Quentin, our marketing manager, and myself recently attended a webinar on content marketing. While the agenda may have skewed to more of a traditional sales and marketing focus there were still plenty of lessons to be learned for a tech transfer office. What were some of the key takeaways for tech transfer professionals? Here are our top five from each of the four presentations.
Developing a Content Strategy
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The dilemma we face is quality vs. speed vs. cost and which two do we want?
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Go back and optimize/update/add new links to existing content for new life.
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Analyze what has been popular and see what the trends/themes might be and see if you can build a new piece around that.
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Don’t forget to look within for team members!
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Put yourself in your audience’s shoes and write to them.
Video Content to Tell Stories
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Start small – learn and build.
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Don’t lose site of the forest or audience by getting caught up in the details.
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Video length in social 30 seconds to 1 ½ minute; Facebook is 30 seconds!
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Don’t forget closed captions on your videos; remember specials needs and in some platforms video starts without sound.
Optimizing Your Content for Search 
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The best benchmarking is done against yourself – improve each month.
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Important keywords should be in page titles (title tag) – don’t overlook this!
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Use a strong, appropriate description for the meta page description tag.
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Page speed: page should load in 3 seconds on desktop and 2 seconds on mobile (optimize your images).
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Focus on fresh, quality content (avoid thin content or no semantic keywords).
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Use schema and be search engine friendly.
Measuring Your Marketing Program
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Continually monitor and re-evaluate your efforts and results.
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Adjust as necessary in real-time.
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Questions you should be able to answer.
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What time during the day does content perform best?
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What time during the week?
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What topics are shared the most on social media?
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What article formats receive the most views?
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We have plenty to think about and to try and incorporate into our current practices. It was an afternoon well spent! We’d like to hear your thoughts and tips on content marketing. Tweet them to us @EmoryOTT.
– Linda Kesselring