For our marketing team, there used to be nothing worse than staring at a blank Google Doc. Crafting content that resonates with people (and has great SEO) takes research, insights, empathy, and some great tools.
In this week’s #BitBakeryStacks, we’re going to take a look at the tools in our content marketing toolbox.
Finding the right (key)words
Understanding what your audience is searching for is the first step in creating not just valuable content, but discoverable content. We use Ubersuggest to help us refine what keywords to use for our content strategy. The tool provides keyword suggestions and also provides analysis of your website to help you increase your domain authority and rank higher in search results. We found that people found us when searching for bakery software – so we leaned into that with a post on our BitBakers’ favourite bakeries in Waterloo Region.
Recording the interviews
When we’re interviewing someone for a blog post, we’ve found the Voice Memos app on iPhone to be one of the best tools. It’s simple to use and syncs between our phones and laptops using iCloud – which means we don’t have to worry about copying files around. The majority of our interviews over the last year have been on Zoom. Placing the iPhone next to our laptop and hitting record works every time. Just make sure you ask first – it’s the polite thing to do.
No one has time for transcription
Once we’ve recorded the interview, the next step is transcribing it. It used to be a tedious process – but we discovered Otter.ai last year and our lives have never been the same. Otter is an AI-powered transcription service that works way better than you’d think. We’ve used it for a four person interview and Otter was able to transcribe with minimal mistakes. Their Pro plan is $12.99 USD per month which lets you transcribe up to 6,000 minutes of audio.
To forgive is human, to edit is divine
After we’ve written our latest masterpiece, the next step is running it through Grammarly. Yes, we know our high school English teachers would shudder at the thought of it, but Grammarly is a great gut check to make sure you’re using em dashes, en dashes, and dashes correctly. (It’s a trap, just use en dashes). Grammarly doesn’t replace having a great human editor review what we write, but it does a great job catching the little things that you might miss.
Digital hygiene
When it comes to any content – blog posts, videos, audio files – we recommend a good digital hygiene program. Digital hygiene is creating a folder architecture for:
- Where all working and final files are stored.
- File naming so content is easy to identify.
- Formatting storage cards so they’re ready to use.
For example, when we use Voice Memo to record an interview, the app uses a default name of our location. When we’re done with the interview, we rename the file to an internal code that matches it with the blog post it is for. We then export the recording to our shared drive and then start the transcription with Otter right away. Even if we’re not going to get to writing for a day or two, it gives us piece of mind knowing that we haven’t lost anything important before we’ve even had a chance to start.
Do you have a must-have tool for content marketing? Let us know on social with the hashtag #BitBakeryStacks.
