How to Create More Engaging Content

0:01Alright, so we're going to talk about how to create more engaging content because everyone is trying to create content right now so let's talk about it we'll do the first one and this is the most obvious one is don't use ai to create your content ai is just creating more regurgitated stuff chad gpt's index is what 3.5 is from september 2021 i think it is and they say chad gpt 4 is still going to be september 2021 so they're not going to adjust the date time frame although that will be modified over time bard is a few weeks old so it's pretty live and up to date uh and i don't know why more people still use chat gpt over barred look at all the workplace integrations now dude it's just so much better but what we're seeing is dude literally i don't know how many clients you talk to but we talk to so many potential customers and customers and they're all saying like oh how do we just create a content with ai and i remember i was talking to someone and they're just like, we don't need a budget for content.

0:58We're just going to create all AI and we're going to get better results because we can create more of the content. I said, okay, try it out. They created tons of content and their traffic actually started going down. And they started publishing it. And I was like, one, the content's not engaging. Two, it's just regurgitated information that you can find all over the web. Three, you now have a ton of low-quality pages on your site, which Google and search engines hate, and they prefer you to have less pages but extremely high quality. Actually, to build off of that, it works when you use AI to create modified content.

1:27And what I mean by that. Yeah. And I don't think any people are talking about it. Like, yes, modified content works. And so if like this, for example, modifying this into like a blog post, that will work. Or taking your old content, updating it, that's modifying it as well. That works really well. And dubbing is also modifying content too. So I think more people need to be talking about that moving forward. We just coined that here. um and what else what else is there with the with the with the ai stuff i i i i think that's the biggest way to lose engagement the second thing is if you want super engaging content you got to create something that's new and fresh that people haven't talked about see when we started in the marketing game it was all about how many pieces of content can you crank out each and every single week and what are the keywords that you can target but now it's not about that like sure yeah you still want to target keywords and you want to cover the necessities when it comes to your industry and just have all the basics you know intermediate and advanced type of content covered but people really want to hear the new stuff it's not about like oh to create engaging content you need to have an infographic or video or use social media it's more so people want to engage with new stuff that just helps them and the content isn't really trying to sell on anything you know what's interesting so we're kind of talking about this in the context of fco and i want to pivot into social in a second but i don't know about you like i was looking at a google search console this just out of curiosity i was like i wonder how many clients their traffic has been declining in the last 12 months from an seo standpoint i think it's like it like 70 and not all of them are doing like seo with us right but it's just like you look at them it's like wow like the seo is just getting harder and i think one of the trends what we've talked about in a previous podcast is like seo is very much a rich man's game or rich woman's game it just it's getting tougher um it is getting tougher but we look at a lot of data on search console data and companies that are doing marketing including the ones we work with you have a lot of uber suggest data uh-huh are you seeing it we're seeing increases no we're not seeing we're not so overall increase is what you're seeing from the people that are doing marketing like when we look at our our all our clients because we track it we're seeing increases these are seo clients though correct yeah my minds we're just you're just looking at general yeah but when we look at people who are just doing seo we're still seeing nice gains what we're not seeing anymore is assuming you're at scale there was a point where you're able to get like 30 40 60 100 percent gains year over year and again this is assuming you're at scale we're not seeing that as much anymore but we are seeing nice wins and we're seeing sites that have content around one subject one area perform way better than sites that just talk about everything there's this one gal she has a substack and where she talks about she i think she's probably the only one and one only few people in this world that has this data set on like you know who prefers uh monogamy versus um polygamy or it's a polygamy or polyamory whatever dude i don't know i'm married i don't know i don't i just don't know how to pronounce the words but anyway there's all this data it's like uh who's actually cheated before have you ever cheated in your relationship so she has all this data and it's like mapped into like graphs and things like that the point is people want novelty and people like if you have interesting data that is novel right if you have an interesting point of view that is novel if you can tell a good story that is novel but if you keep regurgitating the same stuff then and yeah and what we say whether it's content on social or a website that's text based people want short digestible it doesn't mean that your content can be 3 000 words it means that people need to be able to skim it and get all the nuggets and the insights that they want really quickly um on social we're seeing long-form video just not perform as well as short-form video people have shorter attention spans what's the saying the average human has a shorter attention span than a goldfish yeah a couple seconds yeah it's something crazy like that and i don't think it's getting better with tiktok or reels or anything like that i mean to your point that um you're talking about tiktok it spectacle marketing is another thing right like mr beast is very good at spectacle marketing yeah it's always something crazy and crazy and crazy the problem with spectacles is it has to get crazy and crazy and crazier if it doesn't you'll start to bore people so like his trajectory has to remain insane which is hard because it's like remember he compared the boat thing we had a whole podcast episode on it from like a dollar boat to a million dollar boat or billion dollar boat it was something i don't think it was bigger than a million billion yeah you can't get i don't think you get that big of a yacht for a million dollars you're right you're Right.

5:50Yeah. I haven't been on a boat. Yeah. I get seasick. Yeah. But either way, the key with engaging content is like something fresh, new. I you know, if you look at the Hermoses, they do a really good job with creating engaging content on social media. So does Cody Sanchez. Alex. So Alex. And OK, so let's look at Alex. Layla does a good job. But what I would say is Alex and Cody, they tell really good stories. It's not that Layla doesn't tell good stories. Layla is, she, I don't think she tells as many stories as the other two. And that's what I think creates a lot of novelty as well. But for me, it's not just the stories.

6:28They create content that appeals to the masses. Like Cody will be like, this guy's playing the violin and he created a business that's doing$100 ,000 a year. It's like, oh, okay, how do you make$100 ,000 a year playing a violin? Or this laundromat makes like$5 million a year and they don't, no money down or something like that. Yeah. Or like Alice will be like, I've tried on 40 pairs of shorts, 40 pairs of T-shirts and 40 different shoes. And here's the most comfortable outfit. Yeah. Right. But like stuff that's broad, mass appeal. I'm not saying it converts the best. I'm not saying it can't convert.

7:01Well, I think it doesn't convert as well as niche content. But you're somewhat making it up by having more people that are just viewing the content. but anything that's unique like that does really well and i went through phases where i would create stuff like that like i talked about yeah what about your hundred thousand dollar outfit or something i did stuff about clothes what spending hundred plus grand on clothes did for me what traveling in first class what i got from it i broke down a long time ago when people actually liked it no one cares for it anymore but uh the centurion amex card what all the benefits were and stuff like that and that kind of content did really well but when we look at visitor to conversion rate it was just so terrible that we stopped creating content like that but on the flip side if you create very specific technical data rich content people love it it's super engaging like we'll be like what's the difference between using a subdomain versus a subdirectory for SEO and you can say like, you know, assuming you actually did, we analyzed 1 ,632 sites and this is what we learned, right?

8:07I'm making it up, but assuming you can actually run the study, analyze all those sites and you can come up with key nuggets and breaking that kind of stuff down for people, they love it. You're not going to get the views compared to like what's more comfortable, Crocs versus, you know, Nike. But on the flip side, you'll generate way more customers. If you want to create engaging content, it's worth thinking about what it is that you're actually enjoying. And so, for example, this marketing school podcast, we're nerding out on marketing right now. We're talking about stories. But also I realized for me, I don't like doing direct to camera like I am right now where I'm lecturing.

8:41But what I enjoy doing is having conversations. So long form podcast, two to three hours or so. I can do those all day because one, I love learning. Two, I love teaching. And I kind of get both of those at the same time. So it's like figuring out what really resonates with you. And so for Neil, he doesn't do spectacle stuff, right? And you have to also understand there's a trade-off too. Like A, do what you enjoy because that keeps it engaging. People can tell where you're not having fun with it. But also with marking school, our trade-off here is we do it daily. But I don't know about you, but I've had a lot of people come up to me at conferences saying, hey, I listen to the podcast or I used to listen to podcasts.

9:13It's great stuff. But they got what they needed and they moved on. And like maybe that's just how it is for this. And like you have to be willing to accept the trade-offs. yeah or what i found is majority of people i've talked to they listen to some episodes aren't always consistent but a lot do uh listen to it in spurts in which they'll listen they'll go and execute a lot of stuff and then they'll come back three four six months later start listening again and then go and implement new stuff that they learned yep when i first started my business the overwhelm was real i didn't have the tools to help me scale if only i had shopify from the start to handle all the behind the scenes work shopify is the platform behind millions of businesses globally from huge names like Mattel and Gymshark to the smallest brands just getting started.

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12:14And what I figured out that's really helped me, and it's not actually anything revolutionary, I used to try to figure out what's new by reading a lot of other sites. But then creating what they're writing is more like regurgitated. um what's really helped me is looking at what's trending in other industries so let's say someone we're in marketing let's say someone is in digital transformation or someone is in uh sales or something right not marketing but sales and you know let's say the company is gone and they did an interesting study on something related to sales and if it went viral what we'll see is hey can we actually do something similar like that for the marketing industry so look at what's working for other industries that's causing content to get tons of engagement like shares virality and see if you can apply that to your industry and see if anyone's created anything like that within your industry and if so then great do more of it uh i mean or if they have it then go create it and see what ends up happening a great example of this is if you look at gong They may do stuff like on, you know, how much do you talk versus they talk or other people talk.

13:28And you can say, hey, based on the average time that you talk, this is better for sales or it's worse for the sales. You know, you can end up analyzing a lot of content on, let's say if I was doing marketing from social media and reels and be like, what's the difference between a five second reel, a 10 second reel, a 15, 20, 25, 30, 40. and be like, does less talk time or more talk time actually help you get more engagement? And you can break it down, not just for, hey, we analyze 10 ,000 videos, but look at it per industry and have a big sample set for each one and be like, okay, for the auto industry, here's what they prefer.

14:06For B2B software, here's what they prefer. For healthcare, here's what people prefer. And if you just break it down like that and then you start giving people the data, we're finding that kind of stuff to do really well. but you can take what someone else is doing and adapt that concept to your industry. Just like I gave the example with Gong. If someone makes an AI tool that can do that, where they can extrapolate the data and scrape all the data, we would be very interested to at least try it out, if not invest. I don't know about invest because these things, I feel like things can get... We'll be a paying user.

14:36We'll be customers. Yeah. All right. So that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, rate, rate, and subscribe. Check out this next video over here if you're watching on YouTube. And we'll see you tomorrow. Thank you.