Content Strategy Archives - Brittany Frater

April 14 2020

Moxie Case Study: Customer Communication During a Pandemic

Brittany Frater Content Strategy, Copywriting 0

Weeks before making homemade bread was trending, our local bakery, Moxie, started giving away free sourdough starters. Around the same time, Andy, the owner, began a daily email. As things intensified with Covid-19 here in Colorado, Andy’s updates started by reassuring everyone about how they were keeping employees and customers safe.

First, he started limiting the number of customers in the store.
Then better signage and markers on the sidewalk every 6 feet.
Finally, he opened a special no-contact pick-up window.

Next, he launched a delivery service. Free (local) delivery daily for orders over $25. Every newsletter had updates about how they were handling the outbreak, new offerings, and closed with a “song of the day” for a bit of positivity.

In addition to the sourdough, he added flour, fresh and dry yeast and a bread-making book to his online store. Working with other local producers, he began to expand Moxie’s offerings to become a sort of high-end general store: chocolate, craft beer, wine, fresh produce, oat milk, coffee and farm fresh eggs, even TP!

His team started preparing full meals so that people could order a hearty to-go dinner for their families. The nightly menu was mostly comfort food and almost immediately sold out: lasagna, mac and cheese, chicken pot pies. Just last week, a full Easter meal was on offer: 2 pounds of sliced River Bear hormone and antibiotic-free Denver ham, with roasted potatoes, vegetables and salad, along with egg-shaped cookies and hot cross buns. Andy also ran a contest where kids submitted poems for a chance to win a 5-pound chocolate Easter bunny. The second-place winner penned an ode to cinnamon roles:

Cinnamon rolls are as good as scoring a goal in a soccer match,
Cinnamon rolls are as important as moles are to holes,
Cinnamon rolls are better then anything in life
So here I am saying, “Cinnamon rolls are life!”

I think we can probably all relate to that right now. Simple pleasures, am I right?

One newsletter thanked everyone for their support. Because of us, he said, Moxie had been able to keep all their staff on full-time. Because of Moxie, I don’t have to feel guilty that the only thing we’ve been baking at home is cookies. Supporting the bakery makes me feel good. If their sourdough wasn’t so delicious and I wasn’t so lazy I might be tempted to join the bread baking craze. Bread is just too important to me right now. I can’t risk failure!

Andy’s Daily Emails Satisfy Our Desire to Connect

In a time of great uncertainty, Andy’s candid, conversational emails create community. With a whole lot of uncertainty in the world, they are something to rely on. Like most of you, I get a ton of email each day and yet I always look forward to Andy’s email in the morning.

For one thing, it’s deeply personal. Like this anecdote shared early on:

“During these times we are getting to spend so much time with our family. I am seeing my boys glow with happiness as I take them up to the new mill site in North Boulder at the end of the day to help build our new spot. Painting the walls, putting up cobb, testing out the mill, sweeping the floors. My 7 year old Theo has been sleeping on top of me in our bed at night with what we call a “pancake snuggle”. That’s when dad can’t barely breathe because he’s smothered like a pancake with a very large 7 year old. He won’t leave my side! We work so hard to provide for our families, spending weeks in hotels, days on airplanes, late nights at the office. Our children have less time to see us show them how to be. This time spent with them will change them forever, and I bet you’ll be bummed when you have to get back on a plane or train and leave them at the house for your 12 hour work day.”

These stream-of-consciousness style communications are authentic and funny – but they are also useful. Don’t overthink it: you need to be communicating with your customers during this pandemic. It doesn’t have to be incredibly polished. You just need to understand your customers and engage them in a genuine way.

Andy’s Emails Have Valuable Takeaways for all Marketers

These daily communications do:

Andy safely celebrating the grand opening of a brand new location in Boulder.

Contain information about what’s available
Describe new offerings: daily dinners, new products added to the online store, special holiday-themed baked goods, etc.
What’s coming up: special offers to watch out for, or products he’s working on adding to the store.
Current protocols for pick-up or delivery

The daily communications are not:

Fancy. They are sent using Squarespace’s email template. They are simple, clean, and always include photos. The photos are clearly taken with Andy’s phone – they are not perfectly composed or edited. They are fun and personal.
They aren’t 100 percent grammatically correct or error-free. Andy rambles, and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t laboriously edit them.

Hearing from Andy every day ties all of us bread, coffee, and pastry lovers together. His stories are entertaining and informative. At a time when relationships are more important than ever, his newsletter builds a bond between his family and his customers.

Your communication during a pandemic doesn’t have to be perfect. Regular, heartfelt, informative communication with your customers during these uncertain times is priceless. Andy’s awesome instincts are creating community and his words shape the way we feel about his business.

If your forte isn’t with words but you know what you’d like to accomplish, get in touch. I’d be more than happy to help you build a lifelong bond with your customers, starting today.

Let's Chat!

November 19 2019

7 Reasons Long-Form Blogs are Worth the Time Investment

Brittany Frater Content Creation, Content Strategy Blogging 0

There’s no doubt about it – shorter content is easier to produce. You can produce a high quantity of short articles so that your editorial calendar looks satisfyingly full and you’re posting to social frequently to promote your articles.

Just one problem…

No one is engaging with the content your posting. You’re getting very few likes (stop counting that one super fan who likes everything), almost no comments, when some shares your post it’s almost shocking.

Why isn’t it working?

It may seem counter-intuitive that in this day in age, as our attention spans continue to dwindle, that people would be more inclined to read and share a piece that is 1500 words than one that is 500 words, but they are.

People trust long-form content. It’s thorough, and it’s clear to your reader that you invested some time in teaching them something. That matters to them. And the fact that you rigorously canvassed a subject means that there were probably lots on insights – many opportunities for those interesting tidbits to strike different readers and provoke them to share.

Still not convinced? That’s okay, here’s a pretty comprehensive list of reasons why long-form content is worth your time.

Inbound Marketing Saves You Money While Delivering More Leads

Done right, Inbound marketing will save your company money while delivering on your KPIs for lead generation.

It stands to reason that long-form content takes longer to produce than short-form content. You have to invest more money into creating it, but you also have to create less of it, and it pays dividends when it comes to driving organic traffic and converting leads.

Not only that, but you can create an entire campaign around a single great piece of long-form content. You can pick different parts of it and create assets for digital ads, create a Slideshare of insights from the piece to put on LinkedIn and even create a little video with the author asking for feedback.

So while it may feel like you’re paying more for long-form content because you’re shelling out the extra cash (or time) upfront, you will reap the benefits on the backend. It just takes patience, and a bit of foresight.

But in order for Inbound to work…your content needs to be appearing when people search, which means you need to be ranking on Google.

Long-form Content Ranks Higher on Google

When you dig down below the surface when composing your posts, the almighty Google will reward you. Just take a recent study by BuzzSumo that found that, for both The Guardian and BuzzFeed, the pieces over 3,000 words were the ones that knocked it out of the park.

What’s more, Brian Dean from Backlinko recently analyzed 1 million Google search results and found that “the average Google first page result contains 1,890 words.”

Long-form content is generally evergreen. It’s a deep-dive into a subject that gives your customers a lesson on how to start something, or how to get better at something. As such, it generates leads over a longer period of time. By continuing to attract backlinks and organic traffic from Google, your content continues to grow in rank authority and continues to pay dividends to your brand awareness and lead gen efforts.

Google notices when people are spending a longer time on certain website pages. It notices when people are commenting on your posts and sharing them. It notices the length of your post. Then it rewards you for your efforts by giving you better placement on search results.

I say it rewards you, but really Google is trying serving your content up to searchers first because it’s thorough, authoritative, and based on the analytics, it’s confident that your content will answer their questions.

The evidence is stacking up in favor of long-form content…

Do you pass the sniff test? (Photo by Simon Moog on Unsplash)

Consumers Trust Brands Who Are Thorough

Going in-depth on a subject is underrated. Readers get more value out of long-form content because it is detailed enough to actually teach them something.

Naturally, it takes longer to read content that’s 1500 to 2000 words long than something 500 words or less, which means a potential customer is spending more time on your website. This, in turn, means lower bounce rates, and a higher potential to view other pages once they’re finished consuming the first piece of content.

In a blog post for Neil Patel, Emma Siemasko, the Content Marketing Specialist at Grasshopper, gives the example of how a long-form guide she produced performed for their website:

People stayed on the page 40% longer than on the average page, and they looked at 25% more pages than the average visitor.

Just like any relationship, the longer someone spends with you, the more trust you build with them.

To Both Google and Your Reader, You Become a Believable Subject Matter Expert

The more in-depth content you publish on a topic, the more that readers will view you as an authority, and will refer back to you when they actually need something.

You need to earn their trust and loyalty, and you can do that by solving their problems. To solve their problems you must first understand your customers, and then create a super valuable resource for them. One that doesn’t require them to click around to all sorts of different pages, or do secondary searches.

For example, you are in the business of selling seeds, so you publish exhaustively on starting a garden. Chances are that a new gardener that comes across your content and finds that it’s a super valuable resource is going to look to you for seeds once their garden is ready for planting.

It’s all about cultivating that relationship. Makes sense, right?

It’s time to be unique! (Photo by Rupert Britton on Unsplash)

In a World of Tweets and Listicles, Your Content Will Stand Out

No one wants to be unique in middle school, but now that you’re running a business, it’s pretty important to stand out from the crowd.

A couple of years ago, BuzzSumo and Moz teamed up to analyze over 1 million articles. In doing so, they discovered that 85% of articles are less than 1000 words long. Not only that, but the majority of blog posts are around 500 words.

This means that just by consistently producing content over this length, you’ll have an advantage over your competition.

And if you still want to compete on the short-form front, you can tweet about your new long-form article!

Long-form Content Gets WAY More Engagement on Social Media

And when you do tweet about your long-form article, chances are you’ll get double your average amount of retweets, because long-form content kills on social.

In their aforementioned analysis of 1 million articles, Moz and BuzzSumo reported that engagement is uniformly low when it comes to most blog posts that are promoted on social:

“The majority of posts receive few shares and even fewer links. In a randomly selected sample of 100,000 posts over 50% had 2 or less Facebook interactions (shares, likes or comments) and over 75% had zero external links.”

Which means it’s not just you, publishing content that no one is paying attention to, liking or sharing. It’s the majority of brands who are experiencing this, and it’s the minority who manage to create content that gets high levels of likes, shares, and links.

However, there’s one type of content that stands out by consistently garnering higher levels of engagement than it’s counterparts. And, you guessed it, it’s long-form content.

Moz & BuzzSumo findings: impact of content length on total shares and domain links.

“Whilst the majority of the content published on BuzzFeed is less than 3,000 words, the long form content performs significantly better with an average of 38,000 shares.” – BuzzSumo

The data routinely proves that the answer to your social engagement problems is mostly in the length of content that you produce and promote. So good news – it’s a relatively easy fix!

Higher Conversion Rates (and I’m all about content that converts!)

The ultimate goal of any piece of content is conversions, right? Whether it’s a subscribe or a download or a demo request – everyone is looking at those stats. And even when conversions aren’t the primary objective, they sure are appreciated!

It’s historically been pretty difficult for a content marketing person to guarantee a certain number of conversions. It’s also been difficult to figure out how to boost conversions on content.

Content marketing can often feel like a continuous game of whack-a-mole. Sometimes you hit the mole – and get a ton of engagement and conversions – and sometimes you publish something and just hit the air. The sound of crickets.

But no more.

Example: Neil Patel’s heatmapping tool CrazyEgg experienced a 30% increase in conversions when they redesigned the homepage to be about 20 times longer than the original.

Long-form content routinely converts better than the alternative. Think about it. You’ve created something high-value. You have built trust with your customers by being comprehensive. When they trust you, they buy from you.

In Conclusion…

I hope I’ve convinced you of the value of long-form content by now. From countless examples and amassed data we know that articles over 1500 words continually:

Rank higher on Google

Generate more organic traffic to your website

Get more engagement on social media

Have higher conversion rates

You just have to put in a little bit of extra effort upfront.

Admittedly, patience and foresight aren’t our strong suit as human beings, but now that you know what you’ve been missing while optimizing for more shorter form content, are you ready to play the long-game?

P.S. If you understand the value of long-form content and want to outperform your competitors but find yourself under-resourced – I may know someone who can help you out 🙂

Let's chat about long-form content!