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Everyone wants to grow their business, but not everyone has the time or patience to learn all the ins and outs of marketing, sales enablement, and making the most out of a CRM such as HubSpot. Join the Web Canopy Studio team, a HubSpot Diamond Partner Agency, as they chat about various topics all designed to help you grow your B2B business.
(00:01):
Stranger things. Season four has been super awesome to check out. And one of the coolest things about it has been the reintroduction of Kate Bush into, into the music world. She had produced a song called running up that hill, which was released in like 1985. And it's used in season four. It's been taking off, taking over the chart since then. And today I want to talk about how old content things that are from the past, how they can be repurposed and reused and given new life to totally take your marketing to the next level. My name is John Aikin. I'm the CEO of Web Canopy Studio. And this is the website conversion show.
(00:47):
Hey, what's up everyone. Thank you for checking out this week's episode of the website conversion show stranger things. Season four recently came out. It's a fascinating show to me, I'm particularly drawn to it because it's, it takes place in Indiana, which is where I'm from. It takes place in the mid eighties, which is when I was born. And so I've got like this like super draw to the show and they've always had really good, really good music in it. And specifically this last season, major, major, you know, focus of the show was this song by Kate Bush called running up that hill. And I'm not gonna give you spoilers or anything like that, but that song's featured in the show. And Kate Bush recorded that and, and published that song in 1985, I think. And I, I don't even know if it ever was like a popular song back then.
(01:40):
I don't think it was, it was just kind of like sitting there, you know, just like a B sides of, of an old record. And what's been really cool is that today because of all of the, you know, use on that show, how important it is and how many people have been listening to it and getting exposed to it, she has blown up. She has blown up that song's been used 1.8 million times for short videos on TikTok, which is fascinating. It's been streamed 465 million times globally on streaming services, which is nuts. It's seen a 16000% increase in its streaming, and it's the most audio stream song both within the us and global markets this month, which is huge. She's become massive. This song's huge. And it even took the number one spot for a little bit inside of the billboard global 100. So that's really, really cool.
(02:35):
I think it's, it's fascinating that that happened and being used in like such a pivotal part in the show has only contributed to that. But it's raised a question for me specifically, and we've talked about this internally with, with some of the team as well. The age old question of can old content become relevant again. And in the world of marketing, it's pretty easy to put out a piece of content and it just kind of goes off into the ether and dies and we don't ever really hear from it again, but it doesn't necessarily always have to be that way. A lot of the, a lot of the major marketers today will tell you that you should have some kind of like a half life with your with your content that you produce. So can you put out a piece of content, can that decay over a period of time by being distributed on different platforms by chopped up and being put into different short cycles on different areas, you know, putting a video on YouTube, breaking it up and putting pieces of it on Instagram and so on.
(03:32):
And the answer is, yes, it absolutely should. But even then, it's only gonna be around for a short period of time. Now, YouTube, you're gonna have a lot more longevity. You're gonna have the ability to stay on there, but other, these other platforms don't necessarily, that's not necessarily the case. So can you revive an old piece of content and wake it up to the point where it's being utilized and being able to be functional for the overall marketing of your brand. And we actually did a test with this several years ago, surprisingly enough. And it was really cool to see what ended up happening. And now we've actually incorporated this into a major component of how we think about website, traffic, and how we think about getting people to your brand. And the perfect example that I can give you is this, this blog post that we wrote, and it was published back in like February or March of 2018.
(04:25):
So it's been several years now and it was called three sales strategy. Examples for, I don't know, every branch should be using in 2018, something like that. And it was cool. There was, you know, some helpful hints in there. We had a couple hundred people check it out. We shared it for a while and then it just kind of flatlined. Like it never did anything after that. But when we went back and just started looking at the data of where we're ranking for different things on, on different blogs and different P pages on our website, this particular blog post was on like the fourth or fifth page of Google for some relatively strong keywords, specifically sales strategy, examples. And so we were like, okay, Hey, that's actually pretty cool that it ranked fourth or fifth in Google. Like, no one's ever gonna click that far back to find it.
(05:16):
And we're not getting a ton of traffic from Google for that particular blog post, but that was still something to say. That's interesting. I like to see that we're getting some kind of leverage there, some kind of traffic. So what we did was we had kind of an aha moment and we were like, what if we repurposed that a little bit? And what if we gave it some new life? So at the time it was, I don't know. I mean, it was a sustainer blog pose. It been like 800 words long, you know, handful of paragraphs and just some ideas for sales, sales strategy, examples. So we decided to beef that up and in 2019, at the end of the year around December, we decided to put some more content into it and we expanded it. We added some videos to it. We transcribed some of those videos and turned them into actual written content.
(06:04):
And we put all of that inside of the blog itself. And what ended up happening was the blog saw growth, pretty substantial growth, actually. And we started moving up and almost overnight, we were on like the second page of Google for that same term. And that term was getting thousands of searches a month. And so that was pretty powerful to us. So we were like, whoa, this is, this is something that's pretty awesome. And so we kept doing that. We did it a few more times specifically, you know, there was two really major changes and we made some other modifications as, as time went on and today it actually still even needs updated, cuz it still says what businesses should be using in 2021. So we're, we're six months past seven months past now what we should be promoting here. But it's still a great example of how that has happened.
(06:53):
And you can see from the statistics here on this chart, this is literally from HubSpot, just looking at, from the start of the publish date of, of March to let's just say last summer, which is when we saw the biggest, last biggest uptick, you can see the two major points on this graph of where we made massive changes and where we repurposed and, and brought back old content. That was just kind of going to the depths of Google to die and to never be seen organically again. And we revived it and we put a lot more information into it and we shared it and we got more people to be interested in it because it kept improving and it kept getting better and better and better. And so now you can even see here in this graphic, the, the first arrow is when, you know, you see the there's like very little up to that point which was the end of 2019.
(07:47):
So the, the blog post lived for about a year without really anything going on. And then we did some actual big lifts, which I was mentioning and the blog post traffic shot up, right? So almost overnight we were, you know, 10th, 11th ranked for some pretty substantial terms. And that only continued to grow now to this day, we are still number one or two back and forth. Every time we kind of check it for some very awesome keywords around sales strategy, examples teams, templates, and so on. And that particular blog contributes a massive amount of traffic to our website because we help sales teams figure out how to do better within their, their sales implementation and their sales strategy specifically in utilizing things like their website. So that has been really awesome. And then the, the next graphic here, the next area you see is the last time that it had a major change, a major uptick in, in content and you see it shot through the roof again.
(08:43):
So when we're looking at, how can we do that? What does that mean for you specifically? How can we find ways to, to take old pieces of content or things that might just be living on a shelf somewhere and only looked at every now and then as like a, a memory of the past, how do we make that stuff become relevant again? How do we make that become something that's valuable and usable in the marketing world? Because oftentimes we don't know, we don't have a ton of time to sit down and just be cranking out marketing content. We don't have a ton of time to be putting out new blog posts and so on. So how do you find those best opportunities? So if we're specifically looking for what the pages are that might exist, that we want to repurpose or, or awaken, if you will, you can use tools like SIM rush.
(09:29):
There's, there's several others out there that do a decent job of looking at at keywords and your ranking for specific pages. But I think SIM rush is far and above the best one here. So using SIM rush to identify what pages are ranking decent on your website, it'll tell you all of the pages, but specifically looking at at terms or best opportunities on the website. You'll use SIM rush for that. And so what we like to do is we look for what those opportunities are. Again, not necessarily things we're already ranking for or a client is already ranking for on the first or second page of Google. We're more, we're more interested in where are we like very middle of the road, you know, not a hundred plus in the ranking, but are we, you know, 50, 60 in, in the search terms in the volume there.
(10:19):
And so we wanna identify those fourth, fifth or sixth page of Google terms there for the specific content that we're looking at. And then we want to explore other similar keywords that are, that are relevant, that are also getting decent traffic. That would be great ways for us to expand on that content. That is really powerful once we have that, because now not only do we know the identifiable page that we're targeting or the identifiable content, we're also getting a list of other content types or other content topics that can be included on that page that might be relevant as well, that are only going to boost the engagement. And so if you have blog posts that were written, you know, 2, 3, 4 years ago, and they're still doing some kind of, of not even necessarily traffic, but, but relevance in Google, these are great opportunities that you can revive them and bring them back to life and, and really get some compelling traction with your marketing.
(11:22):
So how do we build that out? So what we're gonna do next is talk about building that content and making it expandable and to the point where we have more information on it, there's a, there's a number of ways to do this. My favorite is video content like this, but you gotta be comfortable being in front of a video. So that's, that's one thing. But if you can create a video around just answering questions or, you know, just pulling up your iPhone like this, and you know, you're gonna sit here and answer the questions on your phone and record that content. That's a, that's a phenomenal opportunity. The next one would be podcasts. Okay, are you doing a podcast? Can you take the content from your podcast? Can you do a podcast about that specific topic and use that content, transcribe it, put it into the website itself, and now you're expanding on, on that piece there.
(12:11):
The other thing with the videos, if I take a step back, we have noticed, I don't know if this is like official or not like a super top secret thing from Google, but we have noticed that pages that have embedded YouTube videos generally perform better in, in search rankings. Generally I say, because it's not always the case, but in most cases, the, the pages that we are utilizing YouTube videos on blogs and our content, those are almost always performing better than the pages that are not. So if you do a video, put it on YouTube, put that, embed that YouTube video into your blog as well, because it's also another source of content. It's another reason for people to stay and engage. Especially if the content is very, very relatable. And then the, the last couple pieces here, another one that we like to utilize a lot, especially in ideas and planning and trying to figure out what's working and what's not in, in our world of marketing is we crowdsource ideas from our team.
(13:09):
It's you can ask anybody that works at web canopy studio. It's not uncommon for me to produce a, a Google survey or a Google form with two or three questions on it, and I'll send it to the team. And I'll ask everybody on the team to take a moment this week at some point, and just jot down your thoughts or answer these questions. And, and that content I use all the time, what sometimes I do it just for my own planning. I'm like where I think the company should be going. What's the team feel about improving these kind of services or going to this direction, but other times it's, you know, if you were in this situation, what are three ways that you would recommend a client to change their website to improve the conversion? And so those kind of ideas are really powerful.
(13:50):
So perfect example of this would be, if I was doing something around sales strategy, examples, I would go to the team who are implementing things like HubSpot and say, can you give me three tips that you see most clients misunderstanding or not doing properly? Can you gimme three tips that I can talk about? And we're gonna record a video about that. And I'm gonna put that as additional content on that blog post, they're all gonna come up with lots of ideas. I'm probably gonna end up having 25 ideas. I'm gonna narrow that down to three, and that's gonna be a subsection of that content piece. That'll be really, really good. And then worst case scenario, you just write more, right? You just, it's a blog. You just simply sit down and crank it out and write more content and you are good to go there.
(14:36):
Last couple things here, like the, a pro tip that I want to give you is that E especially if you've been around for a bit, and this isn't brand new coming fresh outta the gate website, you probably have other content that I would call expired or content that just lives deep back into the shelves of, of HubSpot or Google drive or Dropbox, or wherever you save your content that you can revive that you can repurpose. Okay. And you can utilize that in lots of different ways. And so if you have, let's say PDF guides, if you have checklists that you've created or downloadable things that aren't really being engaged with anymore, that aren't really being downloaded, that aren't really being shared old resources. You can easily repurpose that information into these same kind of content pieces. You can easily take presentations that you might have been on in, within your industry at different kind of conferences and events.
(15:39):
And you can use that there, you can take information that you've been featured in, in a guest post or guest content on other websites with other brands and utilize that. And then if you've ever done any webinars that you've done for your, your clients, for your prospects, or maybe you've been a guest on a webinar, can you take that webinar content and transcribe it? There's tons of transcription tools out there. We use rev.com. It's a great tool. It's very, very cheap pennies, really. And so use using that kind of content. Can you transcribe it and put it on your blog post or website page that you're trying to build up here? That is really where I would take things and, and how I would recommend spending my time in order to revive old content, because I think, you know, the, the Kate Bush example from stranger things is phenomenal use case of, you know, taking this song that was produced 37 years ago and giving it new life inside of a new medium that was wasn't even conceivable in the mid eighties of there being a Netflix streaming service on the internet and, you know, putting it there, giving it new life on a featured show and how that has just taken off and catapulted her brand within months within the last couple weeks.
(16:59):
It's phenomenal. It's a great example of ways. As, as a precedent, it's a great example for us to be able to think about how can we capitalize on a similar model of taking stuff that is still really good and is still really awesome. It's just not being seen by the right people. So let's wake it up. Maybe the world's changed a little bit in, in your brand and in your marketing and in your, your prospects and client base. Let's wake, wake up that old content, bring it back and repurpose it. At the end of each episode, I like to give some highlights and go through some of the major takeaways of what we've talked about on the episode. And so first off, Kate Bush's running up that hill is a great example of content that was produced a long time ago. That has kind of sat in a place that not many people have engaged with.
(17:44):
And it got new life. It was reused. It was, it was re-energized in a new medium in front of new people that would've never otherwise had any exposure to it whatsoever. And it's done great things for her brand, for Netflix, for stranger things. It's done huge, huge things for them. So how can we as a brand, as a company, do that same kind of strategy with things that we have produced back in the day, whether it was a couple months ago, a couple years ago, and how can we bring that back to life through new medium, through new strategies and new ways of, of reaching a different audience on a different platform. That's really it. That's the primary message for the day, get your thinking hats on and see what comes up if you have not done so yet, please take a look at the website accelerator, go to webcanopystudio.com/start and check out the website accelerator.
(18:35):
You'll get to work exclusively with our team to put together some of this actual, these ideas here of like looking through existing content that might be able to be rep repurposed on your website. But inside of this website accelerator program, we are helping you go from not having a website that's converting really at all, very well at all, kind of confusing and kind of a messy piece to something that is really awesome. That's converting well and getting lots of exposure. Have a look when you are ready. I think that's it. Thanks so much for, for listening today for checking us out. We'll catch you next time. Bye.