Fajr Muhammad: Hello. Hello. That’s funny that I have my emotional support water bottle here, so very apt. Hello, everybody. I’m super excited to be here, not because it’s our conference, but because I’m excited to talk about something really, really important to me. Mike kind of teased it up, I’ve been in the industry for 15+ years. And you know I’ve never really done the circuit, so you guys might not know a lot about me. So I’ll introduce myself. I’m Faja Muhammad, VP of Content Strategy and Growth at iPullRank. I’m a writer, a content strategist for the last 15 years. I was a fashion blogger. So I was a dyed in the wool internet millennial. I’m a three-peat iPullRank employee, a boomerang. And to Mike’s point, at iPullRank, we do technical SEO at the helm and behalf of Mike King. But we also deliver high performance content strategy and production at the intersection of data and creative. So what does that mean? We take our really detailed technical recommendations and we turn them into actual content and creative. And we’ve been able to do it for some really cool brands, right? We’ve done some cool shit over the years. Gonna drop some swears guys.

But things are changing, Like the last four days are any indication, content and SEO in all of the byproducts are, the forces are impacting us. And we’re gonna have to shift. So as the world shifts and audience needs evolve, we’re shifting too because if we’re nothing, we’re nothing if not flexible in our approach. We want the end goal, but how we get to that end goal is flexible. So let’s be real guys. I’m gonna hold our hands while I say this. We’ve created a content problem. Guilty. There’s too much content. And I know that’s subjective, right, because if it was good, then maybe there wouldn’t be too much of it. But between the creator economy, publishers, brands, we’re just drowning in a historic amount of content. Everything’s content to the point that nothing is content. The stats are staggering, 3.7 million YouTube videos are posted a day, 7.5 million blog posts, 34 million TikTok videos. I’m probably responsible for watching about 20 million of those. So more content doesn’t mean more attention, it actually means the inverse, right? The more stuff that we give people, the less that they can pay attention. And ultimately less attention means less engagement. And if that didn’t make matters worse, we’re in an attention recession. Right? Everything’s a recession indicator. I’m from Philly and they just announced that Philly is like the top destination to travel to this year. And somebody said that’s a recession indicator. So I don’t know how to feel about that, but attention spans are dwindling. In the last decade, spans have declined about seventy percent. And if they continue on this path, right, we are ultimately going to be what they say, the attention span of a goldfish. I asked ChatGPT in about nine seconds. So we are all ultimately going to become Dory from Finding Nemo. And we can’t make more attention, right? Like it is finite resource. And we trained audiences to skim, to bounce, to scroll, right, as a byproduct and a function of our industry. And if we want their attention, we’re going to have to earn it differently.

So there’s hope, guys. It’s not all doom and gloom. Oh, let’s go back. Oh, my meme moment. My team asked me to put a meme in, so am I the drama? I think it I think it was a fail. But there’s hope. Right? User behaviors are changing. On the opposite end of the spectrum, things like watching YouTube shorts, scrolling on TikTok, those engagements or those activities are increasing, right? Like there’s a level of ephemeralness and high frequency to those actions and engagements that may not change, right? But on the opposite end of the spectrum, we’re seeing the rise of newsletter subscriptions, right? We’re seeing the rise of sharing long form content. I think Substack just reached about three million subscribers, and they’ve got projected 20% growth. So audiences are actually asking for more in-depth, low frequency, high value actions. And as marketers, think we really should be focusing in this upper quadrant, right? You got guys like Kai Sena who are like breaking the live streaming model. 

Going live has allowed brands and creators to foster true lasting connections with their audiences. And if this is what users want, then ultimately we need to figure out a way to give it to them. And the funnel is now a flywheel or a subway map like Devin described a few days ago, or maybe it’s three kids in a trench coat, I really kind of can’t tell you. But it’s a mess essentially, right? The funnel is no longer an inverted pyramid, right? We’re no longer taking users from awareness to consideration to purchase to loyalty, right? And we’re not taking them through that journey on one platform, right? It’s multi channel at this point, it’s multi platform. We’re needing to touch them in many different ways and in many different spaces.

And the last point of setup, ultimately, and the thing that I think has brought us all here today, is that the click is in its villain era, Right? Maybe Google Google has always been the villain. Don’t don’t get me started. But the click through rate is dropping. AI overviews, zero click searches. It’s definitely changing the way in which audiences actually reach content. And it’s doing two really interesting things that I think we have to take note of, right. It’s making the click harder to get, but it’s simultaneously making that click more valuable, right? Like we still need the click, we still need to get audiences to our content, we need them to engage with our brands, but how we do that is ultimately going to be more challenging and then once we do, we’re going to need to make it more impactful. So what does that mean for content strategy and content engagement? I’m not Ms. Cleo, so I don’t have a crystal ball. I have data to support my hypotheses. And ultimately, I think that three things are happening and three shifts are going to need to happen. I think we’re going to need one, engagement metrics are changing. Content is going to be need to be worthy of the scroll. And then last, post click behavior is more valuable. So let’s get into those. Surface level metrics no longer tell the whole story, right?

Content engagement is no longer linear. We looked at the engagement reach benchmarks by platform on social and they’re abysmal, right? Between 2020 and 2024, Instagram dropped from about 90.98% engagement to about 0.36%. Even TikTok, right? The behemoth that TikTok was has declined from 5% engagement rate to about 1.7%. So people are not necessarily engaging in the same way, and the way that we measure engagement ultimately is going to have to change. Things like page views, likes, I don’t know that likes was ever really a true metric, but it was something that we measured, right, are not enough to indicate true interest. We’re going to have to think about the depth of the engagement versus the breadth. And what I think that that looks like is we’re going to have to do the old way giving way to the new way to indicate a true indicator of interest, right. Things like page views are going to give way or be deprioritized in favor of time spent, right. Things that tell us that they landed and they also stayed there. Likes, of course, like yes we want you to like the stuff that we’re creating, the content that we’re providing. But saves tells me something deeper about the psychology behind a person who’s engaging with a piece of content, right? They liked it and they enjoyed it and they want more of it. And then lastly, return visits to subscribes. Right? This is tricky because we want people to consistently come back, but the subscribe is what ultimately gives us the control to ensure that they come back.

Shift two. Content needs to stop the scroll. Now, I need you guys to walk with me a little bit. This is a little woo woo, a little less scientific. Right? This is like the creative of it all. It’s a lot of noise out there, right? Like we are dealing with a lot of stuff between the news cycle, social media, everything, everything, everything, the memes, the GIFs. And in order for our content to do this philosophical or esoteric thing of stopping the scroll, it needs to be worthy to stop the scroll, right? Like is this a piece of content that is ultimately worthy of your audience’s attention, right? Like bow down, like am I worthy? I don’t want anybody to have any content crisis, identity crisises out there. But ultimately it’s about how do we engineer the content to ultimately engage an audience on a deeper level. And where we start is really understanding who our audience is. What do they want? What do they want to see? How do they like to see it? 

So here’s a nifty flowchart, very simple. Ultimately, think that content creation and these questions need to start before you even jump into the actual production of a piece of content. Right? We need to be engineering the content to stop the scroll, not doing it after the fact. So some questions to ask yourself as you are developing, producing blog posts, interactives, videos, etc., etc., is, is your hook strong, right? Do you have something in the first couple of seconds that really grabs the audience? Is your key message clear? Right? Are you clear on what you are asking of this person, right? We use words like audience, user, etc. They’re ultimately a person on the other side having a human experience. And if they’re not, go back and rewrite it. I sound like the terrible English teacher that used to give me bad feedback. To go back and rewrite stuff. Are the visuals compelling? This is important and I think it’s something that we don’t spend enough time on. Marketing and creative, we are diametrically opposed, we’re mortal enemies. But it’s got to look good. It’s actually got to be visually appealing. We know we love the aesthetics. I did not wear a scarf around my neck for utility. So if it doesn’t look good, go back and redo it, make it stronger, make it more beautiful. Is it fresh, distinct, or unexpected? This is interesting, right? Because in our spaces, our industries, we’re dealing with competitors, right? Like there’s nothing quote unquote new to say. But is there a way that you can say the same thing in the way that only you can say it, right? Is your voice and tone maybe a distinction between your competitors? Do you have a particular product offering that you know stands well above and away from the other products and services in your space? And if not, go back and reassess. 

And then lastly, and perhaps most importantly, does it provide immediate value? What is in it for the person or the end user experiencing or engaging with this particular piece of content? And if that’s not clear or there isn’t an inherent takeaway, you can just go back and add it. Third, the last shift, I believe, is ultimately the thing that’s kind of the culmination of the last three days or four days that we’ve been here. Right? Post click behavior is going to be far more telling for us going forward, right? We understand that clicks are declining, and as a result traffic is declining as Mike kicked us off. We don’t know if that traffic is coming back. So what we do with the traffic that we do get is going to be extremely of the utmost importance, right? We did all of this work to get a person to our blog post, to our landing pages, to our product pages, to our videos. What are we going to do once they get there? Instead of going for the big swing, right, I think a lot of marketers and content strategists think, okay we’ve gotten the person here, let’s drive them directly to conversion. Let’s get them in the lead funnel, let’s get them into the application. And sure, if a person has indications and indicators that that is the direction that they’re going in, great. But how about we add micro conversions, right? We do email marketing of course for product, but how about the return of the content newsletter or content marketing for lead gen? I’m also really apt for social retargeting, right. We’ve gotten them on the site, let’s get them pixeled, and let’s continue to remarket and retarget them. 

So I’m going to a little Steve Jobs moment here. And I hope you guys are willing and you go along with this. But I’m curious to know what content made you stop this week. Okay. Maybe it was an article, something you read, maybe it was something that you saw here. Here it’s gone. Oh cool, yes, love you. I paid her to do that. But, yeah, like what stopped you in your tracks, right, made you read it, made you experience it all the way to the end. To you know, close your eyes, maybe don’t close your eyes, do whatever feels comfortable for you, but I’d like for you to call something to mind. And I promise there’s a payoff later. For me, I just saw Sinners and the Ryan Coogler movie, yes, great great movie. I will not spoil it, but I tried to avoid like all the trailers and the teasers because I wanted to go in fresh. And there was one YouTube video that I watched, it’s Ryan and he’s in a dark, you know dark room with the celluloid film behind him, all of the different formats, and he’s walking through, right. And he’s going through the process of shooting centers on IMAX and what that meant for him as an artist, and what that means for moviegoers, and the return to the box office, and all of those things. And if I wasn’t a content marketer, I might have missed that the video was from Kodak. Right? It was a branded piece of content from Kodak that really talked about the artistry. And I did the next thing, right? I went to see Sinner, I took the next desired action. So the the content piece that you have in your mind or the thing that you called that made you stop this week, I imagine that it has similarities in common, right? I think that there are a few common tenets of engaging content. Perhaps it was intriguing, right? Maybe it just was interesting to you or on a topic that you are looking to learn more on. Perhaps it was interactive and it requested or required you to do something, take an action to engage with it in order for the content to progress forward. Maybe it answers your questions, right? If you came from search, you did a query and you actually got a direct result that provided you with an immediate answer. Maybe it was just beautiful, like maybe it was a TikTok video shot in high res looking for travel content and you saw Italy, Portofino, and you were like, yes, adding that to list.

Notice in this list, I don’t say it ranked well, I don’t say that it drove thousands of visits. Right? It’s not necessarily about the the front end or the algorithm of it all. It’s about the experience. Humans are having experiences with content and we have to prioritize those experiences. So what that leads me to is this very mathematical equation, very scientific. SEO plus content strategy equals design or plus design equals resonance. I’m a writer guys, not a mathematician. But essentially to me, the go forward for content strategy and content marketing is experiential. It’s going to be ultimately how the end user feels about a piece of content, how they feel about the experience that you’re offering them. SEO tells us the audience demand, a user’s pain points. Content strategy tells us how to shape the story in order to alleviate those pain points. And design allows us to make it frictionless and seamless so that they have a good experience. And all of that ultimately ladders up to resonance. And Mike talked about Relevance Engineering, and maybe at IiPR we just like to make up our own words for things. We like to define and set the tone for categories. So ultimately resonance is, resonance design is the strategic architecture of content to forge connections with its intended audience, right? And strategic architecture is apt, right? Because this is not something that we can just do, publish a piece of content and pray and hope that it’ll happen.

And I’m going a bit over guys, so let’s keep going. I have got a couple of examples that we’ll breeze through. The low end of design, right. This is the Yale School of Art page. The design’s pretty bad, not really sure where to go once I land here. If I’m an artist and I’m looking to potentially enroll, this is not resonating with me, it’s not providing me with the information or the experience that I need. I have a sneaking theory that somebody’s just keeping that page up there to be funny. Nobody’s ever redesigned this page. On the moderate end, we’ve got the New York Times cooking recipe pages, right? They’re very straightforward, very clear. They got the benefit of being on the New York Times of course, right? But interactive is baked in right into the experience. If I click on this page and I’m not ready to make this pizza dough, I can bookmark it and save it for later. And then my favorite on the higher end of course is this creative types interactive quiz from Adobe. Like I mentioned at the top, I’m a writer, I’m an artist, so I always want to know what I am. What’s my zodiac? What’s my Myers Briggs? What’s my Adobe creative type? And not only is the experience beautiful, it’s straightforward, and it provides me with a great archetype while also being branded. It provides some clear product tie ins, so it’s not purely altruistic. And the performance is great. Right? Adobe owns the SERPs for creative types. The experience ranks for about 4,000 keywords and is driving about 3k monthly visits after its initial launch. So that’s the context, right? What are the forces that are shifting content strategy and content engagement? Some of the shifts that I think are on the horizon.

So what do I think the new rules are? Right? I think that there are three clear takeaways and rules for us to go forward. One, create real content. Two, engage beyond the click. And three, design for interaction over consumption. One, make content that resonates not just exist. Right? So this is just a cool framework essentially, and maybe like a middle finger to AI. Right? We’re gonna create real content, not that fake stuff. But essentially it’s a guiding force for how you actually architect a piece of content that truly resonates with your audience. So R of course very obvious, resonant, something that emotionally connects. You’ve got to understand your audience in order to know what they care about and what they engage with. E, experiential. Does it provide an interactive experience, something immersive that allows them to engage beyond just passive consumption? A, does it provide clear actionable offering, right? And this is a little different than experiential, because experiential is about the design and the experience of it, actionable is about the takeaway, right? What are we offering to them in exchange for their attention? And then L, leveraged. And this one I think we can’t neglect, right? Ultimately when we’re thinking about content, we have this if we build it, they will come mentality. And I believe if we build it, it will just stay there. A new field of dreams. So we’ve got to bake the idea of distribution repurposing and content automatization into the actual design of the content. And if we’re looking for examples, because we love examples, it doesn’t get more real than Spotify wrapped, right? Like how many people have done their Spotify wrapped every single year? Right, right, right. 2.1 million social media mentions, thousands of press mentions, It truly is a piece of content that resonates with something deeply personal for people, our music, listening taste, and history. And I hear you guys, right? You’re like, Fajr, I’m not getting any budget to do a Spotify rant. We’re not going get dev resources to develop something so experiential. We don’t even have the data to do something like that. And I think that that’s fine, right? But ultimately, you can take the framework of real and apply it to all of your content ideas, right? It doesn’t just have to be truly scalable interactive experiences, we can even put the framework to something like article content. 

Rule two, we’re going to have to engage beyond the click. I don’t know what happened to lead gen content marketing. I think we just gave it to the B2B marketers and we said here, this is for you guys, B2C, we won’t do content email, newsletters, newsletters is no longer a thing. And I think that that’s a mistake, right? Because ultimately if the click is the first point, the first inflection point of engagement, we’ve gotten them to click, they’ve landed on the content, they’ve engaged, found it interesting, intriguing, entertaining. Ultimately, we’re missing a step if we don’t capture something from that engagement. Because one, we don’t know if they’re going to click again, We know the click through rates are dropping. So I think we’ve got to seize the moment, right? We’ve got to seize this interaction every single chance we get. Because then ultimately, it just better positions us to be able to nurture and foster those connections and ultimately drive them to conversion. And email is still one of the top performing channels, right? Average open rates of about 32%, click through rates of about 3%. So we can’t shake our head at email any longer. If we’re looking for a really cool example, Morning Brew. The content is the marketing, but it’s also the product. I think that there’s this debate between content being marketing or content being product, and I ultimately think it’s both. Right? It’s your storefront, It lives on your website on dot com. Sure it lives in learning, sure it lives in a dedicated content resource section, but ultimately it is a function of a user having an experience with your website. And content grew, they’re like the model for this, right? They grew their subscription base from 100k to one million subscribers in two years, they’ve got industry high open rates of about 40%. And they continue to use a newsletter first strategy even as they move into other forms of media like video and podcasting. 

And then third, design for interaction over consumption. And this is a tricky one, right? Because I don’t think, I think when we think about interactivity, we think it has to be large scale, We think it has to be quizzes, we think it has to have deep inputs. I’m thinking of like the Patagonia immersive storytelling experiences. And I think we can lower the threshold or the barrier to entry, right? And we don’t have to necessarily do either or, but we can do a blend of both, right? We do want audiences to read our content, right, and to find something valuable. But we could also provide them with the option to bookmark it. If we don’t give them that interaction, then they can’t take it. Scrolling, moving scrolling into gamification. Is there something that within the scroll or the experience of a piece of content they can actually take an action, get a badge, do something fun? And there’s nobody better than Duolingo. Right? Duolingo has changed the game on interactive content learning. I stayed up last night to maintain my streak, I don’t know about everybody else. My nephew has me beat. But they’re essentially taking the idea of gamification and building it into their product, right? They’re also the only company mascot involved in a rat beef, so they got that to their credit. So that was a lot to say about the future of content engagement and where I ultimately think that we’re going. 

And the thing that comes to mind of course is like these are some lofty ideas, Like these are some lofty brands that are investing millions of dollars and tons of resources into the creation of their content experiences, so I’m sure you guys are wondering, where do you go from here? How do you start to implement some of these things into your own content strategies and production pipelines? And I think that there are some simple steps we can take, we don’t have to jump directly into, hey guys, everybody here has got to have a duolingo gamification for your product. Like, that’s not what I’m telling you guys to do. But I think that we can start by understanding our audiences better, right? Customer data, build personas, is there customer segmentation within your organization that you can kind of really dive deeper into to understand their pain points and their needs? You can audit, we love an audit, iPullRank loves an audit. You can review, that’s good, my boss laughed. You can review your current content, right? Put it through the flow chart, put it through the paces, hold it up against the light and see if it shines. And then audit it with the new metrics, right? Like page view, sure, traffic visits, add time on-site on a page level and really see what sticks.

And then lastly, and this is probably my favorite one, ideate, brainstorm. I know we’re all busy and we’re trying to hit our quarterly goals, But you can’t put a limit on creativity and ultimately content is a byproduct of that creativity. So I would urge you guys as SEOs and content marketers to brainstorm new ideas, Think outside the box. And I know it’s like, you know, altruistic or radical to be like, don’t let budget constraints or concerns restrict you. Sure, of course, right? But if we have a cool idea, there are always ways that we can tailor that experience to be something that is applicable and works within our limitations. 

That’s it. In summary, I really believe the future of content is no longer about just getting clicks. Right? It’s about creating connections that resonate, engage, and endure, and ultimately about building lasting community. So let’s connect. Thank you.