A Conversation with Ellie Burke: Tips for Getting Started with Content Marketing
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This is the 14th post in the “A Conversation With” series, where I interview smart humans about their experiences in marketing and social media. You can read past features here.
This month, I interviewed Ellie Burke, a content marketing professional who is the Content & SEO Manager at Campspot. In this blog post, we dive into keywords, SEO misconceptions, and much more.
Tell me about your career in content marketing so far–where you started and how you got where you are today.
My undergraduate degree is in creative writing and economics and I graduated from the Simon Business School in 2014 with my MBA. At the time, I expressed to the career counselors that I was interested in publishing and writing and that I wanted to leverage those skills in a business environment. I felt like an odd duck–I had a skillset less commonly prioritized in traditional business settings and I wasn’t sure what type of career to pursue. The job I have now didn’t exist 10 years ago. No one could have told me “you’ll be a content marketer someday.”
After graduation, I found a job opportunity in San Diego as a content writer at Classy, a fundraising software for nonprofits. That was a turning point in my career; blog writing work opened my eyes to how content can drive leads for a sales funnel. I realized my creative writing skills could be married with a business environment in a content marketing job.
Now, I’m the Content & SEO Manager at Campspot, managing their content engines for two different products, a campground reservation software and an online travel agency marketplace. I’m involved in creating content to support campaigns for both sides of the business as well as search engine optimization work. My previous roles over the years prepared me well for this, and it’s been a lot of fun to dive in and work on a team serving both B2B and B2C customers.
Stepping back: what is content marketing?
Content marketing is about creating value for our customers. How can we interact with them on their journey in a way that benefits them? How can we help them solve whatever problem they’re trying to solve? Content marketing is a way to enter a customer’s story and position your company as a potential solution.
The customer is the hero of their own story, and we’re coming in as a guide. Basically, the customer is Frodo and the company is Gandolf. The customer and their wants and needs should be the center of your focus. While it’s important to clearly communicate your organization’s positioning, the goal isn’t to project. It’s to converse—to make them feel heard. Our content marketing should help them understand how we can help them get from point A to Z.
Content marketing is also a key component to communicating brand identity. The right content establishes a tone of voice, brand personality, and clearly communicates organizational values, beliefs, and perspective.
People are often confused by keywords, so on a basic level, how do keywords work?
SEO can be intimidating, especially if you don’t have technical expertise. Basically, Google shows search results for what they think will be most valuable to a person’s search query. By focusing on creating value as your number one goal, keywords aside, if you genuinely try to create valuable content that answers questions your customer might have, then you will rank for certain keywords.
To optimize and rank higher, you can pay attention to specific words that people use to search to solve their problems. We use tools like SEMRush to research this and understand how people are searching for things. Then, you can use that research to design an SEO-driven content strategy that creates content pieces around certain keywords. Or, (where relevant) you can use keyword research to make sure you’re presenting what you planned to write about in a way that will rank well. No one wants to “keyword stuff,” where you force keywords into your writing in ways that feel insincere or inauthentic. Essentially, you want to let Google understand that you’re answering certain questions and then rank you even higher.
Here are some additional tips for getting started:
Keyword density is important–make sure the keyword appears in 1 to 2% of your piece.
Include the target keyword or phrase in your title, URL, the first paragraph of the piece, and in headers throughout the piece–those are all spots where Google looks to see that something is important.
Always be really descriptive in writing alt text and image file names.
You’re helping Google help the reader as much as you can.
If people want to get started with content marketing but only have time to do one thing regularly, what would you recommend?
Blogging–it’s still a very relevant marketing tactic. It’s a great way to consistently get organic traffic to your site and rank for certain keywords. It also shows that you’re taking time to create value for your customer. It positions you as a thought leader, too. From a brand perspective, it goes a long way. It won’t make you an overnight sensation, but it does help you create community.
I will say, from an SEO perspective: if something is fundamentally wrong with your SEO strategy, no one will see your great content. You need to make sure you have the fundamentals in place to ensure that your content is seen. Otherwise, it will feel like you’re pouring a lot of time and effort into a void.
What are 3 things that every blog post must have?
Optimizing for SEO – It’s worth your time. Understanding SEO best practices goes a long way.
A clear value proposition at the top – It should be immediately clear to someone when they land on your blog post what they’re going to get out of reading it. The title and introduction should give clear expectations for the reading experience.
Make it as digestible as possible – Lots of readers skim rather than reading line by line. Organize content in a way that makes it easy to see the hierarchy of information, so readers can skip to the section with the information they’re looking for quickly.
Here’s a fourth one as a bonus: tone of voice/personality – No matter what type of company you’re working for, there’s no reason why we can’t all have tone of voice, and some personality, in our businesses. We’re all just humans talking to each other. Even in B2B, in the end, it’s just humans purchasing things from humans selling things.
You’re a fiction writer as well as a content marketer–what skills from your fiction writing prove helpful in marketing?
My creative writing background helps with shorter copy, like for social or email. Maybe it’s because I have more experience with revision. Trying to resonate with a reader is top of mind for me. Having experience with writing dialogue probably helps too. When writing fiction, I spend a lot of time trying to sound authentic, approachable, or real, and that likely bleeds over to how I show up in content writing.
My fiction is emotionally grounded, so being able to come at things from an emotional lens is helpful. I have to write in different styles for my job, sometimes relying more on emotion and other times more on humor. I’m learning to do more with being lighthearted, comical, and entertaining.
Any must-have tools or resources for content marketing that you’d recommend?
SEMRush
Yoast plugin
Hemingway editor – this is useful when I want to crystallize something and make sure it’s extremely clear.
Donald Miller’s Building a Story Brand has been impactful in my working career.
Asana – I can’t do my job without it!
Where can people find you/your work?
You can stay up to date with my fiction writing at @ellieburkebooks.
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