 Hi everyone, I'm Anate Zubia. I'm the head of marketing for the question and answer website Cora and I'm really excited to be here at E4M's content jam to share some of my ideas around utilizing curiosity to power up intent in your content. You will notice I'm actually on a screen here so I'm not physically with you there. I'm actually coming from Phoenix, Arizona and the United States, land of the desert and cowboys in the wild west but I'm very very jealous of the networking opportunity that you're all having there today. So please I'm going to put my contact information at the end of my slide deck. I would love for you all to reach out, let's share ideas with one another and tell me what you learned at content jam. So reach out social media channels or on my email which I'll pop up at the end. But without further do let's dive into this curiosity topic shall we. So they say that cats are allegedly curious but did you know that humans are actually hardwired for curiosity? We've had a thirst for information since our ancestors early survival. In the early days of human civilization we actually would channel our ingenuity and our curiosity to lead to new discoveries. One of those such discoveries was fire. Fire then spurred our first innovation, the stone tool. From there I went to both spears, language, glue, clothing, even the music we listen to today. All of that was inspired by humankind's natural hard-coded curiosity. Today our curiosity is not so useful in terms of survival context but it is when it comes to our continuing education and it actually makes us happy. Our brain's reward chemical dopamine is actually intricately linked to our curiosity state. So when you're exploring and satisfying curiosity your brain just floods with dopamine and you feel happier when you're discovering new things. That mechanism actually increases that likelihood that you'll continue to try and satisfy curiosity again and again in the future. So knowing that curiosity and finding answers to things makes us happy and creates joy. How do we utilize that to create a better experience through the content that we create and through our marketing funnels? I'm sure you're probably curious about this so let's reward ourselves and learn how we can do that. So over the course of this presentation I'm going to give you five of my personal best practices when it comes to content writing. I'll go through these pretty fast so when I reach five they're actually all going to be on the screen so you can take a snapshot of that if you want to. But the very first one we'll dive into is knowing your target audience. So when I say knowing your target audience you're like, yeah I know who I'm writing for but it's a little bit deeper than that. Let me show you how. So I utilize buyer personas in order to tap in and understand my audience. If you're not doing this already definitely sit down and start looking at how you can craft buyer personas. This is the template that we actually use inside of Cora. I'm happy to share these templates with you so again hit me up at the end of my email and I'm happy to give those to you. But if you don't have a buyer persona that you're sitting down or writing to or maybe your buyer persona doesn't actually include things that guide your content. Things like what drives their decision? Are they more rational or emotional? Do they look at certain types of sources? Are they working more with their peers? Where do they get their information? Those are things you really really want to understand about each one of these users and the best way to craft these personas if you haven't crafted them already is actually conducting interviews. Go out and talk to these people individually. Get to know that who they are and find those common threads and create these personas. These personas should feel like a real person. They should feel like some of that you could sit down and get to know by reading the persona and on the back side of it have a clear statement. Like have a vision statement on the back that explains exactly what this person is about and how you get to know them a little bit more intimately. So, buyer persona. Next thing is to create a solar system of content. And the best way to describe that is actually to talk about one of my very favorite children's books. If you give a mouse a cookie by Laura Nomaroff, the whole concept of the book is if you give a mouse a cookie, he's going to ask for a glass of milk. And then if you give him a glass of milk, he's going to ask for a straw. And it's this continuation of things that he needs to satisfy. And that's exactly how our buyer's curiosity is. They find one thing and next thing and they keep going down this sort of rabbit hole, so to speak. And so that's where the solar system of content comes into play. When you create content, think of a very large content piece that you have. Like maybe it's an ebook or an annual insights report. These are very large pieces of content. How do you get people into that one piece of content to commit to actually spending the time reading long form? Give them lots of bite size nuggets across the past. So maybe your annual insert report turns into several infographics, a couple blog posts, maybe it's a video piece, an interview with the analyst. All of those items should lead down the line into that major, major content piece that then takes them through their funnel from awareness to consideration deeper into decision. So really craft your content around having that unified experience. And you can actually take that and hack your content across. Maybe you've got your bigger piece and you're like, hey, three of these sections could be standalone blogs. Absolutely do that. But that's how you create your solar system. Next is to answer high demand questions. And so answering your high demand questions, this is where the definition of curiosity really, really comes into play. People are eager to know and learn something that is the definition of curiosity. Content becomes more than just words then. It's really seeking out an answer to a burning question that they haven't understood. What is that burning question? And then giving them just that short little nugget, that solar system piece that we talked about to answer those little questions. So pepper them throughout. This is going to help influence them when they're the most receptive when they're doing research against their curiosity. Their their actual dopamine is turned on to try to find this answer. They're actively seeking a great place to do. They sat in one of my personal favorites that I did even before I worked at Cora was utilizing the questions across Cora, full of people who are curious, asking questions, getting answers. And it's a great place to just do research for your content, but also to distribute some of those answers that you're writing. So I definitely recommend find out what kind of questions your audience is asking around your topic across Cora. We have over 100 million unique monthly views in India alone. And a lot of those are very high intent people. So they're researching products or services or brands before they're making purchases. So they're in that like high intent mode of research and learning before they're going through the purchase journey. So great place to really research, but also great place to post content. You can also research what they're what they're looking for over things like Google Analytics, your keyword knowledge, tools like SEM rush, but finding those types of questions you really need to get into long tail keyword searches and just really understand like what are these people searching for when they're looking and their curiosity is peaked. Next is writing high quality content. And I know this seems super obvious, right? Like grammatical brand voice, like it flows well, it's got the right formatting. That's not exactly what I'm talking about. So I'm talking about high quality content in the sense that high quality is not defined by you, high quality is defined by them. So do some research digging into this. These are just industry standards from the B2B research report of 2022 content marketing Institute. And this shows content assets that had its best returns the most engagement over the last 12 months. Do something similar with your audience, really tap into what type of content you're producing, what sorts of format get the most engagement. That's what's defining high quality content. It really is what they want versus what you think is the level. And you can do this by setting the right objectives, which we're going to talk about in our next one. So distributing content with intention. I have six key things that I follow whenever I am doing this. First, understanding audience. Where are they? Where am I distributing to? Where are they doing their research? That's the most important. The next one is setting some very clear objectives for yourself. Knowing what you're trying to achieve. Are you trying to achieve awareness, impressions? Are you trying to get clicks? Is this more consideration? Make sure you have very clear objectives for each one of your content pieces that you're going to publish. That will help you align to where the right place is. Then you select your distribution channels. Those first two should guide you on to which channels are going to be the best fit for achieving your goal and reaching the audience that you need. Then determine your medium. Maybe a video performs better on one platform versus another. Build out your editorial calendar based on that. Really strategize about when the best time is to post according to the region or when they're actually consuming content. You can go back and recap on this. And then continue, measure, analyze, adjust. Do retrospectives. Sit down and analyze your content. Akora, we go through our content twice a year and a deep dive to ensure that the pieces we have out there, even evergreen pieces, are still relevant performing. What do we need to update? A search engine loves it when you update old content. Take advantage of those opportunities to bring things back into the norm. Those are some content distribution strategies. It's how you'd be much more intentful when you're thinking about distribution. So I am going to depart. I'll leave you guys with a quote from Mr. Walt Disney. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things because we're curious and curiosity keeps leading us down to the past. I certainly hope that I will hear from most of you. I've got my contact information there. Again, thank you to our event organizers for making this possible. I hope everyone here is having a fantastic content jam. Thank you so much for having me.