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Amplification: Content
Marketing that Works
October 2014 Presentation
Justin Jackson, Product Marketing at Sprintly

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Join the conversation on Twi!er
@thuelmadsen #KISSwebinar

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Justin Jackson - Sprint.ly - @mijustin
Justin Jackson is the Product Marketing
Manager at Sprintly. He’s been featured in Inc.
Magazine (“The secret to building a high
trafficked blog”) and wrote a book called
Amplification. He also hosts a podcast called
Product People, and blogs at justinjackson.ca

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Want to follow my tweets?
@mijustin #KISSwebinar

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Sprintly’s
Content Marketing

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Amplification is about catching bigger waves

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Table of Contents
1 Section One - What is Amplification?
2 Section Two - Research
Finding your audience
Finding where they hang out
Discovering their needs
Organize your research
3 Section Three - Writing & promoting

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WATCH WEBINAR RECORDING NOW

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What blogs do you read?
1

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Most corporate blogs are
• Boring
• Bland
• Safe
What kind of blogs do you read?
• Opinionated
• Surprising
• Have a point of view
• Teach you something

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What is Content
Marketing?
1

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What is content marketing?
The Content Marketing Institute defines it like this:
Section One
“Content marketing is a marketing technique of
creating and distributing valuable, relevant and
consistent content to a!ract and acquire a clearly
defined audience – with the objective of driving
profitable customer action.”

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How important is content marketing?
Content wins for most effective strategy; but it’s also the hardest to implement
Section One

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Amplification =
content x channel

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What is Amplification?
Section One
There’s this fallacy that good content always gets
discovered; but the truth is that good content
needs distribution in order to be seen.
You could be writing amazing posts that nobody
hears about.

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Example:

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Example:

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Example:

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Example:
Catching the wave in 2013
Original post: 2011

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What is Amplification?
• Choosing a specific audience
• Ge!ing to know their needs: observing trends + pa!erns
• Responding to those needs with targeted content
• Distributing your content through influential networks
• Amplifying your signal on those networks by leveraging your personal
network
The key to success is to create great content and find great channels.

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Section Two:
Research
2

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Start with People

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People first
The first question you need to ask is: “who do I
want to reach?”
Section Two
Every good product, website, campaign, and piece
of writing starts with people in mind.

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How do you choose your audience?
• Make a list of all the potential customer types you could reach. Example:
Product Managers, Project Managers, CEOs, Founders, Developers
Make a long list! To trim it down ask these questions:
• In which of these groups do we have an unnatural advantage?
• Which of these groups are we most excited about?
• Which of these groups has money to spend?

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Technique #2: draw a venn diagram

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Our target
audience is:
__________________

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Finding pain

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Section Two
When you understand your audience’s pain you’ll
be able to be!er define their problem.
If you can describe the problem be!er than your
customer they will assume you have the solution.
- Pat Flynn

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Example: pjrvs.com

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Focus on their needs
Section Two
Don’t ask: ‘what do I want to write?’ Ask: ‘what do
people need?’
Always be researching your niche; never stop. I
look wherever people congregate: forums, mailing
lists, blog posts, off-hand comments from people
on Twi!er, support portals, user groups.
- Amy Hoy

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Observe people in
their habitat

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Where do people hang out?
Online:
• Forums
• Sub-reddits
• News aggregators
• Social networks
• Blogs
• Support sites
Offline:
• Conferences
• Meetups
• Workshops
• Coffee shops
• Festivals
• Industry parties

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Research examples: where would you find managers?

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What are you looking for?
BIG
problems
trends
pain points
frustrations

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Observing trends

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Yesterday I saw this tweet:

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He’s tweeting about this site: The Grid

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He’s not happy about it

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A lot of other designers don’t like it either

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A lot of other designers don’t like it either

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I go to Designer News:

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Where have I seen this before?

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Do you remember this?

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Do you remember this?

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Do you remember this?

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Do you remember this?

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What’s the trend we’re observing?
Designers are feeling threatened.

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This takes time.
Collect and
organize your
research.

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Sample research
I’m using an app called keeeb.com to track trends.

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Listen

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Focus on your audience’s biggest problems
Section Two
If you are talking to potential customers, and the
pain point that you’re going to target is not one of
the top two most pressing issues in their life right
now, don’t do that.
Instead, do one of the top two things. If you’re not
on my top two issue list, I’m not going to [pay
a!ention].
- Patrick McKenzie (Patio11)

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Organize your research
• Record your findings
• Organize them into groupings
• Identify a big pain / issue / topic you could focus on
You grow an audience by targeting a topic people care about!

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Section Three:
Writing & Promotion
3

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Write for your
audience

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Section Three
Writing viral content is hard. For example, look at Nate Silver’s
research on the number of views the average article on the
Huffington Post gets:
The average blog post got about 2,150 page views.
This distribution, however, was highly inequitable.
The top-performing blog post — one by the former
Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich — had received
about 27,000 page views as of Friday morning. The
median blog post, on the other hand, received only
about 550 page views.

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Great, shareable content…
• is simple
• is surprising or unexpected
• is focused on a specific problem, issue, or interest for a given audience
• is well researched
• has a “shareable moment”: a standout quote, diagram, or story
• about 7 minutes long (1,000 - 1,600 words)
You grow an audience by targeting a topic people care about!

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www.useronboard.com/features-vs-benefits/

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Why do people share content?
Section Three
We always seem to be on the lookout for who else
will find this helpful, amusing or interesting, and
our brain data are showing evidence of that. At
the first encounter with information, people are
already using the brain network involved in
thinking about how this can be interesting to
other people. We're wired to want to share
information with other people. I think that is a
profound statement about the social nature of our
minds.

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Types of content

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brandonhilkert.com/courses/build-a-ruby-gem/

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baremetrics.io/blog/startup-chat-pricing

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sprint.ly/blog

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useronboard.com

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standtomake.com

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Amplify your
content

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Which train are you going to hitch your content to?

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Which train are you going to hitch your content to?
Your own small network

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Which train are you going to hitch your content to?
Your own small network
Someone else’s big network

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Effects of amplification
Section Three

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Two types of amplifiers:
1. Individual influencers
Hiten Shah @rands Kevin Rose
2. Online networks: communities, news sites, etc…
Hacker News Designer News Product Hunt

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How do you build relationships with influencers?
Interviewed on
Product People podcast
Sprintly advisor
Through Sprintly’s
founder, Joe Stump
Hiten Shah @rands Kevin Rose

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How do you build relationships with influencers?
Met at a conference
Crashed a speaker’s
dinner Met through writing
club
Samuel Hulick Maura Rodgers Ryan Hoover

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How do you earn the right to on online communities?
Add value
Hacker News Designer News Product Hunt

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Target the right networks
Section Three

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Coordinate your efforts
Before you publish, contact influencers + your network
• Give them a sneak peek into your post
• Tell them why they might be interested
• Ask for their feedback.
The moment you publish, contact those folks again
• Let them know your post has been published
• Ask them to share on social networks (use pre-populated tweet for this)
• Ask them to share on relevant networks

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Example 1: Groovehq

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Example 1: Groovehq

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Section Three
Coordinate your launch

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The game plan
1. Give influencers and your personal network a sneak peek
2. Let them know when you’re going to publish and how they can help
3. Publish + Share on high value networks
4. Mobilize your network to share + get initial traction on community
sites
5. Engage with the response

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Example 2

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A note on
Hacker News,
Designer News,
Product Hunt,
Reddit…

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It typically takes about
20-30 minutes for a story
to slip off the "New
Submissions" page.
That's your window to
get enough votes to
appear on the front
page.

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The algorithm on News Sites favours new content
“Reddit's hot ranking uses the logarithm
function to weight the first votes higher than the
rest. The first 10 up-votes have the same weight
as the next 100 up-votes.” -Amir Salihefendic
• On most news sites, initial traction is critical
• In most algorithms, the time since submission is particularly important.
• The more time that elapses, the harder the score falls
• “The first 10 up-votes have the same weight as the next 100 up-votes.”

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The algorithm on News Sites favours new content

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Can you game the system?
You have to write something genuinely interesting.
That's the difference between being on the front page for
10 to 30 minutes, and being there for 10 hours. HN is very
very unforgiving and that's awesome because it can't
*really* be gamed. If the submission is no good, no
amount of "tricks" will help. -Swizec Teller
• Reddit and Hacker News have fairly sophisticated voting ring detectors
• Don’t ask your same people over and over again to up-vote your posts
• Don’t have people from the same IP address (same office) vote

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Timing is important
"Timing plays a big part in most every success."
• Publish in the morning!
• Be aware of what else is happening in the world.
• What's happening in your niche?
• Initial traction is key
- Jason Fried

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A%er you publish

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A%er you publish
Block off time a%er you publish:
• Respond to those that engage with your content
• Look for opportunities to expand the discussion, or share the post in new
networks
• Thank everyone that shares it
Thanking people will surprise them.
Show gratitude to the people who took the time to share your post. You can do
this by searching for the URL or keywords from your post in Twi!er. Thanking
people will increase the likelihood that they'll follow your work in the future.

89.
Questions?
Justin Jackson
Product Marketing
Sprintly
@mijustin
jjackson@quickle%.com
Thue Madsen
Marketing Associate
KISSmetrics
@ThueLMadsen
tmadsen@kissmetrics.com

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91.
THANK YOU
Justin Jackson
Product Marketing at Sprintly