What you Need to Know About Digital Marketing Trends in 2021

Despina Karatzias 0:20
Happy Friday to you Welcome to the Digital Discovery Show. My name is Despina Karatzias, I am the proud, general manager slash chief navigator here at Tourism Tribe and Navii Digital. And it is my pleasure to welcome you to the digital discovery show, which is a show that’s born out of our pleasure and out on a year at team HQ, Tourism Tribe and Navii that we have daily to help small businesses around Australia with their digital discovery journey. Now, as you join us live, and if you’re joining us watching the recording afterwards, I encourage you to share your comments, share your aha moments, and certainly feel free to engage and ask any questions from our special guests today. Speaking of our special guest, the theme, and the topic that we are going to explore together is looking through the content marketing crystal ball, don’t we wish we could all have one of them. And looking at marketing trends for 2021. Now her name is Hannah Statham and she’s from the media water. Now, Hannah, she might only be just clarified foot but she could easily enter herself into a heavyweight content marketing competition, particularly to move you might ask wanting a target on your audience’s Oh, apologies what is happening. That is not what we want. That’s the sound. That’s the sound we were talking about with my team. To say she’s so awesome. It’s like she’s just entered a ring, right? That was just like she’s into the ring and she’s ready to go for it because she is a heavyweight champion at content marketing. So she’s first and foremost a content marketer creating words, images and videos for clients. They are very important content pillars that the kind of content that stops people in their thumb scrolling tracks. With 10 years of experience in tourism and lifestyle marketing, Hannah brings contagious energy to every task she does. She’s as creative as she strategic and spends most of her time unashamedly working on her client’s big picture. When she’s not refreshing her Instagram feed, you’ll find Hannah searching for the best and Yaki in Brisbane. She’s a dear friend to us and I welcome to you to the show. Hannah welcome Hannah.

How perfect I had like little ding dong as soon as I’m like she’s a heavyweight content marketing head something for me.

Despina Karatzias 3:27
I think there’s something in that I you know, like getting the ring like a content marketing, like dance-off type thing that would be competition. So Hannah, media mortar, tell us about your journey in becoming such a content marketing extraordinary. And your inspiration to really to start your beautiful business media more than how you could and helping others with their content, digital and social media, marketing strategy and content creation.

Hannah Statham 4:00
Yeah, sure. So we started off the business three and a half years ago now. So it’s, um, it sort of started black a lot of good stories do it was a bit of an accident in that I had been working in content and what my background is actually as a publicist, so I’ve been working in PR and I saw the move towards content and everyone was starting to make all this noise about content, being king contents, King, everyone needs all of this content. But there wasn’t really a huge amount of content agencies at the time or people who just specialised in making the content. So I guess I had always worked in our so if you wanted to get content developed, you had to go to a big agency who did specialise in full-service marketing, so media, buy ads, TV sees all those sorts of things. And then you would be sent to their content team who was sort of two people sitting in the corner. They didn’t really have they there was specialists at content. Sure. But that’s not all they did. The agency did so much more than that. So I guess how, when I started media mortar, I just wanted to have an agency that just specialised in content. So developing the words and the images and the videos. How I guess my sort of philosophy around content is that in Australia, and it doesn’t matter what business you’re in, it’s, you know, we can’t compete on price out our wage bills, and rent and utilities, it’s all too high. So we must compete on story. So if we’re competing on the story, the best way to do that is to tell it through content. So we sort of was able to carve out this beautiful nation in storytelling content. And that’s how the business has sort of grown and evolved. And now we’ve got an office in Brisbane and one in Melbourne, as well. So that’s, that’s sort of how we started and the inspiration behind it. But I guess, you know, like, anyone who’s who started a business, it did all sort of happened very quickly, as a bit of a bit of an accident, you know, I was helping a lot of people with their content and doing it, you know, on the side of my, my full-time job, and then I sort of realised that I had more clients that I was helping outside of my full-time job and was able to just finish working there and step straight in to medium order. And I haven’t looked back. So that’s how it’s, it’s sort of grown.

Despina Karatzias 6:28
Yeah, well, congratulations. And as as your businesses has grown, and we’ve certainly grown to love and appreciate the work that you do, and I also love what you said that the correlation and the relationship between content marketing and storytelling is so important. What have been some of the challenges you’ve been experiencing, particularly in the beginning, as you’ve really just unpacked this for yourself to know that’s, that’s the that’s the key to this, in highlighting the importance of content marketing, and storytelling, like real, authentic storytelling in being integrated into a digital or a social media campaign?

Hannah Statham 7:14
Yeah, so I think probably like anyone who is in a new media environment, in particular, there’s a lot of client education that needs to happen. So probably this to two major challenges we have Firstly, is client education. And the second one is the tech changes faster than anyone can keep up with ourselves. And when we work in this space, in terms of client education, it’s, it’s very easy for people to understand they need content, every meeting I go to everyone has a very clear understanding that they need content, whether it’s, you know, how we need content for our website, we know we need to improve our content, because we know we need to rank for SEO, we know we need videos, we know we need images captured. That’s that’s not a hard sell people, people are content poor, generally. That’s very easy. And with sort of statements, everyone says content is king, people know content. But the education piece that really needs that we spend a lot of our time in, that becomes the challenge is the value of content. So a lot of the time content. And the reason why it gets outsourced to a Content Agency is that the business owner doesn’t have time to do it themselves. And it let’s say it’s website, copy your blog posts or running your social media. So these are elements that are tactics that sit within the content marketing framework, that a lot of the time we win that work, or clients come to us because they just don’t have time to do it themselves. It’s not that they don’t have the skill. You know, everyone can write, everyone might not be a brilliant writer, but everyone can write. But they don’t have time to do it. And so we’re really in the business of of time. And so that’s probably a challenge that that we have is just a lot of people know that they need content, but they don’t understand the value of it, because it is incredibly time consuming to create well. So that’s one one challenge we have. Probably the second challenge that we really face is the tech changing. So we need to really focus and spend a lot of our time each week up upgrading the tech that we use, or understanding how new things are being brought online. So social media is a great example. You know, we just got hit around Tick Tock and then Instagram introduced rails, which is their sort of smackdown to tick tock and so we’ve now had to learn how to do reels for our clients and make sure that our clients are performing on those sorts of channels. So it’s keeping up with the Joneses, so to speak, when it comes to the tech to make to make sure that we’ve always got we’re ahead of the game and making sure that our clients are as well and that can be quite exhausting because you don’t get given any notice when Instagram launches a new platform or Facebook changes things will the algorithms change or you know Even to have to explain to clients that you know, this worked really well last week, but it’s not going to perform this week. And so that can be quite challenging. And Facebook is, as everyone would know, particularly if you’ve done any paid ads in that space is just completely moving based. And we’re learning something new every every single day on it. And I do present a lot of social media workshops and boot camps. And I’ve done a lot with Tourism Tribe, and I always get the giggles, there’s always one or two people each year, who at the start of, you know, something to do with social media or content always says, Oh, I know everything about this, I I’ll be surprised what you can teach me and I, I am always amused by that comment, because I live and breathe this stuff. And I learned something new every day. And that’s what I find so rewarding about it is that it it changes and like what an opportunity to never, never finish the book on content marketing. It’s constantly evolving before your eyes. So yeah, so that would be the challenges that we have,

Despina Karatzias 11:00
are and so valid. And I think what you’ve really, really nailed these, that we are in the business of time, and valuing this in your business. So I love what you’ve shared that we all kind of get get it that we need content. But in terms of Would you agree that one of the biggest misconceptions about content marketing is the time required not in just in the execution, but in the planning of the content? To that just a bit misconceptions about what is involved in executing a good content marketing strategy?

Hannah Statham 11:45
Yeah, absolutely. So I think, like anything, if it was a video, because no video is a really nice, easy one to see, as a piece of content, you’d have three phases, you’d have pre-production, production and distribution of post-production in there as well. So maybe four, four phases. If I was doing any content development, 70% of my time would be spent on pre-production, making sure the story was right, making sure that everything was was built correctly, that it was achieving what we wanted to set out. And the same would go for any sort of content you were developing, whether that was words or images, or an E newsletter, or you’re designing your website at 70% of the time is spent in that planning phase. I think the biggest misconception that people have is that content marketing is firstly cheap, which isn’t necessarily cheap, because it’s an incredibly time-consuming piece of marketing. And the second one is that just making content with everyone says content is king. But that doesn’t mean all content was a crown. So people make content, and they think done, take I’ve made the content, I’ve put it out, my job here is done. And I think content is something that can be very easily DIY, I’m a really big advocate for making your own content where possible. It doesn’t have to be high production value. And I can really talk to that, you know, I think authenticity is is really what is the, you know, the crown of content. But I think there is a difference between authentic content and just bad content. And so I think a lot of the time, people rush making their content just to put something out there. So one analogy that I think we could all relate to is you, you know, just starting to prepare dinner and you go I haven’t done my Instagram or Facebook posts for today, I’ll just slap something up and you grab, you scroll through your camera roll piccoli, quickly grab a picture, throw it up with a caption that doesn’t really do anything. It’s sort of you know, let’s say you’re a hairdresser and it sort of a picture of a haircut you did and it just says, you know, like cute hair. Who does, you know, that doesn’t contribute anything to your business? Like, that doesn’t make anyone come? You haven’t told any story? That’s not it’s not that funny. It’s been done. It’s not original. And then you put up these bits of vanilla content. That doesn’t move the needle. So I think that to me is is probably

Despina Karatzias 14:10
I have the mic. The mic just did a little dropout. That’s okay.

Unknown Speaker 14:17
We don’t want to miss a theme.

Despina Karatzias 14:21
It’s still not it’s still on mute. It’s showing that you’re try again.

Despina Karatzias 14:34
No, just low tech people. This can happen. We’re not we’re not stressed about this. When it comes to how about your back? Oh, no. Yeah. No, no good. I could just say so we don’t want to we don’t want to miss anything. Oh, yeah. Awesome. Well, as you were saying About this misconception of contact taking time and not doing things at the last minute.

Hannah Statham 15:07
Yep, so I was absolutely yeah, so we can all sort of relate to that, that moment where you just put something out into the ether. And it doesn’t really make a lot of sense or it’s not strategic, it’s just put up. That’s not a good way of doing content. So content really needs to be planned. And more time should be spent on planning your content, then in ever distributing it, or producing the piece itself. So I spend a lot of time making content plans, whether they’re editorial calendars, social media, calendars, video production schedules, those kinds of things are going to guarantee that your content is aligned to what you want it to achieve. So you know, it’s going back to those basics is like, well, who is the content for is the first question to ask, Who How is it going to be distributed. So I work with a client, it’s, it’s a really big client, and it’s a client who really should know better on this subject, they produced a video, and they didn’t brief the videographer to have the video cut down for the right specs for social media. So what happened was that when the video got distributed, it wasn’t fit for purpose. And so instead of it being a beautiful piece of crafted content, because they didn’t spend enough time in the planning, and the briefings phase, the content actually didn’t perform, it was a great waste of time. So knowing how your contents being distributed at that planning phase is just mission-critical to getting it right. So yeah, I think our point your planning, less time on on the delivery, and knowing what your distribution is, is is key to any of this stuff. And what I love about content, and more than any other form of marketing is it’s, um, you can make content efficiencies with it. So what I mean by that is, like, you know, when you buy an expensive pair of shoes, and you justify the price because you go, I’m going to wear these every single day, for all of summer, the cost per wear is, you know, down to, you know, $2 aware, I can justify spending more than I’d normally spend on this pair of shoes, you can do that with content as well, because it can be caught many different ways. So if you’re going to spend, you know, you know, a week writing a blog post a really, really good blog post, well, that blog post can, you can carve it up into Instagram captions, probably five or six, so that one piece of content is now seven pieces of content, you could read out that blog post as a podcast. So now you’ve got eight pieces of content, you could film yourself while recording that podcast, which becomes a YouTube webinar. So now you’ve got nine pieces of content. And then you could send that blog post out and in a newsletter. So now you’ve got 10 pieces of content. So any time that you invest with content can be caught multiple different ways. And that’s what I really love about it.

Despina Karatzias 17:59
Oh, that is so great, I hope if anyone is taking some notes there, and I’d love that to Julie travers has loves that comment you made that quote is king, but not all content with a crown. It is so true. I love that too. I wrote that one. But I love this approach and system that you’ve shared in whether it’s a video or a written piece of content, that you look at your planning in your pre-planning or pre production, put a lot more of your focus because then everything is kind of you’re saving yourself, the time and the space as you roll it out. So you do your pre then you do your production, and then your post production and then your distribution, the more thought you put that into that brilliant stuff there. Now you’re challenging times, Hannah, just going back to the beginning and you’re growing your business we were talking in the green room before you’re also expecting very exciting your first Baba in a couple of months. And just be like as your business has grown and your own digital journey and the journey internally with your systems. What have been, what are some of the I guess some of the pain points in your growth phase and the types of systems that you’ve developed? Not only internally fatigue management but also your content distribution and you’re planning at the same gold nuggets or systems that are your go to is that you’ve discovered along the way to make your life easier?

Hannah Statham 19:42
Yeah, so I think like any, any business and i think it’s it’s kind of funny, you know, I work in content marketing, but the area of my business that I would say we struggle with the most is our marketing. Because you know, the mechanic always drives the worst car you know, the mouse is never finished, you can go and have a look at any marketers website, it’s not anywhere near what we put into our clients websites, because we do it all day every day for everyone else, the last thing you do is your own. That’s a massive pain point for us. And I’m very realistic, because I am a small business owner, that the, I’ve only got finite hours in the day as well as everyone else does. And so I can either be making stuff making content, or I can be doing work that pays the bills, which pays the mortgage, you know, so on and so forth. So, you know, I think time is always the biggest barrier for any small business, regardless of what ever industry you’re in. But I think ways that we sort of try and I guess, hack more time or find more time is to be more organised around our content. So it’s that time spent in that that pre planning phase. So as an example, you know, our social media is planned for all of December, it’s already done, it just runs itself. So all I have to do is hop in and do my community management each day in my story. So I’m not ever sitting around at 6pm at night going, what am I going to post tonight. So that’s already locked and loaded and put away. So I think putting those sorts of plans in place are really good. In terms of a marketing plan, we build with a quarterly theme. So that also helps me stay really focused, because I suffer a shocking case of bright shiny syndrome. So I’ll say what wouldn’t work is we’re going to focus on this for this quarter. And then, you know, Instagram drops, reels. And I’m like, that’s it. We’re all doing reels now. And I change everything. So that really helps me stay incredibly focused to build a theme for that particular quarter. So that every single thing that we put out, for our own media, motor marketing, scales up or ladders up to that theme, to make sure that we’ve just got one thing that we’re consistently doing well, that that month, and setting really realistic goals or targets as well has been a real a real help in terms of managing the time. So as an example, one of you know, the bugbears that I’ve had, you know, forever has been doing fixing up our website. So that’s on, you know, key sort of q3. So the start of next year’s plan is with fixing our website once and for all. So every single thing that we’re going to be doing for that first quarter is going to ladder up to fixing the website and getting that to where it needs to be. So I think setting realistic goals has also helped, you know, in terms of that, that time challenge, to make a plan but not overwhelm yourself. Because at the end of the day, like anyone who’s listening, who’s running a business, you know, it’s a small business, I am the CFO, I am in charge of HR, I am the general manager, and I’m trying to like step out for maternity leave, and I’m trying to do all of all of the things and wear all of the hats and you know, if you don’t have a plan, you know, and you can’t do everything. So something’s going to come off, it really allows me to say, well, which things are going to deliver the best results and just focus on those because there’s heaps of stuff we do, I can tell you here, right here now and in our marketing that lead contributes zero leads. So if anything is going to drop, it’s those things, you know, so it’s knowing that stuff.

Despina Karatzias 23:27
And I mean, what a great thing you shared earlier too, and a real pivotal, aha moment in a business, because you’re really forced to step out of your business at the moment, as a small business owner, operator, all hands on deck to have a baby, you have to get everything out of your head to pass on to someone else. And I love that, like I think if you get that’s a gift to give yourself in business to be able to have really document what you do and how give it over to someone else. Yeah, how was that experience for you?

Hannah Statham 24:12
By way of that story, if everyone listening, we were just chatting in the green room beforehand. So I was saying I’m in this moment of handing over my business baby to have a real baby. And it’s um, I think it sounds terrible. But the only thing that could help me hand over the business baby is the fact that I have a human nature. And there’s so much I do in my business that no one else knows how to do, because I’ve always done it. And in handing things over, I’ve had to be forced to write everything down that I do in a day and just the list of things. You know, it’s so many and varied and that’s such a great exercise because there’s processes. You know, I would say, you know, as a person, I’m not always The most systemized or process person because it’s all in my head. But when I started to write it down, I was like, No, I do have a process for how I make decisions or how things get chosen. But unless you write it down, sometimes it doesn’t feel so much like it’s it’s a process. So it’s been, it’s been a very good exercise. And if I strongly recommended if you’re in a business is to get those standard operating procedures done, you know, there’s, you know, there’s a reason if you’ve seen the Ray Kroc documentary on Netflix about, you know how he he scaled McDonald’s, it’s exactly the same process. You don’t, you don’t wake up with, you know, hundreds of, you know, McDonald’s or 1000s of McDonald’s in hundreds of countries, you scale to that point by every single person doing exactly the same thing at exactly the same time, so that anyone no matter where you are, knows when you got to flip the hamburger. And in my business, it just like I was the only person who knew in the hamburgers were flipping, because I hadn’t told everyone or I hadn’t written it down. So there wasn’t a process that was being followed. So it was a really, really good exercise, and one that’s ongoing, because we’re still unearthing all manner of things that still need to be handed over that I do.

Despina Karatzias 26:12
But we’re getting there. We’re getting there. What an incredible gift in so many ways to have that. He at this point in your journey in your business and in your, in your personal life. I think it’s fantastic. And it’s going to your scalability. And when you return back to all hands on deck, it’s, it’s going to be better. So I do I think there’s a lot in that to share with others to to do the same.

Hannah Statham 26:40
Yeah. And I think, you know, the thing I’ve just realised is in doing it is that I’m the bottleneck. And I would never have described myself as the bottleneck. But because I wasn’t handing things over or there wasn’t a process on how to do every single job. There’s processes on how to do the jobs, I don’t do like I didn’t do heaps of stuff in the business. But the jobs that I do, there wasn’t a process for so it became very clear that I was a bottleneck in the business, which is terrible.

Despina Karatzias 27:10
It’s really good stuff. And I’ve got an unfortunately i don’t i doesn’t come up with a name that saying of that earlier just also about valuing our time in this way too. And create systems agrees that you’ve hinted that we underestimate how long it takes to create great content that can add value to your business. Now speaking of adding great value to your business, and taking content marketing more seriously, and looking at it holistically as you know, within the Digital, your digital marketing landscape. When businesses are when you’re trying to really share the benefits and the importance to businesses about the place of content marketing within the digital landscape. What are some of the trends in 2021, that we all need to kind of have that fingers on the pulse and be starting to plan for it now while we’ve got this lovely room of coming to an end of the year and starting the new fresh year ahead?

Unknown Speaker 28:19
Yeah, well, I’ve

Hannah Statham 28:19
got I’ve got lots of predictions that that I’m working on. So I’ll take you through a few, a few of them. And some of them are content marketing related. And some of them are Rubik brought up. So one, probably the biggest one that I’m suggesting to people at the moment is to stop relying on historical data and how you’ve always done things. So I’m going into a lot of meetings where we’re starting to plan for 2021. And a lot of people say, Oh, well, we we’ve always done it this way. And I think that’s such as a silly thing to say in this post COVID environment, because how you’ve done it in 2019 is not going to be how we do it in 2021. A lot of spending a lot of time talking to businesses about well, who’s your target audience and this all year we’ve done it, we’ve done a target audience exercise, we know we know who that person is. And I sort of think we’ll do because is that the same person pre COVID as a post COVID world. So I think one of the biggest trends for 2021 is to recalibrate your business in terms of your marketing strategy, who gets targeted for and who’s going to buy a book your your product or service. So I think that’s probably one of the biggest shifts we need to start to do is we can’t rely on how it’s always been. We need to focus on what the new what this new normal is going going to look like. So I’d really encourage you to not look at historical data too closely. Of course, that’s all we’ve got to rely on at the moment. We don’t have new data For a post COVID world, but to start to think and and challenge because what I’ve seen for a lot of customers of the businesses that have my clients is that, you know, their target audience is now much younger, they’re much more nomadic, they spend money, they spend more money. So the way that things need to be taken into market for them is very, very different. So firstly, it would be to stop looking at historical data or relying on it too closely.

Despina Karatzias 30:27
To sort of to put your future future goggles on on first.

Hannah Statham 30:30
So that’s the first tip. My second tip is to be first to market. So I would normally in you know, speaking of like pre COVID, post COVID, I wouldn’t normally say marketing is a race to the to the top, it’s not, you know, I it’s a real slow and steady game, but for at the moment. And the reason I suggest that is that, when the spotlight is when everyone turns cops out of the spotlight, and the stage goes dark spotlight is automatically yours just by showing up. So what we saw a lot with COVID is that a lot of businesses didn’t know what to say. So they said nothing, which meant the businesses who did stay active, or the people who did communicate with their guests, or their customers, they actually got the moat the lion’s share of the business out of it just by showing up. So a lot of marketing is just momentum, and a lot of marketing is just showing up. So I would recommend making sure that you’ve got things ready to go. So I’m speaking from Brisbane today. And you know, we know that our borders are about to open next Tuesday. So is that you’ve got Do you have a message ready to go if you’re in Brisbane on Tuesday to welcome back Sydney and Melbourne, you know, that should be in the bank, it should be ready to go, you should be ready to press play, because it’s too late to get that out. On on Tuesday, it’s you know, the ship will have sailed, it needs to be already locked and loaded in there’s going to be so many of these touch points in 2021, you know that we can anticipate you know, whether that international borders opening as an example, whether that’s next year or the year after, who knows, I don’t I don’t know. But knowing we know there’s going to be significant milestones and planning activity around them. So that you can be first into market or have something ready ready to rumble that you can just press play as soon as announcements are made. So I think that’s that’s a really big deviation opposed to how we traditionally do do plan marketing, which is quite a slow burn kind of activity. Other big trends that I would see for next year is to is to collaborate more and compete less with competitors. So I’ve seen a lot of brands, to co op partnerships or offer package products or packaged experiences and things like that. And I think the the rise of the package is going to go up and up and up in terms of trends that way. So people will be looking more to how to experience things, whether it’s a product or a service in a much deeper level. So looking more at your competitors, not as competitors, but as collaborators, how can you do something together? Because if you, you know, I always use this pie analogy, you know, if you can sell a whole pie, you’ll sell all six slices opposed to just selling one slice of the pie. Because if people don’t like the pie, they’re not going to come back and get the other five slices if they’ve eaten yours, and they it just wasn’t for them. So I think, you know, that’s a really good point is to sort of start to look at who are your strategic partnerships that you can leverage? How can you build an audience together? How can you leverage off their channels and do more partnership activities are going to become more and more the trend in marketing, particularly as the Media Buy or media spend is going to get become more difficult to get on to perhaps traditional media that we might have ever, ever considered before. And then my last big sort of tip for next year is to really be a thought leader. And I think we’ve seen this a lot with COVID is that if you don’t stand, you know, when you stand for nothing, you stand for nothing. And it’s very easy to get forgotten. And you don’t have anything to say you don’t have anything to talk about. Whereas the businesses and the brands that I have really remembered through 2021 were the ones who took a really bold stance for good or bad or whatever side of the spectrum that they they took a stance on something that became really important. So I think it’s going to become more and more important for every single business to have a lot of people talking about an impact statement. So the most people’s marketing strategies or their business plans, they have a vision statement, or they have a mission statement, but they don’t have an impact statement. So an impact statement isn’t what you do. It’s the so what you know, why do you get out of bed every single morning? What is your commitment? What is the world? How are you leaving the world a better place than you left it in your business? So I think coming back to standing for something, being a thought leader, having that impact statement is what’s going to become really, really important and really come through your marketing and stand out in the crowd

Unknown Speaker 34:59
together.

Hannah Statham 34:59
The other things, I guess, from a marketing plan, Union perspective that I see as, as the things, I mean, tactically, there’s going to be a lot of, there’s going to be a lot of other you know trends as well. We’ve got Instagram rails, we know that if you want to get to the top of Instagram, you want more followers. At the moment, all you should be doing is making rails rails get put into the Explore feed, no single images and videos do any more distress real, real, real real, if you want to be found go crazy on rails. But what I would also sort of argue that is if you’re not doing your, your stills and static content, well, don’t overload yourself with reels either. Because I think, you know, we have to be realistic as business owners, as well as what’s going to contribute the most to your to your bottom line or contribute to those marketing goals. So just because it’s available, doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do. tactically, the other area, I’d be focusing all my energy on is organic search at the moment. So what we know is that these, these these times are not normal. But what we know is search traffic is very normal. So as an example, we worked with this client this year, we did develop some long form pieces of content for them between March and October 2021 of the blog posts alone contributed 47,000 unique sessions just through Google Search alone for that for that client. And that’s just from writing one blog post. So that was their return on investment of one piece of content was 47,000 searches for it, which led people back to their website. So local search is through the roof at the moment. And that’s going to continue while we don’t have international borders. So tactically speaking, this trip for 2021, focusing on your organic content. So that’s the words on your website and blog posts on your websites, articles, things like that, that is absolutely mission critical to being found. engaging with an SEO specialist is going to be really important so that your content is going to be found in Google in the sea of Google. And then I guess the third tactical thing to point out is I think ads are going to continue to be really cheap. There’s so many people who got pushed out of the market through COVID. So we’re seeing some of the best click through rates we’ve ever seen on our clients at the moment. So if you’ve always been put off because of budget, in a pay to play environment, now would be the time to give it a go. Because you’re going to get incredible results and see those returns on investment at a much lower cost, because less people are advertising. So they’re my my sort of strategic tips, and then the practical ones that that I’d be implementing at a tactical level, as well.

Despina Karatzias 37:37
Incredible tips that is that there was so much goodness in that. And in fact, we’ve got our dear Liz ward in the house, and she loved what you said about getting your welcome message ready to go. whatever situation you’re in regarding mobilisation of your market. So, so, so good, Hannah, that is, you know, just stop relying on what, what happened and what you’ve been done in the past, recalibrate, and really mean and we’re talking about a new year, it’s a perfect time to really start with the blank page and say, well, let’s look at who our customer is now because things have have changed. I loved what you said about showing up that is I mean I know for myself as soon as you said that there are businesses that just took on just showed up shared what’s happening to them shared authentically what is going on in their world during during the phases and the stages of COVID that we’ve experienced love mainly speaks to be Deeley like creating collaborations and be more collaborative less competitive that’s within our DNA and even together when we live and breathe collaborating together but I think there is great merit in that and creating an impact statement. Absolutely if you stand if you stand for nothing you fall for everything. So really the so what in your business and what’s really important to highlight I mean we talk a lot about social media but content really what you’re doing organically is not necessarily what you have to you have to really look at your two different elements or strategies of what you’re doing in a paid to play space to what you’re doing organically. And the I guess the gold in everything is your website content and looking at blog post is not just just don’t do things because you know it’s there and the child love the shiny stuff and we we love the new announcements and the new rules that we no that’s something we’ve just stopped sustain our tracks, but it’s also stay on your A game, right? I love that even what you’ve shared personally in your business, having that plan and that focus of every quarter. It gets you to stay focused and stay true to that. So some practical things to do right now, if you could, if you’re if you’re, if you could speak to anyone, but just what what is that one thing that they could do today, over the weekend or next week to start their journey on on really refining their content marketing strategy? Yeah,

Hannah Statham 40:35
well, a couple of things, I think. So the first one is I would write down what three pieces of content marketing or what three content marketing strategies or tactics have you put into place that drives the most sales or revenue to your business? Because that’s, that’s what this is about, right? So, as an example, I’m in my business, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you this until recently, I was doing some having a really good deep dive into our Google Analytics. And I realised that 60% of our website traffic comes through LinkedIn. But I don’t spend 60% of my time on LinkedIn, I spend it on Instagram, which contributes 4% of our website traffic. What am I doing, I should be on LinkedIn, it’s driving more traffic, it’s way better. It’s, it’s working for me, well, then Instagram is. So knowing where you are, as an example, knowing where those leads also, you’ll start to see a big shift in my planning Now that everything’s going on to LinkedIn, LinkedIn, first, Instagram, second that it’s in my business, but in yours, it might be, you know, it might be shooting video content, it might be the Instagram reels, it might be Instagram, it might be your website, it might be SEO, it might be a CMA, or be any other tactics. But writing down what those three things three or four things are that have driven the most sales or revenue through your business, and turbocharge each one of those points, because I think it’s very easy to get distracted on the bright shiny things, or the things that you personally like I like Instagram a lot more than I like LinkedIn, but it’s not contributing to my bottom line. So what am I doing? Yes, I know I need to be there. But I don’t need to spend as much time there because it’s just not giving me the returns. So that’s, that’s really interesting. The other thing I do is write a marketing plan. So if you don’t have a marketing plan, at the 27th of November, you are cutting it pretty fine, I would have it locked and loaded for next year, you do still have time to write it up. And at the very worst case scenario, you could do it in the first week of January. But after that, the year is the year that the cat is out of the bag, you must you, you know you won’t get back ahead. And the only way to be proactive with marketing is to have a plan. And if you don’t plan, you’re just going to chase your tail the entire time. So it start with a plan. I would also start with going back to basics on who is your target audience and doing an audience avatar exercise. So we have a couple of DIY tools on our website. And I know Tourism Tribe has blog posts about this exact topic on how to define your target audience, just to make sure that you really are crystal clear. And as I said before, it’s not going to be the audience you had in 2019. So it’s worth doing that exercise again. And I think it’s worth doing it every single year. So in my business in, you know, the three short years, I can tell you that the clients we worked on in 2017, they’re not the clients that we have now. So our customer, their price point is different. They look and feel different. Because of course the business has grown. So the clients we want served, we no longer are able to serve because our our level of experience, our level of cost, our level of overheads, all of those things has gone up. So our customer has changed with time. So if I was still using my marketing strategy, or my marketing plan that I made, when I set up the business, it’s grossly out of date. So I think going back and having that checking in all those back to basics things they’re not, they’re not exciting, like Instagram reels, but they’re really the healers of anything that you that you’re going to do are just absolutely critical, particularly in this in this in this world. And I think making your marketing plan is your only way of staying focused. And I actually did a free webinar over at medium water yesterday on how to write a marketing plan. And controversially, I said that the place that I would start with a marketing plan is a budget because if you’re a small business operator, you’re just writing a wish list if you don’t have the budget to do any of this stuff. So you have to I would I would recommend you start your plan with how much you’re willing to spend on marketing for each for the year. And that’s going to allow you to do it because you know that if you’ve got, you know, $10,000 as an example, yes, we can start to talk about rescanning websites and doing your website but if you’ve got $500 don’t put in a website redevelopment into your marketing plan because it’s not going to happen. So just knowing those kinds of things, even your even the bare cost alone of your hosting would be half of that, you know, even if you’re going to build it all yourself on Wix, and then you’re going to need to get someone to get some photographs and things like that. So being starting with your budget being realistic, how much you’re going to set for this year to deliver those marketing goals? would be where I would really start with that.

Unknown Speaker 45:21
Oh, hang

Despina Karatzias 45:23
out practical, pragmatic, realistic, honest, you do you do have to take into consideration the dollars like what what is the investment I’m willing to make? And then you can work back from that. But I love that measuring. I love what you’ve shared this so much the numbers behind our websites and our insights on our socials, the numbers tell, in our p&l sheets, they tell a story of the journey we’ve been on to really paint that picture moving forward. So very, very excellent things that you could do right now. Thank you, Emily, for your comment at dear Emily, such a great reminder for businesses to review the Google Analytics, especially during these uncertain and turbulent times. Thanks, Emily. It is very true. I think going back behind the scenes popping the bonnet of your analytics is is an excellent recommendation of where to start with your content marketing. My Do you have such a? I could keep going and going. Thank you. And and I appreciate you and the time you’ve taken to be here with with us today. Where can everybody find out more about you and media mortar? Yeah, of course. So

Hannah Statham 46:45
we have our website media mortar.com.au letting you know it’s going to be refurbed in the new year. As per my plan.

Despina Karatzias 46:56
I had critics on that salvia website. It’s beautiful, but it’s it is it’s such a great website. So the thing your you know,

Hannah Statham 47:04
your ration, yeah, yeah, the back ends held together with gaffa tape like everyone else.

Unknown Speaker 47:13
Just like plugging update, after plugging update, it needs an overhaul. But so

Hannah Statham 47:18
at media motor.com.au. You’ll also find us on social media, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn, at media mortar. And we’ve got a YouTube channel at at medium water as well. So you’ll see on every Wednesday, I release a little video, which is on LinkedIn, and YouTube about a little marketing tip, which you might like to follow as well. They’re just three minutes long, nothing, nothing too time consuming, where I share a practical, a practical tip or a piece of advice that you can take forward for your business. So that might be of interest as well.

Despina Karatzias 47:53
Love it. So good. Thank you again, all the very best with medium or water and handing over the business baby for the next little while. And your new human baby. Yeah, wishing you all the help and and all the good stuff for 2021. Hannah might be happy new year to you. Is it just yeah, I can’t believe within

this ad is that we appreciate you dearly. We look forward to working more with you in the new year.

Unknown Speaker 48:33
Thank you.

Despina Karatzias 48:36
And thank you everyone for tuning in to the digital discovery show. So much good stuff. We’re talking about content marketing, and how you can start to really make your plans for 2021. Tune in next week. We’ve got another great episode lined up for you all centred around the topic of on line reputation management. So we’re talking to another great expert, like Hannah. So tune in Same time, same place. Until next time it may you stay on your digital a game and we’ll look forward to seeing you next week and throughout the week. Thanks again everyone. Bye