 I'm really, really excited to be here. I talk a little bit about my journey in the upfront of this presentation, but I have a big passion for taking the things that I hear about at the global and national agency level and being able to translate it and share it with my community in different ways. So it's really wonderful to be here today. Also, honestly, didn't know I'd be speaking in the big room, so we're just gonna flow with that. But I'm really excited to see you guys all here today. Maybe this will be a great, I'm seeing it's a great way to get feedback because I'm really excited to share with you some of the ideas that I've been working on at VML. And to talk a little bit about me, my name is Alyssa Murphy. I currently work at VML. My role is senior connections manager and I have specialties in organic search and social media strategy. So a little bit about how I got there. I started at a smaller agency called Influence, which is now located in the Crossroads. Great place. I learned so much, but I did everything. I was like the Jill of all trades and I always loved content. So I was writing content for people's blogs. I was maintaining the content on the site. And then also I explored starting the strategy department there, which was very focused around content and how it played in social media spaces. So it was a really exciting thing to explore that, but I kind of got to the point that I was like, okay, I want to like really dive in on one thing, you know, really specialize and try out some bigger brands. And so I went over to VML and there I worked, I've worked on Tropicana and Propel initially, purely doing social. Then I went to Tennessee Tourism, which was a really cool experience like, oh my gosh, I just, I love Tennessee now. So in marketing estate was a really neat experience for me. But while I was on that account, I got to explore doing blog content for their new site and kind of restructuring the way that they do content strategy. And it sparked in me a lot of passions that intersected with search and social and kind of exploring a new space that really doesn't, I don't have a word for it yet. My boss is a great term for this, called it squishy. When things are just like, you know, you're still trying to figure them out. So currently I'm working on Wendy's Express and Miami Tourism in kind of a hybrid search and social role. And today I'm gonna share with you some of the things that I use with these different clients to use, leverage, you know, search, social site to do really awesome things, really great content. But first off, I wanted to hear a bit about you guys. So I'd love to, I have some examples in here from a workshop I did for students who were working on a project for the Navy. So that's why there's like a bunch of Navy examples. But I'd love to, as I talk to the examples, maybe speak to some of the things that you guys are writing about and the sites that you are creating. So can you guys throw out some of the topics that you're writing about on your sites or creating your sites for? Yeah. What kind of content are you? I'm not sure. I'm just thinking about peer support. Peer support, cool. So peer support, grocery stores, cybersecurity, very cool, very hot, hot topic right now. But we can surely get into Google trends on that one. Ooh, personal care, beauty. That'll be great to use Pinterest for. So we'll use yours for the Pinterest example. Say that again. Affiliated marketing, what is that exactly for what kind of clients do you serve? Very cool, very cool. Well thank you guys for sharing some of that. It's also great to know that you guys are creating content also. It sounds like for the idea of both passion projects and it sounds like need generation and revenue generation too, which is awesome. So we can dive into all of that. But really quick, I wanted to step back and share this quote that I love. It focuses on SEO but we're gonna dive into different areas outside of SEO as well. But it says the beauty of SEO is that instead of pushing a marketing message onto folks who don't want to hear what you have to say, you can reverse engineer the process to discover exactly what people are looking for, create the right content for it and appear before them at exactly the moment they are looking for it. It's pull versus push. So I think that's like a great internal thought to keep with this today. But if I was to affect this quote or edit it a bit, I would actually say the beauty of organic search trends, social trends and insights, insight insights, not as catchy as just SEO would, that's the beauty of these things all working together. I really believe and I've been able to track progress over the past couple months with these clients that this is kind of where the magic lies is where these areas can intersect. And it's not formulaic, it's a little bit of intuition. It's a lot of digging into tools. This presentation is very tools-based. But I think that it's really exciting when you do hit the mark and you can build off that success to do more and more. So like I said, I'm a big believer in tools. So this presentation is mainly structured around the tools you can use. Feel free to have your laptops out, exploring the tools while I'm talking about them. That's great. You can also tweet, that's great too. My handle is, oh gosh, oh my, sorry, my handle's at the end. Sorry guys, but it's Alys Murphy, A-L-Y-S-M-U-R-F-E-Y on Twitter. So as we go through, feel free to explore these things. I'm also a big believer in using data to inform creative thinking. So I love having a foot in both those worlds. And you'll see a little bit of that. And I think it's really cool because it gives you, it's a system that you can use, but it gives you a lot of flexibility to be creative and apply it to whatever topics you are exploring and creating sites for and trying to get traffic to your site for. So this is kind of structured to take whatever your site is about and then we'll dive into these tools and how you can use them for your own sites in whatever way you wanna tackle them. I also am very big on actionable presentations, so everything in this presentation you can take home and use immediately. So I'm very excited about that. So all right, let's go ahead and dive in. So I have this split into three different areas to talk to kind of the process of content strategy. First, I'm gonna talk about discovering trends. Then we're gonna talk about looking at what's already doing great on your site and then how can you maintain that and keep it going because if you don't have process and you don't have kind of regulation as a part of this and the right stakeholders involved if you have a site with other stakeholders, it can kind of fall apart and it really doesn't work. And then you have possibly your higher ups asking why it didn't work and it didn't get like a full opportunity, preaching because I've had that happen to me before. So first off for discovering trends, one of my favorite new tools that I discovered as I've gotten into the search practice is the Moz keyword explorer. And by the way, all of these are free. There's either a free version or it's completely free the way that it is. So Moz, what it does is you can put in your site, you can put in keywords, and then it will generate ideas for keywords for you and the volume that people search for them. And that's really cool because you can also toggle between queries that are questions, queries that are related to this but don't contain these words, queries that do contain these words. And this is a great place to start because you can kind of see what things that people are interested in that align to your site and create content around them. And a neat thing is, don't be discouraged by low volume because it will show you like the average searches that that topic sees per month or that keyword sees per month because there's actually a lot of power in looking for niche keywords, especially if you're doing kind of like a local focused site. So, you know, a sweet spot for a site that isn't wanting to be super competitive or isn't going after something branded might look for like a monthly volume of like 100 to 500 keywords. But when I'm working with like a brand like Wendy's, they, you know, they own Baconator. Nobody else on the internet can own Baconator and with the authority that Wendy's does. So for instance, you know, so I'll like look on their monthly search volume and it's crazy. This is public data. You could go out and look for this yourself. So I'm happy to share it, but people search for like Baconator over 12,000 times per month. It's crazy. It's crazy. People love their burgers. So it's been great to work with them because I can tell them, hey guys, you know, this product gets a lot of searches. We should put more content on the site about it. We should talk about it more. Hey, people on social, this product's really popular. So maybe you put this into your social posts a little bit more. And then for like the client like Miami who's trying to discover new content, you can use this tool to, you know, look for trends and maybe it kind of that's where the intuition parts come in comes in because we start with a little bit of intuition about a good content topic and then kind of expand from there. So this example's here was when I was looking for US Navy benefits. I found like Navy benefits were fairly, Navy reserve benefits, Navy pay. And then also like looking for US Navy careers, you know, best jobs in the Navy has like a nice 200 to 500 keyword volume. And that would be like a great content piece that would just keep generating traffic for me and capture that focus. Google Trends, my love for Google Trends knows no bounds and they just make it better and better all the time they keep adding stuff. I could spend a whole presentation like with us just running out of Google Trends and it's just blows my mind that it's completely free and you can just go to trends.google.com and access all this information. But Google Trends enables you to do a couple of different things. You can look over different periods of time for the search volume. They make it, you know, say search interest because they don't wanna share, you know, explicit numbers on their volume. But you can look for like the, you know, how much interest there is around the topic. You can manipulate time so you can see if there's certain times of the year that interest spikes. You can add layers onto it so you can compare topics and see if there's a correlation or if they, you know, spike at completely different times. So maybe that's, you know, you write about one piece during one time, you write about one piece during another. You can look for related queries, which is this is an example of. So like, for instance, I looked at Navy for the past 90 days and like a lot of these are like related to news topics and like one of them is about like a shipwreck. I don't wanna talk about that. But one of these was like, was Mr. Rogers and Navy Seal? And that's kind of an interesting topic. Like so that might be a topic that I would explore or, you know, talking, thinking about beauty care. Maybe you're looking at beauty trends and you can see, you can like search for beauty and it will show you, you know, bloggers, you know, searches for bloggers who are at the top, you know, bloggers and influencers, it'll show you different like kinds of things that are trending, like maybe different kinds of lipsticks or something related to Kylie Jenner. So it's a really, it's a really fantastic tool. I use it all the time. For instance, like on Wendy's, I use it a lot to test like their creative ideas. So like if they have kind of like like earlier this week, they kind of had an off the wall idea that they really, and they were like, we know that this is gonna be hard to sell to another client, but they really believed in it. And so I went on to Google Trend and I was like, actually guys, this is a thing. It's crazy, but it's a thing. You can also toggle YouTube's searches too. So gosh, I just can't, I could go on and on about Google Trends, really just explore it and you can, you'll just go down a wonderful rabbit hole and it's very easy to use, very visual. Like this is an example of comparing different warmer weather vacation destinations and we saw like a consistent spike that they, you know, interest spiked around January, you know, during the colder months. So that's like an example of visualization. I just screenshot at that. They make it beautiful. Gosh, they're just so good at Google. So anyways, definitely leverage this tool. It's just so great for content discovery. But this was an example I did with some students who like I said were like looking, looking with the Navy and you know, looking, I looked into was Mr. Rogers and Navy SEAL. They already had written a content piece about it, but I could like look into these content topics that people were interested in and use that to incorporate keywords so that I can draw in the people who are looking for those things. Because I think that's like a really underlying important trend with all of these is it's all about figuring out the way that people talk about things, search for things, they're intense and you know, even phrasing can be really important in your blog post. So you could use these tools to figure out yes, there's volume, yes, there's interest. This is the way people are talking about it and I have a great opportunity to make a blog post for. So that is an example of that. Another great one is answering the public and don't be like, you know, deterred by the weird old dude who's in like the front home page. If anybody pulls it up, I think there's some good figgles. He's like, just so weird. Anyways, I don't know why that's their dude, but don't be deterred by that. It's a really great tool. Again, great for content discovery because you put in a topic and it just shows you all the versions of how people search for things. So for instance, like just all these different queries. So this is one of the visualizations they give and it has, you know, how to calculate Navy retirement paid, how to join the Navy Reserve, how does the Navy Reserve pay work, how much does the Navy Reserve get paid and then break it up into these different types of queries. You can really get into what people are searching for and the intent behind their search. And then you can take that over to Moz, the tool I just showed you, see their volume and then see, you know, where the best opportunities are. Open Site Explorer, another great one, also part of Moz. And this one is just like, you just put in a URL. It tells you the things that are like, you know, linking to that site and you can from there kind of figure out content topics. So for instance, when I did this example for Navy, I noticed that there were like tons of links to this Naval Oceanographer portal, which is what like, it's like this official, you know, where they share their data basically and people use it, I'm sure, you know, for ship navigation and for different weather out at sea. And I was like, wow, that's really cool. And this page looks like crap. So maybe we could use it, since I know the Navy's trying to recruit people, maybe we could use this page as a recruitment tool for people who are interested in that sort of thing and have those types of interests. So, you know, you just can go down the rabbit hole, but it's a really awesome rabbit hole to kind of look at these different trends and try and kind of identify different planes that your site could go after. Do you guys have any questions at this point? I'm also gonna have like normal full Q and A at the end, but I always just like to take a pause if there anything burning, okay, awesome. Also Pinterest, I was talking about in that, so everything up to this point are basically like search tool sets that I've learned from that practice. But when I came into that practice, something that really started me thinking about search initially was Pinterest. Again, love for Pinterest knows no bounds. It's a really cool app and they keep making it better. And it's really neat because it's a light, I don't think of it really as a social network as much as a lifestyle search engine. So it really reveals people's, you know, what is at the root of the human nature of why people are searching for things because it's a network where people start their searches and they're more open minded to different creative things. Now granted, probably whoever threw out affiliated businesses might not be as much content on Pinterest about that because it's just like, it's more of a lifestyle search engine. However, beauty and yes, get there, look at it, love it. It's gonna be great. So you're gonna love all the trend you can get out of it. So these are some of the ways that I use Pinterest. First of all, the Pinterest toolbar in itself is a search tool. When you search for things, it breaks out in these little colored boxes, like all of these related topics. You could put in a term and then you learn, oh, people don't, you know, I'm calling it this, but they search for it like this. And so I'm gonna write about that topic or oh, I didn't realize that people are also interested in this. So I'm gonna write two blog posts. One about this, one about this, and I'm gonna link them together and then I'm gonna put a pin on Pinterest. It's like, you can just kind of start to figure different things out from Pinterest at Spark. You can also, they have this tab called explore. I think it felt like a little over anything yet right here. And it shows you what's trending on Pinterest. It's pretty finicky in the terms that it changes. It's very fluid, it's changing quite a bit. So I would recommend that more for like, if you're like wanting to get content up fast or if you have an idea and you just wanting to kind of validate that it is a trend right now. Like for instance, for one of my like, you know, retail clients, I've been using that tool to tell them like, when things are sparking and when they should be writing content on the blog about it. They also, Pinterest releases this free, amazing report every year called the Pinterest 100, which tells you the rising trends in different categories and the level of interest that they've risen. And they always look at like a certain, they combine different things of looking at a certain period of time at the end of the year, as well as just the volume of interest around that topic. So it's another really great free tool that they give you. And to add to that, they also have this thing called the Pinterest possibilities planner. And again, just a simple PDF that it tells you when trends spark throughout the year. So really great if you're writing about seasonal topics because you can start to be like, oh, there's a, you know, when people are talking about St. Patrick's Day, they actually start talking about it way earlier than I realized or same with holidays. People are searching for like, one of the biggest things that people search for are Thanksgiving outfits. I think they're like wanting to be cute, but like comfy and like leave her in for turkey. But it's really funny because those searches actually like start in like late summer, early fall. So people are like primed, ready for that turkey, but it's just an interesting thing that I wouldn't think about. And then like when I was working with Tennessee, that these kinds of tools really helped us map out, you know, when to feature different parts of the state and different aspects of the state depending on the seasonality. And the other neat thing about Pinterest, I think this is just like, this is actually like a slide from one of those PDF tool sets they have. But the really, I think the really interesting thing about Pinterest and search and social and the way they all work together is thinking about how they work interchangeably. And Pinterest is really cool to kind of help show you what's at the beginning of the funnel of people's discovery before they go to Google to find something specific and then, you know, share about it on Facebook. All right, so the next section is about looking at what you already have going and what's rockin'. I say rockin' a lot. I kind of like have like weird like, you know, dad joke like mango, even though I'm in my 20s. So, you know, bear with me, but I'm proud to have it. So anyway, so see what's already rockin'. Google Analytics, Google Analytics, it's just so simple to put it on your site. You put this like little dab code and paste it on. And all of a sudden you have all this access to all these insights and all these things that can help you figure out what's performing well on your site. So some of the things I use is time on page, looking at how long people spend on a page and which pages they spend the most time on because there's something about that content that's compelling and it's getting them to stay. I also look at visits because obviously there's something about that piece of content that's driving those visits. Maybe I even take it a step further and go, oh, which channels are contributing to those visits because maybe I'm learning that there was a post on Facebook that did really well and that's why it performed well. And I might want to make a note of it for next year. You can also look at what queries lead people to your site. So what people search for and then, you know, and that being a successful kind of visit to your site. You do have to have the search console for that. But again, it's not that hard to install on your site. You can also, of course, see which channels drive the most traffic. This was one that, you know, see what was performing well last year. That was one that one of my colleagues kind of like pointed out one time, like why don't we like look at what was going well last year and see if we can learn anything from that. And it was like a dumb moment that really you can apply across all these tools and especially for more seasonal topics, really kind of help you start to map out your strategy and when you pull your levers at which times. And then also, of course, were there any spikes in traffic last year? Did you see in moments in time that spiked up and can you, you know, kind of recreate that moment? So Google Analytics amazing tool. It can get a little clunky as you like dig into it, but it's almost like Photoshop or obviously WordPress where the more you use it, the easier it gets. And then they add something and you're like, oh, what the hell is this? And then you get it and it's all good. So again, it's very much like all the tools that you guys use. So you'll be great at exploring it. Social media, you can use, you know, like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, especially if you switch to an Instagram business account. All of those channels have insights that you can use to determine future content. So I very much, I lean on, you know, just a lot of the just basic free tool sets and I will look, you know, at the past month, at the past year, what was performing well? What did people comment on? What did they comment about? I learned about my audience. Like why do they follow me? You know, if I'm noticing that I'm getting like a lot of like pre-teen girls following me, like I'm like, maybe I'm like, what am I doing about my content? Is that a good thing? Do I want that to happen? Maybe I'm like into death metal content and I don't want like, you know, sassy pre-teen girls following me. So I need to figure out how to change my content strategy. And then of course, looking at which post got the most clicks because with you guys maintaining site and being, you know, and because masters of your content, I think that's kind of what I would guess everybody really is at the root of why they're here to get more traffic to their site. So of course you're gonna see what helped the most in driving traffic. So that's that section on looking at what already is going well. Any questions on that? Whoa, all right, maintaining it. This is the part that probably is the most squishy for me right now because you have to make it tailored to each, you know, different account or different topic that you're working on. Account if it's for work, topic if it's personal. And really, I hate to report it. That's the thing I found so far, the spreadsheet. I'm sorry guys, I'm working on it. Hopefully we'll find something that's better. We'll bear through it together. But really like just creating spreadsheets has tried different tools, especially like free tools. In terms of paid tools, probably the one that's gotten the closest is like a Divi tool. If anyone's heard of that content management kind of system, but really when it gets down to it you, everyone always has very customized things and it needs to work for you. So I really have just been using Google spreadsheets. And this is the part where, you know, especially if you're working with other people on your site as part of an organization, you might need to start assigning content roles. So when I was working with my tourism client, you know, we had each person represented and then each person had, you know, they knew what they were bringing to the meeting and then we talk about the insights, figure out the content and go from there. So we had a spreadsheet that might look very different from yours. Ours was very focused on, you know, what went well last year, because we're very seasonally focused, what's performing well right now and what are, you know, general travel trends and we kind of worked from there. Your spreadsheet would look very, very different for, you know, affiliated marketing or a beauty content. So, you know, I think it's just one of those things to just kind of dig into, but I think it's also really important because as I was talking about earlier, process is key to keeping this going and keeping it successful, because it's a long game. It's kind of like long, it's kind of like a baseball game. I can't believe I'm using a sports reference. So not me, but it is very much like, you know, it progresses and you have good times and you have bad times and you're able to kind of, through that progression, your different innings of content per se, you start to get an idea of when to play your different cards and your different, you know, your different content plays and then by the time that you play your next game, maybe it's your next year or it's your next month, you're well-equipped to kind of reference back on maybe a previous spreadsheet you did. So, I content play on month by month. You know, you might have a content machine organization and you need to go week by week. You might be just doing it by yourself and you have a million other things on your plate, so maybe it's quarterly. But definitely like make that spreadsheet, keep yourself to it and keep records of it so that you can go back and reference things and keep your content process flowing faster and more efficiently. And then also like I use just simple tools to keep myself on track as well. Trello is so awesome and free and great and I'm sure like tons of people use Trello. That's just like a personal preference because it has a calendar format and I like being able to see things like in a temporal way of what's kind of what's coming up on the horizon in terms of content. But I mean really, this is the part that like it's different for everyone and figuring out for yourself. It's just a matter of kind of tweaking things and making it better month by month. So that's all I got. Do you guys have any questions about any of this? Any of the things I shared? Any of the work that I'm doing because if you can't tell, I'm very excited about it. So I'm happy to answer any questions. Yes. That's when I would say you have your spreadsheet kind of come into play. So you have like maybe like I was saying for one of my tourism clients, we split it up by site, social and industry and in search, well, search was kind of industry but it was so we like would just split it up that way and put the trends in those buckets and then we would progress, you know, horizontally across the spreadsheet and say like, okay, this content pieces based off this trend is going to be about this. We're going to write it on this date. It's going to be posted on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest, whatever. So I think that's when you kind of start to make your process based off of whatever trends you're seeing and whatever works best for your content. Any other questions? Yes. That's a really great question. So she's wondering how long to look back at results in order to kind of inform strategy. I think it does depend on the client because like for instance with Miami it's really great for us to look back over the past five years because travel is a trend that's not going away. We are hella stressed out and we all need to take vacations eventually, you know? Like that's just like the thing about travel. So it's not going away. However, for Wendy's, Wendy's is a brand that has just evolved so much over the last five years and they're also very much about being like very on trend, very relevant in the moment. So for them, I'm probably going to like only look back like 90 days at the most to like look at different trends for them. So it really like depends on the client which is where kind of like the intuition might come in. But I think it's always recognizing that, you know, things do shift and at what level for whatever topic you're addressing at what, how fast do they shift for your topic? And that should kind of determine how much time you look back. Can you say packaging equipment? Okay. Whoa. Yeah. Yeah, that is a tough thing, especially if you're like kind of like a very niche, maybe like a B2B kind of model but you have related topics that are very popular and like somebody who's moving and searching for like U-Haul packing things would be looking for. I would say it would be good to figure out if you have a current customer base the way that they talk. So maybe you like, you know, do a survey with them and look at the language that they're using, ask the right questions to figure out their language and use that to then go take it back into the full set so that you could hopefully narrow things down. Also for you, like probably you'd need more on the tools that are for like determining what's going well for you right now than the trends because it's probably not going to be like top page of Google Trends though packaging is very important. So yeah, so that's what I would say. Cool. Yeah, of course. Any other questions? Yeah. So now we have a really great set of forms that we have for the whole time here. Yeah. So if you ever made it in there, I think it would be hard for us to make that happen. But we do encourage people to make it happen and how do we make it happen. Yeah. That's a really good question, you know, getting content out of groups and motivating people in the right ways to create content. I think it, you know, if you can, it starts with the people you're recruiting. So finding people who want to build, you know, their portfolio with content because they'll be eager to write content that they could possibly think on their personal site. Stardust gift cards are a great motivator. And then I also think like maybe like pub making the process and, you know, the lack of participation like more public. So creating a schedule and letting people know when they've fallen off. And lastly, I think a tool like Trello is a great one because you can assign people to things and then like communicate with them on a certain, like they're called tickets, a certain ticket about a topic. But yeah, I think that that kind of gets into almost like the human psychology of how you like motivate teams. That might be a good question. Copy for you to just explore for your up. Does that answer your question? A little bit. Yeah. Have you considered interns? Interns? So yeah, I would think but yeah, I would, you know, contacting student chapters and like, you know, young organizations, people who are more creative generally like to write content and want to build content in that area. Again, I think it kind of starts with recruiting and finding people who are like people like this in this room who want to do that sort of thing. But yeah, maybe there's some people here who'd be interested. That's a good call. Yeah, that's a great call. Yeah. Yes. Yes. Look at all the young people. Yes. Oh yeah. Yeah, actually there's some sites that do that. That's a really cool idea. I like that. And then you can share the trends and the research you did with them. They can write it for you. I know that there's, you know, larger sites that kind of do that and you just kind of go on and you say, I'm looking for this type of work and I want it by this date and they find people. And then there's also like, if you want to like be able to meet with a person, we have a great freelance exchange network here in Kansas City. And I bet that they would have connections to a freelance network in Des Moines. And that's Julie Cortez. Her name's Julie Cortez. She's a great gal to connect you with that. Any other questions that I want to check time? Make sure that we're... I think we have just about like five minutes left. So if you've got anything else that you guys would like to talk about, if not we can kind of wrap a little early and give time for back room or cookies. Well, thank you guys so much for being here with me today. I really, you know, really appreciate feedback. So if there's any way to give, you know, feedback on speakers or if you even want to tweet me, connect with me. This is my LinkedIn name. Oh, I mean it's my name. It's just, you know, I search for my LinkedIn. I just have like kind of an interesting spelling of my name. And I also, this is my Twitter handle, Alyssa Murphy. So if you ever want to connect to just, you know, nerd out over content or if you have a specific question, just let me know. So thank you guys so much. I hope you have a great rest of the day.