How to Develop a Content Marketing Strategy that Drives Multi-Channel Marketing Success

Thank you so much for having me.

So, depending on the multi-channel part, I always look at it musically. Like, it’s like harmonies or notes. So the first thing you want to do before you add any other notes or even write the first lyric to the song or anything starts with the intentions of who you’re writing it for. Are we writing a love song? Are we writing like, Who is it for? So the first thing we do before we do any content sits, and that’s what Hum Jam means. Hum Jam is where you human idea, and you’re jamming on it until it makes sense. That’s what hum jam means, and that’s what we do.

We strategize, and we Hum Jam a little bit and go, what do they want? What are they looking for? What are their intentions? What can we do? So before we create anything or target any channel at all, we have to get in the mind of our prospect. Who are we writing this for? Who are we creating this for? And what do they want to listen to? What is their channel? What’s going to get their attention? What’s going to get them to dial in? So that’s what we do, we brainstorm and hum jam, that’s a phrase we’re creating, and we jam around the idea of the content. Why are we doing this? What are we doing this? Who’s it for? What are they? Why do they want it? It’s a little bit more avatar? They call that avatar more like a persona. We are diving into that a little bit and going; why are we doing this? And what are they looking for that we can get in that mix? What can we create that’s going to make those connections and harmony? We call that in harmony, that’s going to pull that together. So that’s how we start before we throw that idea down. That’s based on the intention of the person that we’re targeting. So we already know what they want.

Yeah, we first start, and it starts with every client, and it starts in the onboarding process. But every time we start a content brief, we want to have a meeting, an idea meeting, brainstorming meeting about that content brief. And how we go about it, is we just brainstorm on who is this for? Like, give me the demographics? Is this too a male or female audience? Are they happy? Are they sad? Let’s talk about who they are. So we want to dial that in, and if there are multiple personas, we want to identify that, especially in a multi-channel campaign, because you’re going to hit different personas in the different channels. Especially for social media channels, not all personas will be the same on all the channels. So you want to make sure that if you have one message that can match multiple personas, you want to make sure that that message is delivered on their way to reach them. So that’s why you want to think about who you’re creating. And we generally put it on a big spreadsheet where we know the channels and personas to target them correctly.

And our tool for that, and I think maybe you and many people will use this, Facebook. Facebook is the discovery tool where you can look in all different, which is very helpful for discovering details about personas and diving into the concepts and stuff like that. So we use that to research. That’s not just to advertise; we’re using it as our free research tool.

Yeah. And we segment and know that’s maybe a potential topic coming up. But we do segment based on different paths through the channel so that we find more data about the person, and we will segment them in our CRM that sends out lots of data. So I’ll even ask the prospect if they’re happy or sad. In one of my forms like that, they have to go through a channel, and I’ll ask them if they’re happy or sad. So I know that the person I’m communicating with in parts of the channel is either happy or sad. Yeah, it’s customizing even to that level.

When I saw this question, I was like, Oh, my God, I could go all day long on this. But the biggest content pitfall is they write from inspiration. Oh, my God, please. Yeah, supposed to write from inspiration. Right? I mean, yeah. So you are, but the problem is that your writing from inspiration may not match the actual prospect’s targets. And so I get so many clients, they have all this content, all this great stuff, and they’re like, Yeah, but I wrote from inspiration, is like, Yeah, but you’re not ranking for anything, anything at all. And a few phrases that you are ranking for, actually have nothing to do with the article. So you wrote this content with inspiration but not to target the prospect. So that’s the biggest thing, people shoot YouTube videos without starting with keyword research. Without starting with the intention, they’ll shoot the YouTube video; they’ll create the article, they’ll create the Facebook, they’ll just shoot out Facebook posts, they’ll just don’t mean they’re just firing from the hip. There’s nobody who knows the strategy.

Right, without starting correctly, starting with the user intention, starting with that first. And this is the biggest mistake is people just create content. They’re just filling the beast with dirty, terrible, nasty websites and content; it is horrible. That’s what we are as search engine optimizers, cleaning up the web. We’re trying to make it prettier, faster, better. Making the content better, more intention, and stuff like that. It’s cleaning it up; we’re optimizing the web in our eyes.

As far as tools, comm jam.com/tools, you’ll see all of the tools for our agency that we highly recommend. And on the top of that list is called Mangles. I think Mangles used to be a keyword finder, and it was purchased in a group of tools. But it’s the main one we use only because it’s very simple. Several out there that longtail pulls from the same database from this longtail database. I love that it’s not the same as SEMrush. We do keyword research with SEM rush, H refs, and SEO power suites. I run keyword research through every main SEO tool out there, SERPs. Just to see and compare, I’ll make a comparison. But the main one that I research with and hum jam with is the main one, if you’re like, hey, give me an idea. If you just said hey, tell me where the search volume is. Tell me where the low-hanging fruit opportunities are. Tell me where that is. I will start immediately with Mangles because that’ll give me content right off the bat, low tail, or longtail keywords. And then I can just I can start dialing in from there and adding them to a list and see what the overall competition is. What is the overall search volume? And then from there, that’s kind of where we’ll hone in. We use other tools to write the content and hone it. We will dial in using surfer; surfer SEO is a constant tool. So we’ll take those keywords and then dial into surfer to make sure that we’re looking at the competition and that we’re making sure that what we’re writing matches the intentions of the search engine ranking page.

That depends on what content you’re creating. Well, what we’d like to do is, meaning, if you’re creating video content, I would recommend starting, depending on what kind of content creator you are. If you are a writer or video creator, I would say that you should do a little of both, depending, because you can use the same content in both. So your keyword research is the same for your video and your article. Because YouTube is a search engine, just like Google, and the same company, right own them? And so your video text is just like your article text. So you’re ranked based on the video’s text that comes out of your mouth. So you want to ensure that those keywords you’ve researched are in your video. Then what we do is we take that video and transcribe that into a blog or other social media content. So you can use another tool that will transcribe your YouTube video. So you create your YouTube video, that’s part of your channel, that’s one of your channels. You create your video content first because you also want to post that video on Facebook. And you do want to share your YouTube video on Facebook, but Facebook, don’t own YouTube, so they don’t let it hit the EdgeRank too hard if it’s a YouTube video, but you can post that same video on Facebook. You have a smaller version, you cut it down, you piece it down also for Twitter, or you post it also on LinkedIn because all those engines are also video engines. So you want to leverage all the channels. So if you create a video, you can post that video everywhere, you can transcribe that video, and then take screenshots from that video that now becomes content for your social media posts. There’s another tool called. Lately, that will take that video and create small 15 Second segments for your Twitter. That will then allow those 15 Second segments with a Twitter post of that video. So we cut that Twitter strategy takes that video and makes about 15 different smaller posts that are topically relevant to the keywords people are looking for and Twitter. And so it starts with the video content. If you’re creating an article, then you can take that article and have a Fiverr person or somebody record a video with that content. You can hire somebody to record your YouTube video with your article content if you don’t want to get on an audio record. So if you are a writer, you write the content. If you’re a video shooter, you shoot the content but still start with keyword research. And you create the phrases and things you’re going to target in your content, whether you’re shooting a video or writing it. And whether you shoot the video first and transcribe it or write it first and shoot the video makes no difference. Just do it one way or the other. But make sure you do it that way so that the phrases are in there.

Extremely important. Each marketing channel has its own rules, even spam. So in your email marketing channel, you can’t say free; you can’t get my free stuff. It’ll go to the spam box if you say free and use keywords and spam in your email channel, but you could say free all day long on Facebook. And now you can’t say free in LinkedIn because LinkedIn has a free where they don’t like that word in the algorithm. After all, that’s a spam word to them. So you have to gear the content to the platform rules. And Twitter doesn’t have the same amount of texts you can use on Instagram, meaning they all have their own content rules you must follow. You can share the manual actions of the images and the number of links in the videos. Communication with people on Twitter is different than what works on LinkedIn. The content itself has to be different; it has to be phrased differently. It’s not the same. So if you want a long post on Facebook, that becomes a thread on Twitter. It’s the same content, but it is delivered differently. You’re just repurposing it. So you create the content, and this is our blueprint that we’re doing right now. You start with the hum jam, and then you have the whole channel where you take that same content that’s repurposed through all the channels, and then it gets scheduled. We automate all that. So it’s all scheduled, automated, and delivered in the right rhythm. So you got the harmonies together, the whole band, and the whole thing. Now you got the rhythm that’s going to go because the engagement has to be right in time to get the EdgeRank. If somebody comments on that tweet, I was showing my partner yesterday because I was like, watch this, like, watch this magic. Okay, here’s the magic. As soon as you post, you’re going to get shown in the algorithm; somebody may tweet, like, or comment. Hopefully, they comment if it was good enough or if the formula was used correctly. If they comment, you got a comment within 30 seconds to a minute. If you don’t, guess what? You lost that EdgeRank wave. But if you comment, you have to comment in the right way. Meaning if you comment on Twitter, you have to comment in a way that’s going to deliver an answer. Not Oh, thank you for your comment. That’s not going to get an answer. You want to make like, Oh, yeah, what did you think about it? And then they’ll have to comment back, meaning you have to leverage the EdgeRank of engagement. That’s the other piece that comes in here. So you got to get the rhythm and the band together, but you have to get people clapping. That’s the whole thing in harmony. And that’s what gets you ranked to the top, that people are clapping, people are sharing, people are engaging, and you’re on the right topic, the right thread, you’re going to rank.

Yeah, and that all goes in this first stage, at the very beginning. If you see any training that I do on YouTube when we do keyword research, we do keyword research based on top, middle, and bottom. Because it’s different based on where you’re at as a business. Because if you’re a brand new startup, guess what you can’t go after? Short, you can’t go after the bottom. The bottom is already taken by people who have long been there. So, where do you start? You start with the top, which is the informational space, longtail where we can get 1000s of visitors easily within 60 days, 30 days, but they’re starting to do this where they’re not sure of what they want. So we have to create content that pushes them to the middle. And the middle is where we get them on a list and other channels. And once they’re in the middle, we get them on the email channel, which will then say, hey, join my Twitter, join my LinkedIn. So we take them from the top of the funnel, search engine ranking, easy to do, push them to the middle of the funnel, get on my list, push them to social media channels, and connect all those dots once seven or more dots are connected, they start giving you cash, that’s the harmony. Especially if it’s in harmony with them, meaning if you’re providing the thing that’s in harmony with them, and they’re like, oh, this experience is amazing. I’ve learned from them, and they’ve got the solution. They’re talking in my language; we’re in harmony together. That’s trust that harmony creates that trust. They call that bouncing in the relationship world, taking them from one platform to the next. It gives somebody a multi-experience of you. They think they know you if they’ve seen you on email, seen you on Facebook, see you on Twitter, seen you on LinkedIn if they’ve seen you in those places. They think you’re reputable, and they think you have credibility.

Yes, it comes down to hub content and hero content, and so it depends on the niche. So if your niche is geared towards instructional, meaning it’s like woodworking or basket weaving, then I would say informational. You’d want to start at the top of the funnel, and that would be easier to be how to use topically relevant articles and stuff like that in that kind of niche. So it depends on the niche where that starts and what type of content. So if it’s a how-to Niche? Video, teaching how-tos, people YouTube it constantly. Like how do I fill in the blank? How do I fill in the blank if it’s a woodworking niche, basket weaving, or even technical keyword research? Does that make a great video?.

Now, again, we’re going to look at the niche again. Because if it’s like watches, we also have E-commerce and stuff like that, you’re going to want demonstrations; there’s going to be like QVC, meaning you’re going to want videos to show off your stuff. If it’s watched, you’re going to look at my thing. Yeah, video. So it depends on the niche. But if it’s the niches say personal development or coaching, you may not have to do a video, you could write a great article with, there’s tons and tons of great leadership articles and stuff like that, that wouldn’t need somebody talking or a face or even a demonstration for leadership.

Exactly. Consultation. That’s another one of those. There are many different CTAs to connect all those. From that, again, that would depend on the niche.

Right. And then you can look at that all in the top, middle, and then what are the pieces of content that go along with that? And each piece of content, whether you’re targeting the top, keep in mind to make that the best campaign. You’ll want it to complement each channel you’re going for. So if it is the top of the funnel article, you may go, Well, this only targets 100 visitors. But if it’s how to create a cartographer, a map in the forest, if that’s what it’s about, and it’s the long- tail, you need to have an email. If you have a list, you need a Twitter post that links back to it. You have to send all these signals to Google that this is a real article and it deserves to be seen. And so, the same multichannel techniques are required on all parts of the funnel, top middle bottom. Meaning, that you’ll have complimentary, if you create an article, you’ll have complimentary social media, complimentary email, and everything, even if it’s just the top of the funnel keyword.

I have all that written down.

I use Canva. Oh, my God, that is the cheater code to all imagery for anything. If Canva hadn’t come around, that would have been so hard. You’d had to hire graphics and people constantly. The graphics teams are like, oh, man, and we hate Canva. But it’s so easy because you can easily create, and we have templates we just modify like for books we might buy. And so it has all the dimensions, but I have a cheat sheet. I will sometimes get out Photoshop, or I’ll be like, I’m going to old school this. So I have a cheat sheet with all the dimensions, and that’s okay. I would love it if there were just one social media tool, which was all standard.

If the text requirements and all that kind of stuff were all standards, it would be great. But now, I have a cheat sheet, or I use Canva for all my images. And it tells me what they’re supposed to be.

Marketers worldwide listening to this call saying, ” Yeah, Canva is a lifesaver.

Yeah, so everybody on my team is a Canva expert, just because they had to.

Yeah. Canva is a cheater code for sure.

Competitor research. One of the bigger pieces we didn’t talk about was hoping that that question would come up. So we first start with the user’s intentions. Okay, so once we know what we’re looking for, we know what we’re targeting. Whether top or middle, once we know what we’re going after, competitor research is the second thing, the absolute second. I want to see; I want to be like the best bands in the entire world. I’m a drummer, and I come from the music world. You first start learning music by copy. Yeah, the cover band copy bands, like, hey, let’s get together and do some Van Halen, or some Rolling Stones or whatever. Why are we playing other people’s music? Because we don’t yet know how to make music? So if we want to be in the genre of the Rolling Stones, guess who we need to go to look at and study? The Rolling Stones? Because that’s our genre. So if we’re going to play that music, if we’re going to compete in that music, but guess what, even if we copy them, it’s still not going to sound like The Rolling Stones, it’s still going to be original, even if we copy them. So we go out, and want to find the best content in that, whether it’s video or social media, who has the best, who’s gotten the most if it’s Twitter, who’s gotten the most engagements? We do the competitor research to find out who’s ranking for this? Who’s getting the social media rankings for this? Who’s getting all the engagements for this? Who are the influencers around this? That goes into our plan. So we want to ensure that if we’re creating content, we’re going to create the best content because we know the number one ranking factor is the best content wins. That’s because we’ve seen Google give us a number one listing despite Da of 90 fives, and we got to number one listing in Wikipedia, eBay, and B Amazon with a DA F six. Why? Because we had a better piece of content that dialed in more. And we had some schema that helped us out, but that’s another conversation. But that dialed it in, though. We dialed in to the user’s intentions, the person, and what they were looking for. These other people missed the mark a little, but we didn’t. Because we did the competitor research. We ensured we knew exactly what they were looking for, exactly what they wanted and delivered. So whether you’re creating the video, you want to deliver. So somebody’s looking for how to basket weave, and you better cover all the questions. Research all the questions, see what everybody did on that video, and do a better video. One of the better pieces of advice I’ve got for Video SEO is to research the video you’re going to create. Find the top five that rank the top five, write down everything in every other video and shoot a new video with just everything that includes everything in the first five. And you’re going to rank out right now. Why? Because you did a better piece of content than what’s already there. And that’s how we create more value. We will create a better piece of content wherever we’re targeting. So when we start with the user first, that’s going to show us where the cert that we’re going after will show us who our top competitors are. And whether it’s YouTube, Facebook, or wherever it is, we will look for the top competitors there. And we’re going to target them. Meaning that we’re going to try to match them; we’re going to try to sing their songs better than theirs. We can’t always, but we’ll try to.

And I love this question because it’s all based on the budget. Somebody comes to me, and Hum Jam does all the channels. We’ll do the full marketing package, not just SEO, although our cat’s meow is SEO. But the reason why we’re good at SEO is that we connect all the channels and the connecting of the channels makes your SEO better. Believe it or not, that’s the secret that people are like, what, you don’t just do SEO, you add this that makes it better? Yes. Adding it all together makes it better. So that’s what we do is overall marketing for companies in general.

That depends. When a client comes in, that is determined by where they are as a business. We ask, what is your budget? If they are a startup, their budget allotment will be different than if they have been in the business; one of our clients is chuckjones.com. They are Bugs Bunny, and Daffy Duck; their website is twenty-five years old. If you are dealing with a twenty-five-year-old website, it will have a different budget and structure than someone who is just starting up. And they are going to target. Chuck Jones, all of their budget is spent on SEO.

Because they are not a startup, they don’t need to do Pay-Per-Click or Facebook advertising; they are already well known. If you are a startup brand, we will spend money on SEO. We will need that budget, and the bigger the budget for the startup. We always, as every business, should spend at least ten percent of their revenue on Marketing. Every Business. If you are not doing that, you are not running a business. You are not advertising; you are not doing marketing. If you are not spending at least ten percent of revenue on marketing, you are not running a business. Now that ten percent, if you are a startup, you should spend twenty-five to thirty percent on marketing. If you are a startup, I’m going to say ten percent goes to SEO. Ten percent goes to Pay-per-Click. Five percent goes to other social channels. We will divide it up, but a big chunk goes to SEO for a startup. That’s because we can target the low-hanging fruits very easily. Even with the small brand new domain, if we start at the top and create volume there, we will eventually push down to the bottom in a very short time, within six months of the startup. We want to start that SEO train cranking right from the beginning of the startup. So, that budget has to go in the beginning, and once they are well established, that pay-per-click budget, the SEM budget is smaller. SEO, you spend more money because you are creating more content and videos and now building your content network. So that is where you want to invest your money. It will not be twenty-five percent of the revenue. If you are in a business twenty years later, you will not be spending twenty percent of your revenue on a new market if you are well established. So it depends on how new you are. What we recommend you invest your money in marketing-wise; if you are brand new, the larger chunk goes to SEO. Now we complement with Pay-per-click because you need some revenue. We need some tests. We need some people coming in and testing those CTAs for us. If you are spending ten percent on SEO, we want you to spend five percent on Pay-Per-Click or SEM simultaneously. Some of those phrases that we are targeting we can also target in the pay channel to see how they perform.

I think that is a great strategy. We spend a lot of time ensuring we have the right keywords and intentions, so that would be another waste of time. That would be a four-filtration process instead of a three-filtration process. And then you could add a fifth and a sixth and a seventh. But it is still the same in the long run, so I don’t test with a Pay-Per-Click before I target SEO. I know that is a good strategy if you are not spending time on the first part of the strategy. If you are just testing keywords and not going for the searcher’s intention, you just want to know if a keyword will rank, then yeah, do that. We are starting with the heart of the person, so we will not see if it will rank on Pay-Per-Click before we decide. Does that make sense?

Great question. We insist that we create the KPIs whenever we start with the goals and our clients. The key performance indicators.

That’s the juice, and if you are talking about the mistakes that people make, they miss the intention and don’t start with the target in mind. They don’t know what the target is. We don’t write any content and don’t do anything without a KPI to measure it with. How did we know that we got what we got? Are people spending money on us? How do they know what it is working? You have led; you have sales. Is that tracked? We want to ensure that if we are driving traffic, we know how many people are coming to the website daily. If we are tracking conversions, we want to know the conversion. We set this up, and now JA4 has some really good conversion tracking, but we set this up in Google and conversion tracking everything. We know the keywords we are targeting, whether they convert or not. Whether they are making sales or not.

We will not engage with you if we don’t know your goals. We know your goals are either trying to grow or get awareness. You are either trying to engage, or you are trying to retain, from a marketing standpoint. So that is what gears that.

First, you have to know your business and who you are targeting. But lay out all the places where they are. We have a chart, and you can look this up. But look at all the different social channels because the demographics are different, like Snapchat is highly female. Pinterest is highly female. So you will want to ensure that if you are a female audience, you are a female audience, and you are targeting the right channel. Lay out the channels first, and then tell me your strategy. Where you are going to go and where you are going to focus. Because we don’t hit all the channels for all the campaigns.

Bugs Bunny will have some Pinterest pictures. People like the art, but for some of our other clients, we don’t have Pinterest. Now Tik Tok is becoming big. Anybody with training info to teach is now big on Tik Tok. It is now becoming a part of our channels. One more channel. There is not going to be an end to channels. That’s the great news, but everyone is like, no, that’s the bad news. That’s great news; why is that the good news? Because we will have plenty of work to do. So we have another target, Tik Tok. Then I’m like, who is the demographic of Tik Tok? Then we go- Oh, I have this gaming niche over here that would be great on TikTok. I need to throw any of the content I have now on Youtube that I am creating on Tik Tok. And that is doing just as good on Tik Tok.

It is. Two minutes.

Yes. Repurposing everything. So, the Youtube video you want to make is twenty minutes. Then you have to chop that down into smaller chunks. Your Facebook video should be four minutes. Then your Tik Tok and Twitter video, two minutes. It used to be sixty seconds. I think Instagram is sixty seconds. So you have to take the juicy bits for targeting. Make sure the juicy bits have those main keyword phrases in there. While you are teaching, if you pepper in that phrase, you can cut those snippets, and those phrases will be there.

Right, you use the scripts. It’s just like creating the content; you start with the intention of what you are creating before you do.

Start with the intention of the user. Start with who you are targeting first; if you know them, you get in harmony with them and who they are. With their pains and their trials and their tribulations. Suppose you can speak to that because AIDA is a formula we constantly use; not sure if you have heard of that. That’s our intent. On Pinterest, you have our actions. Intention starts with the heart. So harmony starts with the heart, and trust starts with the heart. So that is where we want to target. The number one thing in your marketing is the user that you are targeting. Sing their song, and you will have people coming to you like the Pied Piper.

If they want to connect me, our company is HumJam.com. Even if you Google Hum Jam. We did a branded search with different strategies, so if you Google Hum Jam, you will find us. If you want to connect with me on all my social, I’m Joseph S. Kahn on everything. But I have a Znap link to make it easy, and it’s snap.link\Joseph S Kahn, and there you will see all the socials, Youtube videos, and everything. They are all on my Znap link. Connect with me; I will respond to everybody I love chatting with and engage on the topic.

Thank you so much.

You too.