TRAFFIC
1. Title formatting – do the highly shared
pieces use any common types of title
formatting? If so what?
2. Is there a topic theme that seems to
outperform like-for-like other pieces?
3. Are there differences between the content
that performs well on social versus the
content that seems to attract quality links?
4. What are the common features of the
pieces with the most ‘engaging’ metrics?
5. Are there any marked differences in
performance metrics when comparing, for
example, interactive HTML pieces, to more
traditional text and image pieces?
6. What about tone of voice and social
metrics? Do all the competitors use humour,
and if so, is there any correlation with
popularity e.g. the funnier the more sharable?
In addition to the immediate analysis,
there are also a number of more strategic
insights and ongoing learnings that your
analysis can be applied to.
Creative ideation
You can use some of the clearest success
criteria that come out of your analysis to
underpin creative brainstorming. Let’s
say for example there’s a clear sign that
relatable, athlete “back-story” content
correlates strongly with social shares, you
can narrow down your brainstorming
around this basic idea.
Here are some of the ideation techniques
and tactics we use at theMediaFlow to help
us come up with original ideas that grab the
attention and the visits:
1. Word/free association
Try brainstorming seed terms related
to your main theme and start to freely
associate those seed terms to any other
words and phrases that spring to mind.
There is no right answer here; you’re
hoping to take off some of the constraints
of formal thinking to help stimulate ideas.
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iGB Affiliate Issue 59 OCT/NOV 2016
2. Mind mapping
There’s a number of different mind
mapping techniques, but something that
we like to do with our clients is draw out
a start position (i.e. we need an interactive
guide to Wimbledon) and then a dream,
which might be a fantastic result in terms
of visits and sign-ups. You then need
to imagine the steps on the way. We’ve
sparked off some awesome ideas this way
using techniques from flowcharts to colourcharts to hand-drawn sketches.
3. Physical distraction
There’s a lot of scientific theory behind
the way the brain works when trying
demographics, you can start to define a
couple of visitor personas, which then
help to guide and refine your approach
to content ideation and styles. When
choosing a clear demographic group, you
need to think about:
●●Is he/she married?
●●Does he/she have kids?
●●What kind of job is typical for them?
●●Where does he/she go for an evening?
To the gym or a pub?
Flesh out this persona and write for this
person to really help shape your style and
tone of voice.
Content auditing can take a little bit of
time and effort, but the insights available
can really improve the performance of
your content as well as save you time and
direct your plans, meaning your efforts
get more rewards and your approach is
more efficient.
“Do remember that if their content is great it might be
frequently scraped so you might need to do a bit of data
hygiene to avoid false positives”
to problem solve and think creatively.
Harvard researcher Shelley H. Carson says
that the subconscious mind is continually
trying to work on solving your problem
and if we occupy our conscious mind
somewhat, this allows the subconscious
to be heard, meaning you might have that
lightning bolt moment.
In our team creative-brainstorms we
use Lego or plasticine as a distraction. I
personally seem to get my best ideas on a
long run. Don’t knock it ‘til you try it!
Developing personas
By analysing the most common success
criteria, you may start to get a feel for polar
content appeals. For example there may be
a very straight, informative, statistics-driven
type of content that works well in horse
racing – whereas emotive content may
work well in Formula 1.
Identifying content features and
combining with your own site user
NICHOLA STOTT is
founder of theMediaFlow,
a multi award-winning
digital marketing agency
that specialises in organic
search and content marketing.
Nichola has almost two decades of
experience in digital communications
and features in the BIMA Hot100 Digital
People of 2015.
Illustration by Richard Jarvis, theMediaFlow
“Screaming Frog SEO Spider will help you crawl a site
and any content sub-folder, to extract a nice list of all
content page URLs, plus the title and data elements if
that’s useful”