShare, use it, but if you’ve never used SlideShare, don’t start now. It’s probably not going to do much for you. Just post the content on your channels and throw a few Facebook ads on it.
00:14:45
Is There Too Much Content Repurposing Going On?
Ashley says there is such a thing as too much repurposing. You wouldn’t want all your content efforts for a whole quarter to only be repurposing content from the previous quarter. That would be a mistake. You do need to be producing new and unique content all the time. Whatever your target audience may be, there are topics you haven’t covered for them that they want to know about, information they want, entertainment you haven’t provided, and so on. For the most part, you can bet your competitors are addressing all of that as well. In some extremely rare cases you may come across a real content gap that no one has filled, which is the Holy Grail of content marketing research.
00:16:04
Successful Content Tracking: Tools of the Trade
How do you evaluate whether or not content has reached your target audience and the impact it had? Ashley noted the following key metrics:
Time on Page: This one is a very common metric because it tells you whether people found the content valuable enough to fully consume it as measured by how much time they spend on that page. But it’s only useful in combination with other metrics. You can imagine how often someone gets to a page and really wants to digest the content but gets a phone call or needs to respond to an urgent email message or gets up to go get a cup of coffee. Ten minutes later they’re still on that page but they haven’t actually consumed most of the content.
Heat Mapping: The scenario above is why you have to also check against something like heat mapping to see how far down the page people actually went in consuming the content. Heat mapping can be very eye-opening in terms of showing how users are consuming your content.
Bounce Rate: If your content has high traffic combined with a high bounce rate, there’s something the content isn’t delivering that visitors were looking for.
When asked if she’s an ROI (return on investment) or ROO (return on objective) content marketer, Ashley noted it depends on a variety of factors. Overall, the objective is generally more important because content has a much longer time horizon for accomplishing anything when compared to more immediate impacts from advertising. If your content is meant to move people a little further along the sales funnel, any content that prompts users to do that is a win in her book, even if it’s a small move in the right direction.
[...]
April 5, 2021- 405 | Content Marketing Research and Business Goals with Ashley SeguraInterview / podcastOur special guest for episode 405 of the award-winning EDGE of the Web podcast was Ashley Segura, VP of Operations and CoFounder of TopHatContent. Host Erin Sparks spoke with Ashley about recent developments in content marketing and how to make the most of content. Here’s what we learned:
Ashley Segura: Her Background and Experience
Ashley is an international speaker and VP of Operations and CoFounder of TopHatContent, a content marketing agency. She has worked extensively both in-house and with multiple agencies helping clients grow their businesses online. Ashley regularly teaches digital marketing workshops and speaks at industry conferences like Pubcon, BrightonSEO, SearchLove, Digital Summit, Retail Global, and the prestigious SMS Sydney. Ashley has also co-authored the best-selling book The Better Business Book V.2 and is a contributing writer to industry blogs such as Search Engine Journal and AuthorityLabs.
Ashley got into content marketing back in 2011. She already had a journalism background, so content was always important, but it was a conscious decision to begin taking all her content digital rather than print. That was the beginning of understanding digital content, what engages users and gets them to move from content piece to content piece. She has worked at multiple agencies and also became a serial agency owner (she’s on something like her fourth agency now). Each agency iteration has gotten her closer to the Holy Grail of content services that make a real difference.
The Constant Evolution of Content Consumption
The content playing field and how people digest content has changed so much since 2011, as has the way people search for content. The focus keeps shifting. For a while the emphasis was on short content because people want quick answers. Then it became long content because people are actually taking the time to digest it. Search users started putting in long-tail keywords to their queries. Now they are asking full-blown questions as if they’re talking to a friend. All these things and changes feed into what kind of content gets created in order to satisfy users as best as they can be understood.
Content Marketing Research: How to Begin
If you want to build a content research model you can repeat, Ashley noted that it begins with clearly defining who your personas are. This is marketing 101, but it’s so much more powerful these days because of the all the data that’s available. You can really come up with several exact match personas of who is tuning in to your content, who is visiting your website, who is going to your social media sites, and then create content specifically for them. This doesn’t mean one type of content is going to fit them all, so before doing a content audit or content creation or even developing a content strategy, the first order of business is dive deep into the backend data to really figure out who those people are—both the ones who are highly engaged as well as the ones you’re trying to engage but have missed for some reason.
What you can create from this kind of data analysis is very specific. You might have three different personas—A, B, and C. And you know each persona is going to like a certain kind of content posted on certain days on certain platforms. There will be similarities across the personas, but also things that are significantly different enough to warrant them being a distinct persona type. You have to know those personas in order to then create content that reaches them and engages them at all times.
The data will tell you what content different personas want and how they want to consume that content—their preferred digital channels. One persona knows what they want in terms of products and just needs to see if you offer a good deal, while another persona needs a lot more research and education content to build trust and credibility.
After you’ve nailed down those personas, the next step is to go out there and see what’s already been done because just about everything has already been done at some point. From an agency perspective, you ask the client who they think are their top 3–5 direct competitors, and you start there. But then you do your own manual searching on the relevant keywords and topics to see what surfaces because nine times out of ten you’re going to see even stronger competitors than what the client named, and you definitely want to see what they’re doing because they’re the ones who are currently winning the game. And of course there are all kinds of tools out there to help with this kind of research as well.
When you find some of those key pieces of content, whether old or new, that rise above the others, study the structure and learn from it. Examine closely any comments that contain questions and other relevant content from users because those might be pointing out content that was missing from the original piece that you can incorporate into your piece. You need to understand why those sites are doing so well, and it doesn’t always have to do because of their brand or domain authority. Learn how they’re getting their results and then you can do it just as well if not better.
Thanks to social media engagement, brands can also just ask directly what people want in terms of content, and people respond. This is how small players can stay in the game when they don’t have the resources to do focus groups and other old-school marketing research that the big corporations can still do.
Also be wary about attempting to jump into trending topics just for the sake of getting in on the conversation. There will probably be a number of big voices that tend to dominate the discourse on trending topics, so the chances of your brand getting any traction in there is slim to none. But if you do feel the need to weigh in on trending topic, be smart about it. Go to the SEMrush Topic Research Tool to learn about what people are asking about a specific topic. Your goal is to identify what questions are not being answered by the trending articles, and there are always at least a few. If your content addresses those questions, then you might do well. That’s how you could make a stand out difference on a trending topic rather than just blending in.
Aligning Content Marketing to Business Goals
Different business goals require different kinds of content and different ways of presenting that content. A big, basic goal of almost all marketing is sales because you have to keep money flowing into the business. You can create a series of content pieces that lead customers down the sales funnel, rather than just relying on phone calls. Think about the kinds of information the potential customer needs along the funnel to get them comfortable and informed so they have what they need at the conversion point. And you can track them to see if they’re moving through the content pieces as you’ve ordered them in the virtual funnel.
Building Trust Through Content Marketing
Trust plays such a huge role in digital marketing today, but how do you even measure it let alone figure out how to build it through content marketing? The starting point, once again, is data. Get out there see what your brand sentiment is by looking at what people are actually saying about your brand online right now. Are you getting backlinks and are they high-authority backlinks? If you are, that builds trust not only on the part of the search engine that your site is good, but it also builds trust with other users.
A more analytical way to look at it would be through your bounce rate. If you have high traffic but also a high bounce rate, there’s a reason they’re bouncing right off your piece of content or your site. Of course, there could be a thousand different reasons why they’re bouncing, including things as simple as slow page loading speed or how it looks on mobile. If you can eliminate those sorts of reasons using tools like Google Search Console, then what’s left is an issue of trust. If you’ve claimed the user will find x-y-z by following this link to a page on your site but when they get there they don’t see x-y-z, then they’re bouncing because you’ve lost their trust.
Measuring trust is tricky, but there are some good tools you can use to help you track brand sentiment, such as Mention. There’s also the SEMrush Brand Monitoring tool that includes a sentiment analysis feature. Brandwatch is another one. But if you’re already using something like SEMrush for your content marketing, then it’s easy to just use their brand monitoring tool as well. [...]
March 29, 2021
