on Consumer-Centric Storytelling in Content Marketing

Claire Carlile 00:02
Hello and welcome to Adventures in Local Marketing from BrightLocal, the marketing podcast for marketers who want to do good local SEO. So in the upcoming episodes, I'm going to be chatting with a smorgasbord of marketers who are each going to bring their unique insight into the local marketing landscape. And each episode is going to serve up a one stop overview of our guest chosen topic area. And it's going to give you tips and tactics that you will be able to dash off and implement straight away and I am your host, Claire Carlile, and I am BrightLocal search expert as well as a chartered marketer with 20 years experience of working with local businesses of all shapes and sizes, and today we are going to be chatting with the wonderful Melissa Popp, Melissa is the content strategy director at RicketyRoo. And in that role, she oversees all of the content initiatives for the clients and her responsibilities span from creating high level content strategies to diving into the minutiae of content creation. And Melissa says that she lives and breathes everything related to content and writing has been her passion ever since she first picked up a number two pencil. And she takes pride in making content relevant to readers and illustrating to clients how crucial this connection is for reaching their potential customers. Hello, Melissa, and welcome to the show.

Melissa Popp 01:40
Hello, hello, thanks for having me!

Claire Carlile 01:42
Always, thank you very much for making the time for us today, I am very excited to talk to you today about narratives in local marketing. So what we think of as I guess, sort of content storytelling. So this is something that I am very interested to hear more about, and the way that you manage to get your clients to produce this very compelling content. So we're just going to dive straight into what I know is going to be a great conversation. So I like to start at the very beginning. So can you give me and give us a quick definition of what you mean, when you talk about local narratives. When we think about storytelling in that way? What is it?

Melissa Popp 02:30
Well when we're talking about storytelling often, and we're looking at ways to integrate locations, people experiences, cultural aspects of a community into the stories we're telling. And oftentimes, when we're creating a piece of content, you know, we start with keywords. And we start with outlines, trying to figure out how to talk about these keywords. And we often forget that at the end of the day, no matter what piece of content we're creating, we're trying to tell a story. We're trying to engage with an audience, we're trying to pique their interest. And so by weaving in local narratives, through those unique experiences that potential customers or an audience have is a great way to connect with them. And keep the keep yourself top of mind when they start navigating through the rest of your site.

Claire Carlile 03:13
Yeah, for sure. So that's like, a real way to tap into unique content, something that isn't like cookie cutter that you're not going to replicate other people's content just because you can't because it is someone's story, I guess. So when we think about that do Do you think that the, you know, the Google leak, or however we're going to refer to it? Do you think that makes a difference to the type of content that we need to be, you know, getting out of our clients and having on our sites?

Melissa Popp 03:43
What's funny to me, and maybe this is because I'm a content marketer first, SEO second is that the Google leaks taught us all sorts of things. And no matter what we call it, what else might come out in the future? Or what might be true or not in these leaks, because we still don't know exactly whether or not all these bullet points actually are ranking factors or not. We have assumptions. But at the end of the day, storytelling has always been important, whether we're doing it for Google, whether we're doing it for an audience, just because Google says something in a league or even funnier, with a helpful content update. It's like who wasn't already creating helpful content like that, to me, that's a no brainer. And why we pretend like we don't need to create real authentic, unique content to begin with is just like, it makes me just throw my hands in the air because I'm like, that's the basis the foundation for good SEO is solid content. So I don't think necessarily the Google leaks change anything. But looking forward, because we're seeing more volatility in search results. We're seeing more frequent updates in general, we're seeing the helpful content as they get smarter and smarter each time it's rerun, you know, the storytelling and quality content, even though we know it's been important the whole time. Really, it's kind of like yeah, here's the gotcha y'all you should have been doing In this from the get go, not just because Google's telling you in a leaked document.

Claire Carlile 05:03
I was just thinking about, with regard to you know, how people are interpreting these points that are coming in from the. I keep doing this, why do I keep doing that with my fingers? What I'm trying to say about the idea is, you know, is it a leaked document, it's like, Well, personally, there's nothing in it that that there is an incredible surprise, it's not like someone is given some secret sauce, it's like, you know, be authentic, have quality content have unique content. And well, that's my interpretation of it. And when you're talking about these, and I'm sure we will come to this in a moment, when we think about storytelling, that's a an easy way to be unique, and to have this unique content. But it's not necessarily a pathway, a guaranteed pathway to quality content. And I feel like we're gonna get onto that part in a moment when we might start thinking about how to tease these stories out, and then how to, you know, present them in a in a way that makes them quality thinking of the storytelling, the narratives, and then if you're, you know, reading a lot about content marketing, brands, brand stories, where where do all of those things sit together? In terms of why do you think that the storytelling and the narrative has, I always think of it sort of going quite hand in hand with brand? So I was just interested to see if you thought that they were sort of good friends like that, and how they played together?

Melissa Popp 06:35
Oh, absolutely. I mean, most of the clients that we work with, especially if you work more in the local space, with small, medium sized businesses, often they don't have a brand to begin with, they don't quite know who they are, yes, they have a logo, and they have a website, and they have a color scheme. And, and they're trying to sound fun in their content, but really, like, you look at their GBP posts, you look at their social media posts, and it's just generic, you know, they don't know what their brand is, or what their voice is. And then on the flip side, you get these much bigger, bigger companies, you know, think about, you know, your Amazon's things like that, you know, everybody knows what that logo is, they know immediately what this branding is what they can expect. And really, it absolutely goes hand in hand with with quality storytelling and content creation, no matter what the purpose of that content is. Because if you know who you are even a little bit, as a company, you can instill those values, that connection to your community, big or small. You can find unique experiences from what you're selling, what you're doing, what your value proposition is, and integrate that into your content creation from the get go. And I think that one of the things that has happened with SEO and I feel like I get in a lot of trouble when I talk to people about stuff like this, because like, I feel like I talk about things that people just want to answer out. But it's like, the amount of content that we're churning out there isn't unique. It's it's BS, it's copying what the top 10 on page one of Google is. And there's nothing exciting or interesting about it, our eyes glaze over when we read it, probably rolling our eyes seeing keyword stuffing and other things and integrating the brand into content like that can transform it into something completely unique, even if you're just copying what everybody else is doing. And that can be a differentiator to me absolutely. They work hand in hand. And frankly, we need to be working as SEOs to integrate that into what we're creating even more than we are now.

Claire Carlile 08:28
Just then you mentioned that, you know, RicketyRoo works with a lot of small and medium size, I know that you work with a few sort of multi smaller multilocation. And maybe we'll talk about like big brands again later. But especially with the types of businesses that you work with at RicketyRoo, I'm really, because when we talk about things like this, it's very easy to go, oh, that's an amazing idea. That's an amazing idea. But we don't necessarily hear the examples and really get those. Well, I was gonna say stories, and that's what we're talking about. But we don't get the stories of the actual work that's being done. So I'm interested to know about the types of businesses that you work with at rickety Rue, whether that be what sort of niche they're in, maybe you specialize, and also off the back of that. I'm interested to know, when you're looking at their content, and you're making an assessment of their content and the competitive space, what are the shortfalls that you are seeing in their content? So sort of took two pronged question there is like, Who do you work with? And what are the key all for not necessarily awful things that you're seeing on the website, but what are the key issues that they're having?

Melissa Popp 09:35
Well that could be like a whole other like four hour episodes. So RicketyRoo, we work with a variety of of small, medium sized multi franchise locations across North America and sometimes elsewhere in the world. We primarily specialize in home service businesses, medical clients, legal clients, and then the oddballs who come in as they need help, and choose to work with us. When it comes to content shortfalls, oh, gosh, okay, how do I build it? Long story short, the number one issue you always face in local, doing local content marketing? Absolutely is is the duplicate content, spam, usually often location pages, service pages were lazy companies convince these clients that oh, all we have to do is swap out a service name or a city. And now we have 100 location pages, most not even really needed, either. That's bringing down overall site quality in Google's eyes. That's typically our number one issue. And usually, that's a hard conversation to have with a client, because you know, they've spent probably 10s of 1000s of dollars at this point, thinking that, oh, yeah, this is awesome. This is great. This is the way to go. And now we have to come in and, you know, be the bearer of bad news and say, Hey, we, we got to rewrite all this content. And it has to be unique and interesting and different. And so to me, that's, that's really the number one shortfall. And it really, it breaks my heart honestly, for these clients. When we the amount of times my colleague, Amanda Jordan comes to me and says homeless, so don't look at this website, just don't, you don't want to look at it. Don't do it. Because you know, I get ready to throw hands. Because I because I feel bad. You know, it's it's these clients don't know better. I think that's the number one issue. From there, you know, what happens is whether you're having duplicate content, or you're having generic content that was treated with only SEO in mind, there's no personalization, there's no funnel optimization, there's no conversion rate optimisation. Sometimes we see no call to actions at all to even a contact form on a client's website. And you know, that to me is like content writing one-on-one, when you're writing transactional pages like that. And so that's probably my number two shortfall that I see with clients is that there's just no, there's no compelling statement there to convince someone, hey, choose me, pick me pick up the phone, fill out a form. You know, I'm sure there's probably case studies out there of how many leads people have lost in various industries because of a lack of a compelling call to action. And then, and then, of course, the third shortfall I see the most is circling back to what we were just talking about, about branding, integrating into content is that a lot of small and medium sized businesses unless they really see fast growth, they they don't really know who they are, they, they want to know who they are, but they just don't know how to get there. And so that can be hard, you know, RicketyRoo is not a branding company, it's very hard for us to go in and support helping a client figuring that part out. But what we do kind of to meet in the middle is that when our clients come on board, we have a branding and content questionnaire that I've worked with our SEO team on to not only ask those very common SEO questions like, what are your KPIs? And who are your competitors and those sorts of things, but it's also like, tell me why your competitors suck? What do you do better that that we should be talking about and capitalizing that other people aren't doing? What are the most common pain points that your customers picking up the phone calling you're experiencing? You know, we want to get into the nitty gritty. And through that questionnaire, we can start data mining, a little bit more about who they are, and what sets them apart. And so that's one of the first things we do when a content client comes on board with, to do content with us is to start figuring that out. And another thing we do ongoing is we create content is that we have a very robust content research and outline process that I've built for the company, I like to think it's a lot different than how most SEO companies work. Just because I'm very content marketing focused, I will push SEO, as far away from my content as I can until that team could come in and clean things up. And so we constantly ask your clients questions, you know, we might be writing a service page for an air conditioning service that a client offers. And we've written 1000s Of those, right? We know probably more than a lot of people do. But we're still going to ask that client questions later. What brands do you carry? Is there like, Are there common questions, people are asking for this service? You know, we want to integrate new information that we find if we ask the clients and kind of push them a little bit out of their comfort zone, we can get those answers and then help not only try to tell a better story in transactional pages, but also integrate their brand voice into that.

Claire Carlile 14:11
There's so much in that, that I'm just sort of nodding my head and just smiling. Number one, I'd love to get my hands on that template. Lovely Melissa, with all of her lovely templates, RicketyRoo. Yes, please. Thank you very much. I know it's all top secret. And then what was going through my mind was one of the challenges. You know, there are lots of opportunities with working with small and medium sized businesses. But one of the challenges is when you when you work with a client, you don't sort of inherit or take on a lot of work that has already been done. So there won't necessarily be a marketing plan, a business plan, there won't be a tone of voice document. There won't be branding, there won't be personas is a real challenge, in my experience working with those types of clients because those things Things don't already exist, and they're not paying you for that service. But you really do need a lot of those foundational pieces. And it sounds like you've got a good process sewn up for getting those things done reasonably sort of quickly and effectively. So you have a firm foundation for what you need to do.

Melissa Popp 15:19
Definitely. And like, that's one of the challenges, right, the smaller the clients you're working with, the less marketing collateral they've ever invested in it. And, you know, that's a challenge for all of us, no matter with clients, because even sometimes those big name clients that have you know, $100,000, marketing spin, also don't have that collateral, which boggles my mind. But no, another thing we've we've done at RicketyRoo is I don't think I've ever publicly talked about this, it's not proprietary, or anything like that. So, so I'm not gonna get in trouble. But I've actually built a buyer's journey process, specific to SEO. And I think it's unique and different than anything anybody's out there. I'm not aware and please, anybody listening and watching, please yell at me and send me links. I'm not aware that anybody has created an SEO buyers journey specific to the keyword journey in content versus a traditional buyers journey. And I've created a process that can fit within our client budgets, so it doesn't bring to the bank. You know, I know companies who charge $15,000 - $20,000 to build out personas and journeys and that, and that, that has been incredibly helpful for us to optimize the funnel for clients, especially with clients that don't have a lot of content on their website to begin with. So if we're trying to find ways to bring these pieces in, without pricing our clients and anybody who's interested in working with us, because it's so vital, and like you said, these smaller companies just don't have the money to actually invest in this but long term, it actually would benefit them so much to already have that going in for all their marketing collateral, not just SEO in their website, but everything that they're touching.

Claire Carlile 16:56
And yeah, just having all of those assets to repurpose, really. So just thinking about how like, I'm really interested in thinking about what are your processes for like getting, how do you uncover these stories? You know, you're going into a new organization, that there isn't some remarkable brand story, which is there. You know, what's the story of where you came from, with regard to superhero, people are cycled? You know what I'm talking about? The story of where someone came from, oh, you're something story. Okay.

Melissa Popp 17:31
My street nerd credits are going...

Claire Carlile 17:33
Shocking, shocking. Why don't you know? If it doesn't exist, you're like, okay, how do you? How do you find these stories? How do you find these stories and organizations? What do you do?

Melissa Popp 17:49
Well realistically, it's hard. You know, you're you're working with clients who don't know themselves, right. And so the things I like to do is like, first that support with the content question or that I talked about, but then also just having conversations with these clients. You know, I'm really lucky at RicketyRoo, that we are so interactive with our clients, I've worked at companies that very much everything is done via email, once a month. That's your check in, that's what they're paying for. And that's it, right, that's not nearly enough time or communication to be able to move the needle on anything. And so I encourage my team to ask as many questions as possible throughout our writing process. And we have a pretty lengthy writing process, from research to production to go live for our clients and continuously like, it's, you'll see in our docs, it's comment after comment of question of, you know, like, what's your thoughts here? And like, Do you have a quote here? And like, can you tell us anything weird or unique? I like to think we ask our clients a lot of weird questions that a lot of other marketing agencies don't, because I know that by being able to ask them a question in a different way than they're used to, sometimes that makes their brain like a less creative brain, because they're focused on the work they're doing. It makes them think about something in a different way. And I think with clients like this, that don't already have a story and don't even know where to start without being able to push them a little bit is the way to go. And then that opens up a conversation that all of a sudden, just like today, where we we have no idea where we're going, right, we have our questions, and we're gonna, we're gonna go but you know, it's like, it opens up the doors to so many different ways of thinking and perspectives by just asking questions in a different way. So that's really what I encourage my team to do. There are definitely cases where we're an account manager at RicketyRoo, like hey, Melissa, can you jump on a call it let's pick this client's brain? Let's talk to them. And then I get on a call, no script, no scripted questions, nothing like that. And it just starts with like, how's it going into, like, how's business going? Like, okay, why did you start your business? And then the client will give you an answer, like, oh, well, you know, I have the skill and I wanted to do it. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. Why in your heart? Did you start this business? Why wouldn't why is this business important to you? And you know, that's where you start getting into having a natural conversation. I mean, you're talking about real things, you're not just answering random questions out of out of list, you're having a conversation, and then that's where they start dropping their guard. And you can start getting kind of to the meat of their story and their business and then integrate that into what you're doing.

Claire Carlile 20:16
I love that. So it's a it's a lot more free and easy than when you I mean, you could give someone a list of questions to have a think about. And then you can have a conversation with them based on you know, them understanding a little bit like what type of thing you want to talk about. But it sounds like you're just having the opportunity to, to ask, and why, and why, and why, and why, in a not annoying way, which is where you get the little vignettes out. I've just remembered what it's called the origin story. So origin story, yeah. Thinking about thinking about storytelling in general, and especially when I think people think about brand, storytelling. So the sort of origin story of the brand, the origin story of the founder, those are two things that I can think of. But I imagine that storytelling works at, there's other people's stories within this that we could be thinking about, are there or what what do when you talk about those stories with an organization? Do they always just think it's the founder that you want to have a story from? What, who are the characters in these stories?

Melissa Popp 21:24
I'd say a lot of times when you're first introducing this idea to a client that yes, they think it's it's the company's overall story, it's the founder story. And, and sometimes, yes, that is the story. And that's it, you know, and that's, that's the narrative you want to run with, you see that a lot with much bigger companies where that big name, you know, everybody knows Jeff Bezos, his name, right? Like everybody knows, oh, that's the guy who started Amazon in his garage. And now it's one of the biggest companies in the world. There's no other storytelling in Amazon's organization that needs to be done because of that. But when it comes to smaller companies, most of the time realistically, there's not going to be an interesting, exciting story from just the founder, and I'm sorry, at all any of our clients listening to that, but it's the reality of the situation. There's, there's not necessarily enough that's been done there that makes that a compelling enough story to carry the whole business every once in a while you run into that, but, but usually, it's not. So you know, talking to them and getting to know them and finding out more than just about the businesses and the place to start, you know, like we have clients we work with, who are veterans who served in the armed forces, what did they learn from that that's helped them grow their business, what what values and even processes have they instilled from, from that that's been part of their company that's being passed on to people who are, there's ways to find that story from from founders, you just have to dig deeper to do it. But then from there, you know, everybody at your company, big or small, has walked life in a different way, we've all been through the good, the bad, the ugly, there's ways to find things for people who work on your team, that also can help with the storytelling and the selling of say, you know, we like I said, we work with a lot of home services and a track clients, how many of them themselves have run into issues that have frustrated the heck out of them, we can talk about that we can use that to sell services. If the HVAC customer service people and technicians are frustrated because their AC or heat went out. Those are real feelings that you can dive into and share those frustrations, you know, they've run into issues, concerns and successes that you can integrate it. So once again, it's all about diving deeper, and choosing to do that to create your content and find those stories. But I'm a very big believer that whether it's for work or play, everybody has a story to tell, most people don't believe that they're worth enough to share that story. And that makes me sad as a storyteller. And it makes me sadder for these businesses who don't realize that like, they also have a unique perspective, we can share and integrate into storytelling through the content marketing that they're working with us on.

Claire Carlile 24:06
And do you also, like tap into to customers there? Is there a sort of segue into not case studies, but like, Do customers ever come in with their stories? Is that usable as well, in this context?

Melissa Popp 24:21
I think it's absolutely usable. One of the things I like to look at is for companies that have huge reviews, I personally don't work with Google business profiles at all. That's other members of our team. But I'm constantly data mining reviews in there looking at sentiment analysis. What questions are people asking that? Often unfortunately, we want to answer you know, where can we answer those on a website? Where can we integrate those in there? It's a great way to find pain points, even negative reviews, you know, everybody, nobody wants to negative review, right? But even negative reviews, you can turn around and find those pain points and address them in content you're writing and sometimes you can even Create a whole blog post about an issue somebody ran into, we're so concerned in this industry of only looking at content from that keyword perspective, what keyword is going to help us rank this blog post here. And sometimes you find something in a review. Even in feedback, you know, like an email feedback that that a client will give to to a business. And you're like, This is a goldmine here, okay, there's no keyword that goes with it. But if people are, are complaining about this, or have feedback on this, why wouldn't you want to talk about it and share a different perspective, a solution even from the negatives. And so this is where this is where we get lost in the keyword sauce almost when we're when we're looking at content is we're so focused on trying to rank keywords, we forget everything else that actually builds trust with a client. So like, I'm totally I'm always looking for content ideas everywhere. Like I mean, I was using Reddit before everybody else hopped on that Reddit train of thinking, I've been doing that for 15 years. Like, you know, Quora when it was good. I was young as hell. But what we forget, we forget that there are stories everywhere. You just have to find them.

Claire Carlile 26:09
Yeah agreed. That is brilliant. Thank you very much. So now, a favorite part for me, which is where you get to put a topic or a word or a subject or anything in marketing, local marketing, that really makes your heart race but not for the right reasons. So is there anything that you would like to put into room 404. The place where bad marketing concepts go to die? That sounds harsh, but that's where they go.

Melissa Popp 27:38
This would not be a surprise to anybody. I hate the phrase SEO content. And every time someone says we're going to create some SEO content, I love you all in this industry. But I want to punch each and every one of you in the face. Again, not a surprise to anybody. I've said this everywhere. I understand the point of SEO content, don't get me wrong, are we creating SEO content in places that recruiter we are not going to sit here and lie about that. But realistically, that phrase has turned content in our industry into garbage? It really has when all we do is focus on content around keywords. And that's the goal. That's the start, we've already decided that we don't care how good the content is. And not everybody out there that's that's doing it this way is creating crappy content. Absolutely not there. There are some great people in this industry, who have found ways to integrate both I like to think I have as well. But this misnomer of calling it SEO content and telling clients and people who don't understand what we do that this is the type of content we're creating sets an expectation that the bar is this low, when the bar needs to be so high, we can't even see it. And so I just I all content is content. And yes, content is created for different purposes. But SEO, the term SEO content I feel like has continuously set us back and our clients back for 15, 20 years now. And I really think our industry needs to focus on changing that. And really, it's content it's high quality content, it's good content, it's different content, it's authentic content and just embrace and get away from that terrible phrase once and for all.

Claire Carlile 29:17
I don't even need to think about that one it's not like I'm the ultimate judge of whether or not so well I am the ultimate judge of whether something should go in room 404 or not. And goodbye, goodbye SEO content goodbye. We slammed the door, room 404, you are gone forever. And no one may ever mentioned that phrase ever again. It's official you heard it here first

Melissa Popp 29:44
Yep, you heard it. Queen Claire has laid the law down.

Claire Carlile 29:49
It's gone. No more sprinkle in that that secret SEO sauce onto the content. It's just content. Okay. So let's have a think about this. We've gone through some of the industries that you work with. We've talked about the processes. Let's think about this process at scale. So for the multilocation, marketers for the big brand marketers moving beyond, like one story, how can they use the sort of content storytelling for their local, you know, stories, how do bigger, how do bigger brands and bigger you know, bigger businesses actually make that idea scale, in your experience.

Melissa Popp 30:32
First you have to have buy in, and not just from the people signing the checks, you have to have buy in from people across the company, you know, these companies, sometimes it's 20,30 people, sometimes it's two 300 people. And one of the things I've done when I've worked with giant multilocation businesses, both at rookie ruin elsewhere, is I'm looking for people who want to be storyteller ambassadors, and I give them this kooky title. And I empower them to be the ones who have their ear to the ground, because, you know, we can't obviously get on a call with 15, 20 people, in some cases to get those stories out. And so things I've done in the past, have been to encourage people to become these ambassadors and help share information with us, I am given out business cards left and right when I need clients, I'm like, no, please just email me directly. Like just, you know, you think of something, email me directly, I'm gonna get it in your account notes. So we have it there, we can work with it. And another thing I've done previously is actually created comm submission forums for clients that they can actually pass out and to their teams, it with the same ideas as they come up with ideas, or they think of something, it's like, share it with us, we can get it on the docket, we can talk through it. And so really, you have to foster a supportive culture with your clients in that case, to encourage them to be part of the process at all levels, not just the marketing, or C suite contact or who you're talking to, but you want to be able to talk to more than just the marketing people in front of you. And so getting that buy in, sometimes it's more it's it is a lot of trouble to get it you know, a lot of companies know everything to go through me. But you really have to explain why this is important, and how we can help benefit those stories. And once you have that buy in you pretty much you've opened that chest like you have what you need to start integrating that into the content you're creating, from the research process onward.

Claire Carlile 32:27
I would love to hear about an example of something that you've worked on, you know, that has been a narrative or story that you think has been like, particularly successful or powerful, and just love to hear some examples. So we can all you know, get our heads around what this actually looks like. Once you've once you've generated the story.

Melissa Popp 32:48
Yeah, so I have a couple. One of the ones this is what I share a lot with people is so years back, I had a client locally here in Denver, a plumber kind of a one on one show, and I started noticing in Google Search Console that his website was getting a lot of queries for sticking your hand in a garbage disposal and getting stuck, like all sorts of variations around this. And I'm like, I'm like I know, we haven't written any content about that, like, where, Where's this coming from? So I started looking through his website, and one of the subcontractors that he worked with, got his hand stuck and had talked about it on the website on the about us pages. And he's always working on someone's garbage disposal, and his hand I guess, was too big, and he got stuck. And he didn't know what to do. And so I started I was like, okay, like he didn't he was just being funny when he wrote this. He didn't he didn't think about like, you know, anything around marketing or storytelling or anything like that. And I thought, okay, let me look at the search volume for this. Like, there's a lot of search volume, like I guess a lot of people in America stick their hands and get stuck in the garbage disposal. That's crazy. Don't put your hand on the garbage disposal. Melissa's disclaimer here, y'all. I was like, okay, let's write a blog post about this. Now, you know, someone could literally have their hand in the garbage disposal with their phone up, trying to figure out asking Siri and everything, how do they get their handout? And so I wrote a blog post about the subcontractors experience and optimized it and it became the not only the highest performing blog posts on the website, but it also led to I, I. This is like 10 years ago. Now. I want to say probably about 140% increase in leads for garbage disposal services from that blog posts. And so like something just innocuous that came out of some funny story, someone sharing, working on someone's garbage disposal turned into something generating the most leads on the website. And that's the story I love to tell because it's weird. It's weird and quirky. And how do you find that that kind of thing?

Claire Carlile 34:47
I love it. I love that. I wonder if that post is still live. I might go and hunt do a search for what happens when you get your hands.

Melissa Popp 34:58
Sadly that business did before COVID I believe, all right, as COVID started went out of business, so yeah, and I, and I wish I would have saved it, you know, like, because I just was like this was great example.

Claire Carlile 35:09
All right, so if we've got any listeners in that area, then I'm not saying that you should write a story about that. But there's obviously there's a little niche for a piece of content on the web with video and all of those things. I'm sure it'd be fascinating. I love that story. Thank you. When you are working with clients, I know right back at the start of our conversation, we talked about KPIs or you mentioned KPIs is one of those things. When you're working with a client, you want to you know what it is? What does success look like for them? And what are the things how you're going to know that they've you know, reached that what the you're doing what you're supposed to be doing. So when it comes to, I imagine that there is, you know, quite a reasonable amount of investment in this process of getting these stories out, getting them written, getting them produced getting them put on the website in a format, which is going to be compelling, and get people to do what you want them to do. So what would you say? How do you go about measuring it measuring the return on investment of these stories that you're working on?

Melissa Popp 36:52
Definitely. The first thing is, as our account managers work with our clients to understand their overall KPI so we have a general idea of what they're looking to accomplish working with us overall, and not just on the content side of things. So that's top of mind for us with what we're trying to decide is most impactful for content creation, when it comes to individual pieces of content. The metric I'm most concerned about whether the client is or not, is obviously conversion or funneling to conversion. That's something a lot of us don't we just focus on conversion. And we don't actually focus on the funneling of it, because not all content we create is going to be bottom on the funnel. And so for me, I'm looking at, okay, are we converting from a page and once those success metrics before and after work we've done along with, okay, if we have something top middle of funnel, are we guiding, and that person's journey is going from the right place to the next to convert? So for me, those are the kind of the go hand in hand are the two most important things from a client perspective of what they think is shiny. I'm also looking at impressions clicks, overall, your keyword rankings per page again, before, you know before and after a certain set of keywords, because you know, those shiny metrics are things that when a client hires an SEO company, they want to see their rankings and their traffic go up. So you know, but conversion for me is always one of the first things I'm focused on whether the client quite is or not, they should be. But sometimes clients get distracted by what they think is important in the long run.

Claire Carlile 38:23
So all of this sounds absolutely delicious. And delightful. That was my segue into recipe for success. Because you have kindly put together a little I love these five point plan for people to just get cracking. They think that storytelling sounds great. They want to go for it. So I'm going to ask you for your recipe for success with storytelling.

Melissa Popp 38:56
Any type of story I'm telling. Big or small, I have five steps I typically follow. I mean, there's probably a lot more there but breaking it down to five. The first one is absolutely you have to understand your audience, and not your perception of what that audience is you want to make sure that you're researching their values, their interests, where are they spending their time in a community in a city suburb? What are they doing while they're there, you want to understand where they live, and where they're raising their families where they're going to work. From there. You can then identify how business it can integrate that audience into their storytelling. So now that you understand who your audience is, you can reach into yourself and your business and find those local story connections and how what you do who you are connects with them where they're at, then comes probably the easiest part of the process, which is actually creating the content. A lot of people think creating content is hard. Don't get me wrong, it is but when you've done enough research on your audience and the story you're telling the writing part should come naturally now, because you're comfortable with the story you're telling. And this is where you can integrate real experiences into the community and your audience that they connect with, and then aligns with who your business is and what you're trying to accomplish by connecting with them. From there, you know, it's all about the SEO side of things, right, you want to make sure that if you're creating high quality content that connects with your audience, that you're optimizing it with the proper keywords, with your your metadata, your internal linking, and looking for opportunities to guide people from other areas of your site. If you're sleeping on internal linking with your content creation, you might as well not create content at all, you want to always be able to guide someone from one place to the other where you need them to be to convert. And then the last point, something we don't talk about a lot in the SEO community is is content distribution. If y'all haven't read Ross Simmons book yet, I'm telling you go buy it, get it now. Get it, you have to distribute your content. And Ross does a great job of explaining why this is important how to do it, no matter how big your business is, content, it's not created in a vacuum. Unfortunately, in SEO, it often is, but it should never be and your audience isn't just looking at your website, they're looking at your GBP posts, they're looking at your social media channels, Facebook groups, Reddit, you want to be where they are. So don't leave your content hanging by doing all the other steps, and then just leaving it there on your website, there's so many more ways you can distribute it and get in front of your audience. But yeah, those five, my recipe for success is five tips to get to help you not only create content that resonates with your audience, but converts, and keeps you top of mind when they're looking to do business with you.

Claire Carlile 41:40
I love that if you haven't already written that up into a blog post, then I will. So I'll race you to that content. That was brilliant. Another thing that I've just thought I need to read Ross Simmons his book, clearly, it's been like there's been so much today. And I could talk about it for another three hours. But I think that with everything that you've said, My the sort of key takeaways that I'm feeling here are everyone has a story. And there are multiple stories, it's really getting how to get them out of people to tweak them from the organization's storytelling is an awesome opportunity to get unique content onto your website. That is also good content. And we just need to make sure that we're also thinking about the conversion funnel, while we're telling those stories is where does it fit, we're in the in the process. And in the journey, there is a lot there that people could take away and run off and get writing their store at least thinking about their stories, those organizations themselves, or people that are working with organizations thinking about the systems and processes they need to put in place to start getting this absolute gold out of their customers and the organizations they work with. So if our listeners and I know they will, will want to learn more about what we've been speaking about today, is there a good place for them to you know, you've already mentioned Ross Simmons's book, but is there anything else that they should run off and consume? Is it like books? Or is there any one particular writing about this sort of storytelling and narrative?

Melissa Popp 43:20
Yeah, definitely. Ross's book, I can't. I can't praise enough, I pre ordered it. I read it as soon as I got back from a vacation. i It's incredible look at content distribution and storytelling, but also my good friend, Maddy Osman. She's written a book about writing for humans and robots. And I highly recommend that as well. Pretty much anything Maddie does and talks about is gold and things you should be paying attention to. And she's one of my go to sources for people to share and storytelling and content marketing that pleases both people and Google.

Claire Carlile 43:54
I love that. Thank you. So two big marketers shout outs for Maddie Osman, who is new to me and I need to run off and find her immediately. And Ross Simmons. So brilliant. Thanks very much. And if anyone wants to find out more about you, Melissa, where are you know, where can they find you? Obviously not in real life. But where can they find you?

Melissa Popp 44:18
Oh, I mean, if people want to come find me in real life, I mean, I'm we're all Google know how to use Google. I'm sure they could find me. I mean, I get people knocking now because I yelled about SEO content. So I gotta go hide after that. So people can find me on Twitter. I'm going down with that ship. I'm pop up writer on Twitter. I'm also trying to get more active on LinkedIn under my name. And then if anybody wants to learn more about local storytelling, and I'm working on a lot of great content on the rickety route blog, this year of specific to finding different ways to do that. I just wrote a great blog post about local events, and how you can capitalize on content around that both in your community once you've host.

Claire Carlile 45:01
And when will we see you, either speaking or in, you know, at any events coming up, can we like, look out for you anywhere? Or maybe you're aiming for something next year?

Melissa Popp 45:11
Yeah, so I will be really proud that RicketyRoo's the headline sponsor for the women in tech SEO festival in Philadelphia, in September. So I will, I will be there. I'm also reach has afforded me the chief welcoming officer. So everybody come up and say hi to me and hang out with me. And then also be embracing SEO in San Diego along with a handful of our route crew that are going to be able to go as well. But ya know, I'm throwing myself out there and trying to talk more about content that matters, and hopefully all see me on a stage in the coming months or soon.

Claire Carlile 45:49
Well, we'll look forward to that you've definitely got a story to tell Melissa. That's for sure. It has been so lovely to speak with you today. Thank you for sharing all of that with us.

Melissa Popp 46:00
Thank you so much for having me, I'm so grateful to be here to just get to hang out with people who want to talk about awesome things in marketing.

Claire Carlile 46:08
See you in San Diego. So before we wrap up, I just want to mention BrightLocals Brand Review Index. Now, we all know that reputation is critical to business success, whether you're a small local shop or your national chain. And with consumers having access to a multitude of ways to leave feedback and to share their experience is more important than ever for marketers to understand how reputation and reviews impact their brand's perception and their online visibility. So in the brand review index we've collected at the top brands in the USA across three verticals. We've taken grocery retail gyms and fast food. And then using up to date Google review data from 1000s upon 1000s of Google business profiles, we've built leaderboards comparing how well or how badly these brands are performing in the eyes of their customers. And critically, what the leaders are getting right in customer experience and review management. So you can grab your copy by following the link in the shownotes. Because I know that's what I'll be doing right after this episode. So a big thank you to Melissa. And of course, a big thank you to you, our listeners. So we'll make sure that we include all of the links we talked about today in the show notes. So make sure that you read through those so you can follow up and you can learn more. And if you're enjoyed listening to Adventures in Local Marketing, and I really hope you have, please leave us a review on your podcast platform of choice and share it with a friend or listen with a friend that you think might like it, because it makes a big difference to us and it helps us keep making great valuable content for you. And if you dear listeners and watchers have got some ideas about guests that you'd like to hear from or topics that you would like covered then please can you let us know so you can tweet me if it's still called that at Claire Carlile or you can tweet us at BrightLocal. In the next few months. We have got some amazing guests lined up. We've got episodes with Dayna Lucio, Elizabeth Rule, and Areej AbuAli. So make sure you subscribe so you don't miss out on access to their absolutely lovely brains. And I'd recommend checking out the last episode if you haven't already, where I got to chat with Marie Haynes about embracing AI. We will see you next time on Adventures in Local Marketing. I am looking forward to it already.