When the pandemic started, our content marketing agency actually gained customers. The reason was mainly due to unspent marketing budget.
Marketers, SaaS founders and startup CEOs were pulling their money from ads and events and doubling down on content marketing.
So if you are looking at some unspent budget for the remainder of the year, and facing a “use it or lose it” marketing budget situation, we got you covered!
Now we ARE a little biased. We’re gonna suggest you use your unspent budget on content marketing. But we’re also going to explain why. So check out all our ways to use your unspent marketing budget on content marketing
Quick Takeaways:
Spending your unused marketing budget on content marketing right now gets you a locked-in annual content plan before the year even starts.
You’ll start the year with content that attracts relevant buyers and qualified leads and sales right out of the gate
You can spend the rest of your budget next year on testing new promotion channels of campaigns focused on your company priorities
Why Use Your Unspent Marketing Budget On Content Marketing?
When I first joined SAP in the summer of 2007, I was asked to identify all the marketing programs that delivered actual leads, sales and ROI. I spoke to all my colleagues, I dove into our CRM, I poured over our reports.
And what I found astounded me: 62% of our marketing budget was spent on activities that drove ZERO leads for sales. Not one lead. From almost two-thirds of our regional marketing budget that was supposed to focus on, you guessed it, driving leads for sales.
These campaigns typically came at the direction of the VP of Sales for those segments: let’s get a full page in an industry trade publication. We need a brochure. How about some boondoggle events?
Which programs actually drove results the sales teams loved: content marketing. One-third of the budget delivered 100% pipeline our sales team was looking for.
And they were all annually-planned content marketing programs.
There were 3 big reasons why these programs worked so well:
They strategically planned customer-focused content to be delivered across the entire year
They allowed time for constant optimization of the program to deliver the right leads at the right time
They created their plans and spent their budget before the year started
You see, sales people are funny. I know. I spent my first 5 years in sales. In the beginning of the year we want LOTS of leads we can nurture into sales opportunities so we can hit our sales targets.
At the end of the year, we want only highly qualified leads so we can focus what time we have left on closing deals.
So content marketing that’s planned out now, before the year is over, allows you to hit the ground running with a strategy in place before the year even gets started. It allows you to deliver value to the company right from the start, and it allows you to change and optimize as you go.
What If We Don’t Know Our Campaign Priorities Yet?
I’m so glad you asked. See, the problem with campaigns: they define what you decide is important. With SEO-based content marketing, we use objective research of the customer questions, keywords and concerns to decide what’s important.
We use trending data on what topics are important in your industry. We define what gaps you have with your competition to figure out what you need to be talking about.
Sure campaigns can be weaved into the content plan. No problem. But at least you have a strategy to build an audience for those big ideas that I’m sure will change the world. Definitely!
How To Use Your Unspent Marketing Budget
How and where should you place the dollars from your unused marketing budget? In this post, we’re sharing the simple 7-step process we use for our clients who spend their unused marketing budget on content marketing for next year. We also lay out the costs you should expect to incur.
1. Align To Your Business Strategy
First step is always to start with the business case for your content marketing. How does it align to your business goals, your overall marketing goals, and how will you measure those results in the terms your executive team understands.
2. Build The Content Marketing Measurement Framework
I always like to use the framework of Reach, Engage, Convert, and Retain to cover all stages of the buyer journey.
Reach: attract new prospects or customers to your business. While some marketers like to think of this stage as awareness. I find that a really tough thing to measure and an easy way to blow through budget. With reach, you can actually count the hard number in terms of visitors to your website or landing pages.
Engage: Are you building a relationship with these new folks. How many times do they visit? How long do they stay? How deep do they go?
Convert: This is the stuff we love count. Did they fill out a form, register for an offer, buy the product? Content marketing leads are 62% cheaper than other types because of the way we attract them with valuable content vs ads or trickery or persuasion.
Retain: Content marketing-generated customers are “better” because they stay longer and spend more. 4x more revenue Lifetime Value (LTV) from our research.
Now that you’ve identified the framework, you can move into the defining the actual measures of success. Whether you call the KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) or OKRs (Objectives and Key Results), simply metrics or reports, you can define which data points will show whether you are successful at building reach, engagement, conversion, and retention
3. Conduct Keyword Research and Topic Modeling
We start all our content planning with deep keyword research. While aligning to your business strategy is important, we find user-based research is more effective at driving marketing plans than internal opinions about which campaign messages are most important. We follow these steps:
Identify important themes or categories of content you want to create
Research your SEO rankings and positions against those “short-tail” keywords. For MIG, examples include might be marketing, content marketing, etc.
Look at search intent such as commercial intent (see below)
Identify competitive gaps and opportunities based on high CPC keywords
Source: Semrush
Bonus: Check out how we use CPC to identify high purchase intent and competitive gap keywords in my latest webinar.
4. Brainstorm 100 Article Ideas
I know this sounds like a lot, but trust me, this exercise is easier than it sounds. Here’s a few tricks:
AnswerThePublic: Type any focus keyword into Answer The Public and it spits out this entire content plan based on common questions people ask their search engines related to that topic. This is why I wrote Why Content Marketing Is Important and Why Does Content Marketing Take So Long To Work because real people are asking these questions and Answer The Public told me to answer them.
Buzzsumo: Type any search term into Buzzsumo (License required) and it spits out hundreds of ideas based on the content ideas that have been shared the most. Buzzsumo told me to write about content marketing trends, AI-generated content, content marketing tips for startups, and why social media alone isn’t enough for business growth.
So with Semrush, you’re using search intent. With Answer The Public, you’re using search query data. With Buzzsumo, you’re using social sharing data.
5. Plan Your Entire Year’s Worth of Content
Now you have a general sense of your business strategy for next year and how your marketing strategy will support it. you know what keywords your audience uses, what content they like to share, what competitive gaps you have, and what you need to create.
So let’s use some of that unused marketing budget right here at the end of the year to pay for next year’s content! Here’;s the approach we use to plan it out:
Ask your team each to rank from 1 to 4 which article ideas they love (ranked as a 1), which ones they hate (ranked as a 4) and everything in between (2 = like and 3 = meh). Average and weight those rankings across your team. If you have 100 article ideas, plan to publish the article twice a week across the year.
Make sure you balance out the content themes. Here’s an example from our MIG blog last year.
6. Make Sure To Optimize or Update Old Content
Go the search bar on your website and type last year into it. Surely you’ll have some articles about last year’s trends that you’ll want to update. Or maybe you have articles from 5 years ago that still get some decent traffic or conversions. If you delete those pages Google may penalize your website. So instead, use some of your unused marketing budget to update those old pages.
Start by searching for article with year’s on them. Look for articles that have high traffic but are older than 2 years. Look for articles that still get lots of conversions or rankings that are more than 3 years old.
Now create a plan to update those using some of last year’s leftover marketing budget! Updating old posts is one of the most effective ways to generate leads and revenue without having to spend money generating new conte t ideas or new articles.
7. Promote Your Content Through an Employee-Generated Social Media Campaign
Employee-generated content is one of the most effective ways to boost the value of your marketing budget. Why? Because your target audience is more likely to trust content from your employees than from ads. It’s also a great way to boost the personal brand of your employees who are interested. And who knows, maybe some of them will even want to start writing for you.
We call this employee activation: getting your employees to write and share your content. Not because you made them do it (never mandate this) but because they want to. Engaged employees who create and share content are able to generate 2x the click through rate as brand-shared content.
Source: Edelman LinkedIn study on thought leadership
How Much Does Content Marketing Cost?
The cost of content marketing ranges between $1000 and $10,000 per month depending on the variety of content types and the number of content pieces you need per month.
Our content packages are simple: we help our clients generate traffic and leads with an annual content plan and 1-2 blog articles per week. It’s simple and focused: 50-100 focus keywords, 50-100 creative article headlines, 1-2 blog articles per week, monthly Semrush tracking to prove that it works!
We charge $4,500 / month for 2 weekly articles. That’s just $54,000 for all of next year’s blog content. That is less than the cost of one event sponsorship or a month of PPC advertising. (If you’re interested, check out an ROI-focused case study, the success we see by using this service for ourselves and all our amazing G2 Reviews.)
The trick to setting up a marketing budget is like baking a cake, as Alex from Jotform tells us below. You have to have the right recipe, put the ingredients together, warm and the oven and you’re ready to go:
That’s why we shared our recipe for how to use your unspent marketing budget right now, to get the most delicious cake.
Why Spending Your Unused Budget On Next Year’s Content Marketing Makes Sense
As you can see, using any unspent marketing budget on next year’s content marketing is a great idea.
With MIG, not only do you get an entire year’s worth of content. But you start the year with a keyword strategy mapped to your buyer’s needs. You get 100 article ideas, weekly content to keep your lead machine humming along, and monthly reports you can share with your boss.
All this combined will bring the results you need next year. And it will already be paid for! That’s why now is the perfect time to spend that unused marketing budget on next year’s content marketing. When next year rolls around, you’ll look like a hero.
Do you want to use some of your unused marketing budget on content marketing. Our team of 35+ experienced writers are ready to produce content for YOUR business. Check out our weeklyblogcontentservice or scheduleafreeconsultation.
The post Use Your Unspent Marketing Budget On Content Marketing For Next Year appeared first on Marketing Insider Group.
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Do you want to be known as a leader in your industry?
For Oberer Homes, a full-service real estate company and semi-custom home builder in Dayton, Ohio, it was one of their top goals. As a family-owned and locally-focused business, Oberer also aimed to be considered a local expert by current and potential residents.
The team at Oberer, headed by Marketing Director Traci Bohn, has long known that content marketing was the right approach to establish this reputation. But by mid-2020, with the world turned upside down and the real estate industry facing huge uncertainty, they knew they needed to level up their approach.
Fast forward two years, and Oberer has achieved this goal and more. Today, they consistently publish top-performing articles on Google, have earned significant boosts in organic traffic and site views, and are a go-to source for information on new construction and custom home building in the Dayton area.
In this case study, we’ll explore how Oberer Homes partnered with Marketing Insider Group to achieve these results (and how you can do the same for your business).
Quick Takeaways:
Successful content marketing requires consistent, frequent publishing with an SEO strategy behind it.
It’s very possible to work with an agency to produce engaging content that accurately represents your brand.
Oberer Homes has experienced significant growth in organic search, website traffic, top-ranking keywords, and overall search visibility.
Oberer now has an extensive content library and most of their top-performing web pages are blog posts.
Oberer now publishes two blog posts every week and spends little to no time having to edit content.
The Problem:
Oberer had recently shifted their marketing focus exclusively to digital channels, which included a content marketing strategy centered around an active blog. They were working with multiple partners to produce content. Still, their efforts fell short as they admittedly lacked focus and the level of research necessary to get noticed by Google.
“Over the years our digital marketing strategy has been really disjointed,” shared Traci. “We’ve worked with multiple partners and nothing was ever consistent. We did have a content marketing strategy, but it was the bare minimum — about two blogs per month — and nothing was optimized for SEO.”
The Oberer team knew they needed a new solution, but understandable reservations lingered about bringing on a new partner. There were already too many cooks in the content kitchen, and budget was also a consideration.
To boot, Oberer Homes is a specialty builder with offerings that don’t fit squarely into a single category, and they focus heavily in their immediate geographic area. Finding an agency and writer that could accurately capture their brand felt like a challenge.
Still, Traci decided to take the leap.
The Strategy:
Oberer’s goal of establishing their reputation as both an industry leader and local expert was top-of-mind for the MIG team as we developed their content plan. After a look at their existing content, extensive keyword research, and ongoing strategy meetings with the Oberer team, it was time to start publishing.
Oberer’s content plan contained a range of titles across categories in areas where they wanted to establish expertise. These included:
Dayton city guides
Tips on navigating the new construction and custom home building processes
Resources for tackling home improvement projects
Inspiration for designing spaces throughout the home.
Even for long-time Dayton residents like Traci, the content felt fresh and new:
“The Dayton city guides that we do? Every time I got one of those blogs, I thought— ‘We have that here? That’s so cool!’ My family has done so many things now that we don’t normally do, because now we know Dayton has the best parks, great festivals, and more. So that has been really fun.”
At the same time, the Oberer team worked seamlessly on their end to maximize ROI on their content plan. They provided quick and constructive feedback on articles, published frequently and on time, and met with the MIG team to track progress.
After a few months, the results started showing in the numbers. Rankings were growing, traffic was increasing, and Oberer now had a well-developed and engaging content library to share with their audience.
“When I look at our top pages, almost all of them are blog posts,” Traci shared, “which is really cool because they’re not just exiting off of that post. They’re looking at other pages and they’re visiting the site and learning more about us. It’s just a good way to let everyone know we’re an expert in the industry and in our area. It’s been really beneficial.”
The Results:
Oberer has gained significant real estate (pun intended!) on Google’s search results pages. Here’s what the numbers say:
Organic search has gone up 26% YOY compared to 2021
Number of web visitors have increased by 17% over the same period
6 of Oberer’s current top-10 web pages are blog posts
Rankings reports covering the duration of Oberer’s partnership with MIG include even more impressive achievements, including 110+ keywords ranking in the top 20 slots on Google, and huge jumps in visibility, traffic, and average ranking position (as shown in their all-time performance report pictured below).
Most importantly, the Oberer Team feels confident in their content and happy that it represents their brand well. Thanks to seamless collaboration with the MIG team, Traci has been able to publish articles without getting bogged down with time-consuming edits.
“The first few months, I edited some of the articles,” said Traci. “Not heavily, but just switched some of the lingo around or added something in. But the tone and the voice has been spot on from the beginning. And now it’s rare that I make any edits at all.”
The Takeaway
Content marketing — the kind that yields serious results and boosts performance — takes time, consistency, and expertise in the right areas. It can feel daunting to partner with an agency and get them up to speed on your business, because it’s true — no one can know your brand as well as you do.
That’s why Marketing Insider Group prioritizes building real partnerships with our clients. We get to know your company, your goals, your voice, your audience, and anything else important to your success.
Oberer’s story demonstrates the kind of success companies can experience when they buy in to the process. And the best part? They can then spend more time on what’s most important: serving customers.
Are You Looking for Results Like These?
There is no one-size-fits-all solution to content marketing, but Marketing Insider Group executes best practices that we have tested and proven to work. We align them with the specific needs of your company and audience to create a personalized strategy that drives results.
If you are ready to get more traffic to your site with quality content published consistently, check out our SEO Blog Writing Service or schedule a quick consultation to learn more about how we can help you earn more traffic and leads for your business.
The post How Oberer Homes Earned More Traffic, Rankings, and Leads with Our Content Marketing Service appeared first on Marketing Insider Group.
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Brands face multiple obstacles when organizing the content function. They must grapple with content proliferation; inconsistent and uncoordinated content creation; the lack of strategic direction in the content insights process; and the difficulty for consumers, customers and prospects to find content that is relevant and timely.
Startups and B2B SaaS Founders often are’t even sure where to begin with marketing, let alone how to address the lack of content on their websites to drive leads and growth.
Add in a tough economic environment and it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. But we need to focus on growth. That’s why measuring ROI is always the biggest content marketing challenge.
Content marketing is a journey, and it’s not easy. In fact, it’s freaking hard. Too many of the marketing professionals we know are miserable. They try to fight every day to do work they can be proud of. Marketing that works!
So we asked our clients to tell us what are the biggest content marketing challenges we help them overcome. And how we help them solve for those challenges.
The insights below represent what we hear from our clients, the content marketing community, and our unique perspective. our goal is that you too can see a way past these challenges. Whether you work with us or not.
The major themes that emerge include tying content marketing efforts to business value, limited resources and internal tensions that hinder the content production process. Let’s take a closer look at some of the biggest challenges that are keeping marketers up at night.
1. Determining Content Marketing ROI
Many marketers are struggling to show the ROI of their content marketing efforts. Marketers from the agency side, for example, shared that some of their clients are wanting to know how many conversions can be attributed to a specific piece of content or channel. Often times these are brands whose digital conversion paths cannot be tracked or analyzed.
To combat this, marketers use a purchase intent model that assigns different weights to customer interactions with a piece of content, but they admit that this model isn’t perfect.
For other marketers, their biggest challenge is tying content to conversions and defining relevant, appropriate metrics to measure and evaluate the impact their content marketing programs make on the business’ bottom line.
Content ROI is subjective and driven by the business mission or objectives of the content marketing program. An integrated approach to measurement yields a value story as opposed to simply tracking activity metrics
Defining your value story requires a methodical approach.
Clearly identify KPIs aligned with business mission.
Identify the metrics that will work as a unit to tell a value story.
Identify the sources of those metrics and pull into a dashboard using connectors.
Create an algorithm that weights each metric in relation to their importance to the “story.”
Analyze performing and non-performing metrics for each KPI on a periodic basis and use to calibrate approach.
Check out this video from a recent marketing keynote speech where I explain this dilemma:
For More Check Out: 10 Examples To Prove Content Marketing ROI To Your CEO
2. Video Content Marketing Virality
As my friend Todd Wheatland once said, the only answer to the question on how to make a viral video is STFU! He’s Australian so please forgive his potty mouth. But you gotta admit it’s somewhat true. You can’t just “create” a viral video. But anyone can create quality videos that reach, engage and convert.
But how do we guarantee that these great videos are seen by our target audience? How do we guarantee that the message of the video was viewed? The cost of guaranteeing that messages are seen is becoming increasingly more expensive, and the industry needs to be prepared for the increased cost.
Other marketers are facing time and resource constraints to produce quality videos. Some marketers also struggle with building out a sustainable video content strategy that can product videos which can live and scale across multiple markets.
Read More: How to Grow Your Audience with Video Content Marketing
3. Figuring Out How to Feed the Content Beast
Many brands spend too much of their time worried about creating the perfect piece of content. Or they worry about creating only the kind of content their boss or sales, or product people want (see point #1). The real goal is to create content consistently mapped to the buyer journey.
Buyers are searching online every day. And their search patterns reflect the need for basic education. Exactly the kind of content you are too afraid of publishing because you think your target audience already knows the basics. Or because you don’t realize how many people your target audience has to convince to buy your stuff.
Your content needs to be published frequently, based on your buyer’s journey, and mapped to keywords that relate to your business. That’s why our clients outsource content creation to us: because we provide foundational content that meets buyer needs, and delivers business results.
There are always obstacles to consistent publishing in content marketing. This can be due to a lack of resources, ideas, organization, and more.
The number one goal of content marketing for organizations is to generate more quality leads. They also said this was their biggest challenge.
It’s easy to create a lot of content. It’s very hard to do this at scale and to maintain high quality. Even if you have a good number of resources, keep in mind that without high throughput, you’re always lagging.
Research on blog frequency tells us 11 per month is the “magic” number—can you produce that amount of content on your own? That’s not the only content you’ll be creating—video, social posts, infographics, eBooks, etc. Do you have a “machine” to accomplish this? And how confident are you in its quality?
These are two big questions that content leaders need to ponder. Even the biggest organizations would have trouble with consistency and frequency. But we have a framework that allows us to deliver.
When you engage with us, we’ve already done the topic and keyword research. The content strategy informs voice and tone and considers audience profiles. Then we execute on it by using our own subject matter expert (SME) writers, SEO optimization best practices, and buyer’s journey funnel goals.
Sure, you could go on platforms and hire a freelancer here or there, but fair warning, you’ll likely be disappointed. In most scenarios, the quality won’t be up to your standards, nor will it be relatable to your audience.
For example, we write for a lot of software as a service (SaaS) companies. To write about SaaS subjects requires experience in the industry, a healthy technical aptitude, and the ability to understand how and why customers use the platform. Sorry, you’re not going to find this for $10/hour.
Here’s an approach for making your content resonate deeply at the point of discovery:
Start with an insights process that provides deep understanding, fresh perspective and a honed vision of what will resonate and fulfill a specific need. In our experience, there is no dearth of available background information to inform story ideation and road map development, but typically information is scattered throughout the organization with no systematic way to capture, analyze and apply it
Model the insights process for a specific need and use the results to create a COE methodology for content insights. This involves overlaying inputs from multiple points such as SEO reports, listening scans, CMS & CRM data, conference reports, sales insights, customer insights and research reports, etc. Overlay inputs and create a topic “Venn diagram” to determine topics best suited for brand differentiation and marketplace resonance.
Use results to create a content roadmap. Audit existing content to identify holes and get new content needs into the content production cycle.
Read More: The Ultimate List of Blog Post Ideas for Content Marketers
4. Proving Credibility And Authority
For many marketers, they struggle with finding and establishing a credible and authoritative voice for their brands, and cutting through the noise to capture their target audience’s attention. The financial space, for example, is filled with “experts” offering advice and insights to consumers, which makes it extremely difficult for brands to stand out with their content.
Marketers are thus looking to develop an effective content strategy that will allow them to maintain the brand’s identity and boost marketing ROI, while improving their brand’s authority and thought leadership in the space.
This is where effective thought leadership comes in. You use your people and their passions and expertise to share what they know with your target audience. The result? Credibility and trust.
Read More:
How to Increase Your Authority with Evergreen Content
What Is Authority And How Can You Build It?
5. Set Your Content Marketing Budgeting
Budget remains one of the top challenges marketers face when it comes to justifying the cost and investment in their content marketing programs.
Many senior leaders want immediate results. Content marketing takes time to show ROI. Finding the budget for content marketing doesn’t need to be as challenging as it sounds: look at the ROI of your marketing campaigns. Chances are most of them don’t have any.
What are you spending on paid search because you don’t rank organically? Shift that budget in to content marketing.
Yes, investment in content is rising with more organizations realizing the value of it. According to HubSpot, 70% of marketers are doing so.
While they understand the importance of content marketing and want to invest, companies often face challenges here. They may have budget limitations that prohibit them from adding to their team.
These limitations may have become more of an issue during the pandemic. Or, they may have the majority of the budget allocated to paid channels to boost content but not focused on actually producing it.
Even when faced with COVID-19, B2B organizations still shifted dollars to content marketing from their advertising spend.
Looking ahead, companies said they would invest the most in content creation. Figuring out how to allocate this well isn’t an easy endeavor, especially if you’re trying to put resources into lots of buckets—writers, SEO strategists, etc.
The Solution: Spend Less, Get More
We’ve got it down to a number: $8,000 a month is all the budget you need to achieve your content marketing objectives. What do you get for that amount of money? A lot, including:
Content marketing strategy
One year of content ideas
SEO: An audit, keyword strategy, and external link building
Conversion funnel development
Paid promotion
For that investment, we see a 7x return for every dollar spent, which equates to $56K in revenue each month. These results won’t occur overnight or even after 30 or 60 days. Content marketing is a long game, and you must keep doing it.
Brands that invest in us to guide their content marketing will see returns. The returns are tangible metrics such as increased traffic, conversions, and revenue. Content becomes an important tool to attract, engage, nurture, and retain customers. Its value far exceeds filtering these dollars to paid ads only. Those ads only return when they are running. Content returns for as long as it’s live.
Read More: How Much Budget Do You Need for Content Marketing?
6. Approval Processes
Marketers on the agency side shared the same sentiment when it comes to their client approval process being too long. Some stakeholders are wanting to provide input at every step of the content creation process, which creates bottlenecks and delays in production timeline.
At the same time, different teams and organizations within a company all produce content to support various programs and channels they own, and this creates content quality and consistency issues. Marketers are looking to manage and govern their content creation process more efficiently to ensure all content produced is compelling, consistent and effective for their target audience.
For both agency and non-agency marketers, staying timely and relevant with the long, clunky approval processes they need to go through with content creation is one of the biggest challenges that’s keeping them up at night.
Read More: 5 Ways to Provide Better Feedback and Improve the Review & Approval Process
7. Branding
Marketers face various branding challenges when it comes to content marketing. Some struggle with maintaining their brand voice as brands expand their in-house teams and outsource content creation to external agencies and partners.
Others struggle with maintaining their individual brand identities while working under a bigger umbrella brand. The real goal with content marketing and branding is to think of content marketing as the platform to tell your brand story.
Read More: The Best Example of The Value of Storytelling You Will Ever Find
8. Maintaining Volume, Quality, Speed
One of the biggest challenges many marketers share is figuring out how to deliver engaging, compelling content with speed, without compromising on quality and volume. Trying to stay nimble and agile within a large corporate structure also proves to be a big pain point for many marketers.
For marketing a startup, the challenge is mainly time and resources. Regular content publishing is recognized by many startup founders as important, but they don’t have the time.
We always start by looking at the company blog. How often are you publishing? Sre you getting more traffic? Are your keyword rankings improving over time? How often is the competition publishing? Is their content long enough? Good enough?
Then we follow this process:
Start by looking at keywords your audience is using in the buying process and keywords where you can win vs the competition.
Create a list of the content headlines our amazing writing team thinks will resonate with this audience. We also ask them to create a list of things they are interested in writing about. This aligns writers with clients and audiences.
Finally, we ask our clients for feedback and actual ratings of what they want to see published.
From there, we create a calendar of weekly content planned out for the entire year!
Read More: How Weekly Blog Content Solves the Top Challenges
9. Content Management
An Accenture study of over 1,000 marketing executives from 17 countries and 14 industries found that 73% of respondents are spending more than $50 million on content every year.
While 100% of marketing leaders surveyed all agreed that content is vital to the success of their businesses, content overload has become a top challenge for many organizations.
92% said the volume of the content their organizations are producing is higher than it was two years ago, and 83% expect the volume to continue to increase in the next two years.
50% said they currently have more content than they can effectively manage. Individual teams often create messaging and coordinate distribution of content on their own, which leads to organizational silos and program inefficiencies internally.
Less than 50% respondents felt they are fully prepared to manage the content they have today. The top three reasons marketing leaders attribute to their unpreparedness are a lack of skilled talent, technologies and clarity in content management and production processes.
The content calendar is the forcing function of every good marketing plan.
10. Strategic Business Alignment
For many brands, there is a lack of alignment in digital strategy and messaging across different platforms, which can hurt the customer experience and content marketing success. Cross-team collaboration becomes a big challenge for marketers when individuals and teams are working in silos and towards different visions and goals.
78% of leaders surveyed by Accenture felt they need better alignment between Marketing and IT teams to improve content marketing success. Marketing is more about digital now and requires technology more than ever before. New technologies are also available for marketers to experiment and innovate their practices in new ways. Another reason why marketers need better marketing and IT alignment is because technology today plays a central role in helping marketers deliver a seamless, compelling customer experience to reach, convert and retain customers.
Organizations create content in a dispersed structure, often resulting in multiple pieces of content being created by multiple areas of the company with little awareness that other content objects existed or were in production. In addition, often no master editorial calendar drives the content creation or amplification process. The lack of a chief content officer or well defined governance process results in no central authority to lead and direct the content creation process.
Only 19% of marketing leaders in the Accenture survey felt they have clear objectives established when creating new content assets. Nearly half of respondents say they do not feel their organizations have an effective content strategy that meets their current and future needs. 53% said they spend more time on the operational details of managing content than on strategically aligning their daily marketing efforts to a bigger picture. This goes to show that many brands have yet developed effective content marketing strategies or invested in the right resources to fully realize content marketing’s potential.
A Semrush study revealed that while 77 percent of organizations have a content strategy, only 9 percent say it’s excellent. The average rating in the survey was 3.5 out of 5. Just having a strategy isn’t good enough. You have to have an effective content marketing strategy. You must consistently execute on it and adjust it when necessary.
Why is that so hard? Many reasons come to mind—stakeholder interference (and not in a good way), there’s no time to be strategic because you’re always in the logistics, and you don’t have expertise in the area.
The data and the reality of what we see every day in the field are true. It comes down to budget, consistency/frequency, and strategy. We’ve developed a proven recipe that resolves these challenges for our clients.
That’s why the content marketing strategies that we create for clients are full of details. It’s not a document full of fluff; it’s one of action. It defines:
What content marketing means for your brand
The tactics you’ll employ to develop and promote content
Content production frequency and workflows
Your audience: demographics, motivations, challenges, objections, and more
Content clusters, which are the themes all the topics will roll up to
Distribution methods
What to measure and why
Without an actionable and well-defined strategy, you simply can’t achieve content marketing ROI. The strategy is the guiding light. Without one, you’re in the dark; with an ineffectual one, your light is very dim. The strategy tells you and delivers the path to success.
Further, here are five things that brands should do before beginning to create their content organization, in order to organize their content creation and distribution process:
Map the current nodes of the content eco-system across the entire enterprise. This requires the authority to create a cross-functional view of how content gets produced.
Analyze the map to determine if there is a logical flow and uncover interdependencies between groups that can impact efficiencies and approvals.
Study the delta between current and future state and create a step strategy for breaking down siloes and working cross functionally.
Create a content governance structure that aligns with future state.
Adopt a center of Excellence approach that is both dynamic and inclusive.
Read More: How to Create and Align Your Content with the Buyer Journey
11. Continuous Learning
The ever-changing marketing landscape means marketers need to dedicate themselves to lifelong learning and innovation to reinvent themselves, or risk extinction. Training their teams on the latest marketing practices is another top challenge for many marketers as they are also trying to navigate the learning curve themselves.
12. Content Marketing Promotion
Identifying influencers to help amplify content is another marketing challenge many marketers face with their content marketing efforts.
Creating great content is not enough anymore, you need an effective content promotion strategy to help customers find and see your content.
Read More: 18 Content Promotion Tools for Every Strategy
13. The Biggest Challenge in Content Marketing: Developing a Customer-Centric Mindset
This may sound surprising to some, but convincing brands to put customers first is still a challenge many marketers face when creating content. They need to help brands change their mindset about the value of content and understand that content marketing isn’t the same as advertising. Content marketing is about being helpful and providing real value to customers, by giving them what they want and need at each stage of the customer journey.
If you go to most company websites or read their marketing content, you’ll notice that they do an excellent job of telling you all about the company and telling you all about their products. But they don’t answer the biggest questions their customers might have. In other words, they make the biggest marketing mistake and make it all about themselves and not about the customer.
Almost a decade ago, C.C. Chapman (@cc_chapman) predicted that companies will become better at this when he begged to see “more brands interacting in real time with their customers.”
Barbra Gago (@BarbraGago) also suggests marketers stop trying to “re-invent the wheel with every piece of content” and should instead focus on helping prospective buyers find “the right information–the content that is going to help them move through their purchase process.”
In an article on CMI, Alison Bolen (@alisonbolen) explained that the greatest challenge in content marketing is “understanding your customers well enough to develop content that is useful and relevant for them.”
And Marcus Sheridan (@TheSalesLion) gets to this same point when he asks content marketers to “write and communicate in a way that is completely and utterly on the level of their audience, not the level of the industry professional.”
So how do we help address this challenge?
Ardath Albee (@ardath421) suggests we need to “Take a Customer Field Trip” and try to look at our marketing and our content as a customer might see it.
I also answered one of the biggest marketing challenges for small businesses, How To Create Killer Content: Speak To A Customer where I tell very simply how you can use your customer stories to tell your story. But most importantly, to tell it using their words and by showing how you are solving real customer problems.
25 Signs Your Business Is Not Ready for Content Marketing
One question I get asked a lot is, “How is content marketing right for our business?” Well, the right question business owners should be asking is, “How do we know our business is ready for content marketing?”
I try to answer that question regularly on this blog. We talk about culture and brand publishing and I try to point to examples of great content whenever I can.
But sometimes, it’s better to define the signs that show you are not ready to change your direction.
And that’s what I’m doing here, with these 25 signs your business is not ready for content marketing. I’m sure there are plenty more. But these are the ones that just flew right off the top of my head.
You don’t have a corporate blog.
You have a corporate blog but only publish company news on it.
Social listening and share of (search) voice does not drive your marketing strategy.
Your social channels are only used to promote and push your webinars, white papers and events.
Your content talks more about your products.
You ask “How can we create a viral video?”
You haven’t mapped your existing or future content to buyer stages.
You don’t have any early-stage or thought leadership content.
You haven’t defined an appropriate next step or “call to action” for your content.
You think content marketing is expensive.
You think hiring a bunch of journalists can help you.
You constantly try to re-create your own viral Tiktok moments.
You don’t track how much of your content gets used and which does best.
You don’t monitor the content your competitors are creating.
You don’t know what keywords your customers are using.
You think content marketing is a campaign.
You don’t have resources to publish on a regular basis.
You don’t have dedicated testing resources for your content development and landing pages.
You haven’t defined any kind of editorial workflow.
Your business doesn’t train your employees on effective storytelling.
You’re resistant to “giving away” content for free (without registration).
You don’t think about the”shareability” of your content. Your website gets less than 5% of traffic from social networks.
You don’t create visual content (videos, slide decks, infographics).
You create content without thinking about how to distribute and amplify it.
You do content marketing because someone told you to.
Over to You
Is your organization or agency currently facing any of these content marketing challenges? If so, how are you solving them? I’d love to hear your ideas, please share them below!
Are you interested in engaging and converting new customers via content? Contact me and let’s talk about how we can help.
Check out the photo of the full challenge board below:
We’re content marketing challenge solvers. Let’s talk about how we can get you out of reactive mode and into a proactive approach to content. If you’re ready to get more traffic to your site with quality content published consistently, check out our Content Builder Service.
The post 13 Biggest Content Marketing Challenges appeared first on Marketing Insider Group.
Technology and the services that connect them all have seen massive growth in the past few years. And we are just getting started. With the advent of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, we are now seeing software that teaches software how to write better software.
Content marketing emerged early on as a driver of technology and IT Service company marketing strategies. It was resisted at first because many product folks and engineers thought of marketing as a bad word and akin to lying. IT people don’t want to be marketed to (aka sold to or lied to), they would say. I was called a “marketeer” by many of these product engineers early on in my career. It was not a complement.
But content marketing helped to change the conversation. Technology and IT Service buyers need to be educated on the context of new technology. Content marketing helped engineers to see that marketing could be helpful. Creating and publishing content that answers the questions on the minds of your prospects and customers is how you start to build trust, get measurable traffic to your website, and leads for your IT services.
The Big Picture of Content Marketing
I define content marketing as a marketing strategy that consistently publishing customer-focusedcontent on your website that allows you to reach and convert new customers for your business.
So ads, product promotions, lies of any kind, and brochures do not fall under the realm of content marketing.
Content marketing is more important in industries where the educational needs of the buyer are high. That’s why Technology, healthcare, finance and IT Services see the highest penetration of content marketing. Because your buyers demand it.
Quick Takeaways:
Content marketing is an affordable way to reach and convert new clients to your IT Service business
Publishing helpful content that educates your audience is more effective than more traditional forms of paid advertisement
Keeping a consistent and quality content marketing schedule is critical to achieving Compounding Marketing ROI
So we’ve assembled a list of what you need to know and how to implement content marketing for your brand to maximize the value of your content marketing efforts for your IT Service business:
What You Need to Know For Content Marketing Your IT Services
Know Your Audience [WHO?]
The first step in deciding what content to write is understanding who you’re writing it for – your buyer persona.
For a B2B IT services, your target audience is usually business owners and technology leaders. But as I love to say, Personas are great except when they suck. What they call themselves, how old they are, your fake names for them – aren’t going to help you create great content.
WHAT Are They Interested In?
You need to focus on topics of interest. What are their top challenges, concerns, questions. What kinds of things are they interested in? What are the hottest topics in your industry.
Source: Forbes
WHY do they care?
You need to answer the WHY for your persona and how it related to your business, like we did here. (and many other ways!) Why is privacy, security, cloud, digital transformation important?
WHEN to publish
Our research shows that businesses that publish more than once a week, see 4-5x more traffic and leads than those who publish infrequently or not at all.
It’s also important to remember that your buyers are searching for answers to their top business challenges every single day!
And of course I love to say that Google is looking for your website to have a heart beat, a cadence, a rhythm that it can see from regular blog posting.
WHO Writes
If your IT business is a start-up or a longstanding pillar of industry, you got to where you are by excellent technicians, service people, and sales reps. Experts in their fields of study and champions of excellence.
But they probably aren’t writers. If you haven’t already, you’re going to have to track down quality writers with proven blog-writing (or even journalism) experience. Ideally, you’re looking for people plugged into the tech or cybersecurity spaces to fill out your website and enhance your content marketing efforts.
But hiring blog writers directly is expensive and time-consuming. You can always try and hire freelancers or work with a writing agency.
There’s pros and cons to both, but you have options when considering content creation for your digital marketing efforts. We believe outsourcing content gives you an advantage because you can get the best of all worlds: experienced writers, less cost than full-time hires, less hassle than finding the write ones.
However, blog writing isn’t the only type of content you want to consider in your content marketing. These days videos, animations, demos, customer testimonials are also important.
Take this example from SaberVox Cloud Software:
By using good expert analysis and real-world application, they explain why you need their services. Leading your prospect to this natural conclusion is the whole point of content marketing! Make sure to hire experienced videographers or content creators to advise you and execute similar content.
HOW to Build Your Content Marketing Strategy for IT Services
Using the framework we provided here should be a good start. Or just call us and we’ll handle it all for you. But whatever you decide, you should consider:
Who you are writing for? What questions do they have?
Where you are publishing? Your website is the best way to attract new leads.
Who does the work. Finding someone to build your content strategy and expert writers is key
How often will you publish
Where will you distribute the content? Can you automate some aspects of promotion?
How will you measure results
HOW MUCH Value Does It Deliver
Half the battle of content marketing is measuring the results and being able to read your analytics for insights into your audience. There’s a couple key metrics you need to keep track of how well you are reaching and converting new customers.
Reach
Engagement
Conversion
Traffic on your content includes the number of eyes and users getting to your website. Important questions to consider during analysis include where are my viewers coming from, how many are there, and what are the demographics I’m the most popular with. These answers will tell you about the raw viewership of your content marketing, giving you a solid base to work from.
Engagements refers to the sharing, commenting, and interacting done with your content across social media. This includes things like comments, likes, and conversations surrounding what your page has published. Higher engagement makes social media platforms more likely to put your content in front of fresh eyes.
Conversions on your content include how many viewers are actually becoming customers via your content. After all, the whole point of this is to convert your prospects into returning, loyal customers and clients. This metric will help you decide which of your content is best for overall viewership, and which gives you the best shot at increasing your bottom dollar.
These metrics should drive your content marketing strategy. You have to be able to look at the trends in the content you produce online and read between the lines. Some of the things you do will work better than others. Figure out what does – and do more of it.
Know Your Website(s)
If you’re in IT, you know that good UI (user interface) is crucial to the overall experience of a viewer. After all, who would want to call you to implement IT Services if your web experience is terrible?
Furthermore, knowing what your social media following and presentation looks like is important to keeping up your brand image for clients and prospects.
We’ve worked with dozens of companies working on a relaunch of their website and put together this checklist of things you want to consider.
But your main website isn’t your only website. Your social media channels are powerful distribution tools meant to share your services with the world. IT services lend themselves best to more professional avenues like LinkedIn and Facebook.
Check out what industry leader Tata Consultancy Services is doing on LinkedIn. With over 10 million followers, they are amplifying their brand voice and in turn distributing their content to prospects and customers all over the world. By effectively utilizing a professional platform, they are able to boast their authenticity and credibility for all to see.
As an IT Service company, you probably don’t have to be on Snapchat, but identifying your communities across Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn can put you in a place where the conversation already is.
Wrap Up
IT services is a tough field to set yourself apart from the competition. In a research-oriented business, you need to be able to put the information your prospects need to convert right in front of their faces. By knowing your audience, creators, analytics, and websites, you can boost awareness of your services today! Go get to it!
Looking to work with a marketing consultancy for your IT service provider? Look no further! You can check out MIG’s weeklyblogcontentservice or scheduleafreeconsultation.
The post The Power of Content Marketing for IT Services appeared first on Marketing Insider Group.
https://www.sydneysocialmediaservices.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Screen-Shot-2022-10-25-at-11.55.06-AM.png8301482exposurehttps://www.sydneysocialmediaservices.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/sydney-social-media-services-white.pngexposure2022-11-01 23:21:372022-11-01 23:21:37The Power of Content Marketing for IT Services
One of the most fundamental parts of effective content marketing is solid keyword research. Keyword research allows you to bring the voice of your customer into your content marketing strategy. It also provides a measurable way to show the value of your content in a relatively short period of time. All digital marketing starts and ends with keyword research.
Keywords drive your content, because the higher you rank with keywords, the higher you are on Google’s search results. Seeing how your organic search rankings are performing is crucial to a healthy content marketing strategy.
Getting views on the content you publish for your website isn’t exactly the easiest thing to accomplish. It’s easy to throw money at paid advertising to up your impressions on your content marketing efforts, even if it does hurt to see a chunk of your marketing budget disappear.
But believe it or not, organic search rankings can help out your website traffic even more than paid advertising! Not to mention, it’s a cheaper way of going about marketing your site. Fueling the SEO machine is an important part of getting your content in front of your prospects’ eyes.
The distinction between promoted and organic is important, as they both accomplish different goals, but both are driven by good keyword research.
Quick Takeaways:
Search engine optimization for your content and overall website is crucial to building your organic search rankings
Keyword research is how you determine what’s being searched for in relation to your product or service
Creating your content with SEO practices in mind will boost your overall engagements online
Here’s the only 5 keyword research tools you’ll ever need to nail your SEO strategy and how to use them long-term:
Semrush
This is the main keyword research tool we use for ourselves and all of our clients (not a paid endorsement). Semrush allows us to research our client, their competition, run competitive gaps, dive deep into keyword research. It also allows for research into paid keywords, site audits, and more.
Once we identify our client’s focus keywords, we send them off to our editorial team to brainstorm content ideas and actual article headlines. We also upload them into Semrush to create a client Visibility Tracking Report. These reports are sent monthly to all of our clients showing them:
Average visibility in search for all the keywords we are tracking
An estimate of their organic search traffic (take this with some measure of caution)
Average rank position
How many keywords they have in the top 3, top 10, top 20 and top 100 and how many have improved or declined
My favorite part of the report is the competitive review that shows client visibility vs the competition which is a direct reflection of the keyword research powering our content strategy:
Whether you’re interested in keyword and website research for you, your competition or your industry, Semrush is a powerful keyword research tool.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs has provided excellent service for marketers and SEO specialists all over the world for over a decade. They offer a good trial plan and fantastic keyword research analysis on the top performing articles and websites.
Additionally, they offer a free service for website owners called Webmaster Tools, and my favorite is their free Keyword Generator which provides 150 keyword ideas from any main keyword.
Keywordtool.io
Keyword.io boasts a 99.9% success rate for its free keyword research service. So free in fact, that you don’t even need an account to use its comprehensive database. As per their site:
Keyword Tool helps you employ Google Suggest for keyword research. It extracts Google keyword suggestions and presents it to you in an easy-to-understand interface.
Google Keyword Finder
Surely you might’ve guessed we’d get right to one of the biggest sources of keyword research in Google’s keyword finder. Google is the dominant force in the keyword research industry, as sooner or later your content will be on their browser search results.
While it isn’t as intuitive as some of the other tools, it is free and has all of the data you need to see to make good decisions in your SEO practices.
Moz
Moz is the first keyword research tool I ever used. It’s great for analyzing your website and specific keywords as well. Moz can help you understand how people are finding your website and how to make the most of keyword opportunities.
Some other Keyword Research Tools to Consider
Google Trends provides not just the relative volume of multiple keywords but also the trend data so you can see what is hot and what is not
QuestionDB uses related queries and reddit for identifying question-based keywords
Jaaxy provides keywords, topic and idea suggestions for any keyword or website
Keyword Sheeter uses Google autofill to populate thousands of ideas from any focus keyword you enter
Answer the Public also uses Google autofill and “People Also Ask” to populate search phrases with all the who, what, why, when, and how version of any search query
Keyworddit pulls data from reddit and offers an interesting take on topics to explore for any keyword
Bulk Keyword Generator is a good research tool for local SEO
Soovle uses search data from google, youtube and Amazon
SECockpit is the tool SEO experts swear by because it provides lots of depth
Keyword Snatcher provides up to 2,000 keyword suggestions for any “seed” keyword (as the SEOs call them)
KWFinder allows you to search by keyword difficulty
Serpstat is another tool that allows you to go deep and is beloved by many SEO experts
New to keyword research?
We start by asking our clients for a few simple things:
5-10 keywords they wished they ranked for
The categories, themes or topics they think are important in their industry
Their top 4-5 competitors
2-4 industry or trade publication their audience reads
From there, we are able to expand the keyword list. We group those keywords into structured categories or themes. Then we identify the most important or “focus” keywords by looking at whether they are long-tail, or short-tail, have clear buyer intent, and if they represent an opportunity based on a competitive gap.
My favorite trick is use CPC data to identify those keywords other people are spending money against. The assumption here is that people wouldn’t pay more to advertise against a keyword unless it had lots of value.
BONUS: Check out this and more of my keyword research tips and tools in my latest webinar 10 tips for optimizing your content marketing.
If you’re looking for more of a basic training on keyword research check out this video:
Conversion rates from your keyword research
Views are great, but what happens after the initial click? Is the reader just leafing through your website? Are they sharing it? Are they actually purchasing your product or scheduling your services?
Conversion rate shows how many prospects are becoming customers. This metric is the real shining gem of your content marketing efforts! Converting prospects should be your number one goal with content marketing.
Oftentimes the places where you are producing and publishing media give you excellent analytics tools to help assess what ads or content is producing the best conversion rate.
By figuring out what content does the best across what platforms, you can make better, more informed decisions on what media to spend the most time on.
Retaining your conversions as long-term customers
Source: Marketing Charts
Customer Retention is the measure of the percentage of customers who continue to use your product over time (you know, the ones you just pulled with good keyword research!). Some companies measure the opposite of retention: churn rate. Or the percentage of customers who leave in a given time period.
Ultimately, the only way a company can be successful is if the cost to acquire and retain a customer is largely outweighed by the monetization that customer will return to your business (about 3-5x that cost).
So how do you know if you’re retaining customers acquired through your digital media efforts? There’s a few ways!
Analytics – Often websites will show you on the backend how many customers you have are repeat customers. Diving deep into the extra layer to see how many came from your digital media efforts is a good step in hitting your KPIs.
You can ask – Using surveys through your email marketing efforts can help you figure out just who has been using your product or service over a longer period of time. This also builds brand trust because people want to feel like your business cares about them.
Look at the voices on your social media channels – Seeing individual voices in your business’ community discuss your business, service, or content can give you a good read on how many newer customers you are attracting and if there are any older clients steering the overall conversation online.
Wrap Up
Whichever site you use, keyword research is a necessity for creating reliable search traffic for your business. Without keeping good SEO practices in mind in your writing and meta description, you’re throwing away easy traffic that makes you money.
You have the knowhow, it’s time to hop on board with one of these keyword research tools and see which is right for you!
Do you want to use some of the marketing strategies seen here on MIG’s site but need some help or advice? Marketing Insider Group has a team of 35+ experienced writers ready to produce content for YOUR business. Check out our weeklyblogcontentservice or scheduleafreeconsultation.
The post The Only 5 Keyword Research Tools You’ll Ever Need appeared first on Marketing Insider Group.
https://www.sydneysocialmediaservices.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Screen-Shot-2022-10-25-at-10.40.56-AM.png5971167exposurehttps://www.sydneysocialmediaservices.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/sydney-social-media-services-white.pngexposure2022-11-01 02:25:502022-11-01 02:25:50The Only 5 Keyword Research Tools You’ll Ever Need
Have you been tasked with planning your marketing team’s content calendar for the entire year? No doubt, this can feel like a tall order. It requires including key themes defined in your content marketing strategy and planning for various types of content. Likely, the driving force behind your content marketing success is your business blog.
Setting out to create a long-term blog content calendar can be daunting – even for seasoned marketers. To help ease the pressure and avoid extra stress, we’ve created a comprehensive guide to walk you through the process of building an effective, robust content calendar to empower your team to develop strategic content all year long.
We use this process for each of our clients who publish an average of two articles per week (100 per year). Read on to learn about the specific tactics and tools we use. They’ll help your team stay on track and work ahead if desired. Most importantly, this process will help you impress your boss and create engaging content consistently for your target audience.
Quick Takeaways:
Every content calendar should focus primarily on the customer rather than your business.
Many free resources exist today to help you identify keywords, develop relevant blog topic lists, and learn what customers are searching for in your industry.
Diversifying your output with various forms of content (e.g., blog articles, infographics, podcasts, etc.) is essential in implementing a successful content marketing strategy.
What is a Content Calendar?
A content (or editorial) calendar will help you plan, organize, and schedule your content successfully. It’ll help you and your team stay on track and enable you to work ahead. You can build a content calendar using a basic spreadsheet like Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets, a physical calendar, a content calendar tool like DivvyHQ, or a project management tool like Trello or download some readily available content calendar templates.
The Role of Content Marketing Today
You’ve probably heard the standard business advice circulating the internet today: “Remember your why.” This tip applies directly to content marketing. By focusing on meeting our buyer’s needs first, you can address their challenges and offer relevant solutions to their problems.
The buyer’s journey has shifted over the past several years. Today, with such easy access to the internet from nearly any location in the U.S., consumers rely on their own knowledge and self-education to find the best products and services for their needs. Consumers are in complete control of their purchasing journey. Access to multiple platforms gives them full control over the information they consume and with whom they share their discoveries.
As content marketers, it’s our job to create content that resonates well with our target audiences. We must create content that builds trust, share specific information about our products and services, and have an end goal of converting prospects and leads into paying customers.
How to Build an Effective Content Calendar for Your Blog and Other Content Formats
To develop an effective content calendar for the upcoming year, you must identify your goals, know your target customers, and understand the buyer’s journey. Only then can you identify, plan, and organize the most relevant topics and content formats to engage your audience successfully throughout the year.
Follow these seven steps to build a simple, SEO-driven content calendar for your business.
1. Identify Your Content Marketing Goals
Ultimately, the goal for most businesses is to generate more customers and improve Marketing ROI. But what does that process look like for your business specifically? What S.M.A.R.T. goals do you have to move your business forward and reach more of your target audience effectively?
Source: Indeed
Your content marketing strategy should address consumers in each of the three phases of the buyer’s journey: the awareness, consideration, and decision stages. Your marketing plan should also include retention marketing strategies to keep your current customers happy.
Top of the funnel (TOFU)/awareness stage: In the first phase, you should focus on attracting new customers. Your content should be helpful, relatable, and easy to share. Avoid mentioning specific products or services at this stage. Instead, offer relevant advice, address pain points, and focus on educating consumers to help build their knowledge of your industry.
Middle of the funnel (MOFU)/consideration stage: During the second phase, consumers are somewhat familiar with your brand and beginning to trust you. They might follow you on social media or subscribe to your newsletter. Continue building trust and positioning your brand as a thought leader in your industry.
Bottom of the funnel (BOFU)/decision stage: It’s decision-making time in the buyer’s journey. In this phase, consumers are usually ready to take the final step toward making a purchase. Provide product-specific content based on what you now know your target audience is seeking. You’ve earned their trust and want to encourage them to make the final jump.
Source: Hotjar
Of course, the sales journey doesn’t end when consumers reach the bottom of the funnel. You’ll want to create content that reengages past and current customers so they remain loyal to your brand and continue engaging with your business.
While all stages of the customer experience are vital, most of the content you produce should be geared toward consumers in the first two stages. The awareness and consideration stages are often the most time-consuming parts of the buyer’s journey. It takes time to build trust and credibility with a target audience.
Our research suggests that for every single buyer, around 100 individuals are looking for answers to questions that trigger a buyer’s journey. Examples of TOFU/MOFU content include educational blog posts, brand stories, and thought leadership articles.
As the funnel suggests, you’ll have a larger audience at the top of the funnel. As you start getting more specific with your content and weeding out those who aren’t serious about paying you for a solution to their problem, your audience will grow smaller. Those who make it to the BOFU are usually more serious prospects. They’ll be much more likely to become loyal customers than those at the TOFU. Focus on quality over quantity.
At MIG, we plan our content calendar based on our company goals. Most of the content we produce focuses on our top priority. We then fill any gaps by addressing our secondary goals.
2. Conduct Keyword Research
The first step in identifying relevant content ideas is generating a list of questions and topics you already know people ask in your industry. Speak with individuals on your sales team, and look at past campaign analytics. Customer testimonials can also prove insightful.
Another easy way to brainstorm new ideas is by searching online. Here are several content marketing tools to help you develop new topics, identify questions people are asking today, and generate specific topics for your content calendar.
Google
Test out Google autofill by entering the first part of a query into the search bar. The autofill will show you what people most often enter into the search bar for any given topic. Try entering your target personas and keywords you’re considering to see what appears.
For example, we could enter “marketers will” or “marketers are” to get a sense of what our target audience is thinking, doing, or looking for online.
Also, look at the “news” tab on Google for current events and keywords to consider targeting.
Google Trends
Google Trends shows you how popular different search terms are over time. It’s a great place to start determining relevant keywords based on their relative search volumes. Compare two or three similar terms to identify which ones are more interesting to the public.
AnswerThePublic
AnswerThePublic is a free, valuable resource for content marketers. It scrapes Google to identify, categorize, and visualize questions people are asking surrounding specific keywords. You can remove irrelevant results and download a customized list as a CSV file.
BuzzSumo
With BuzzSumo, you can find the most socially engaging content for any website or keyword. This robust tool gives content marketers an organized way to plan their content calendars while also viewing competitor data. Keep in mind that you’ll need to subscribe to a paid plan after a free 30-day trial.
Google Keyword Planner
Keyword Planner is another easy-to-use tool that can help you cultivate additional topic ideas. Focus on pinpointing short-tail and long-tail keyword phrases that accurately represent your brand and target audience. Ultimately, you’ll develop content based on select keywords to support both. If you’re already actively involved in search engine optimization (SEO), this process should feel natural to you.
3. Select Relevant Keywords Based on Your Research
After you’ve brainstormed keyword and topic ideas, it’s time to narrow down your list by selecting the most relevant keywords and phrases. You’ll use these to build content topics and optimize your content throughout the year. This keyword data will be the foundation of your content calendar.
After generating your keyword data, it’s time to review your findings and select the phrases that make the most sense for your business and target audience. Here’s the basic process we use.
In the following example, we want to reveal insights surrounding the keyword “film transfer,” a service that involves converting old film to DVD and other digital formats.
Using Keyword Planner, submit a related keyword phrase where it says to “Search for new keywords using a phrase, website, or category.”
Next, extract all keyword phrases relevant to your target audience and future content strategy. You can easily save keywords using the “Add to plan” option. In the next phase, we’ll refer to this data.
Review the keyword ideas Google suggested, then add phrases to your plan if they have significant meaning and are relevant to your project. You can view annual search trend data by hovering over the bar graph icon next to each keyword.
Next, it’s time to leverage your trend data to create your content calendar and learn when to schedule content when people search for it most.
In our example, the phrase “film transfer to DVD” has the highest search volume between November and January, probably because of the holiday season when families spend more time together.
To keep your data even more organized, you can create new “ad groups” or related keyword categories. This will make your data easier to analyze for future use.
After gathering enough keyword data, download your data into a spreadsheet to further analyze and organize it for your content calendar. You have several options when downloading your keyword data. Make sure you check “Segment by month” to include monthly search volume so you can analyze search trends.
You can also “Save to Google Drive” if you’d like to work directly from Google’s spreadsheet interface.
4. Format Your Keyword Data Spreadsheet
After you download your keywords, open your spreadsheet. You’ll see several columns that are irrelevant to this process. We suggest formatting your spreadsheet in a way that makes reviewing the data as efficient as possible. It’s time to remove unnecessary information.
We usually delete columns A through I and rows labeled “keyword type,” “segmentation,” “forecast quality,” “impression share,” “organic impression share,” and “organic average position.” We also delete rows 3 to 8 to further tighten up the data.
There’s no right or wrong way to organize your data. Focus on which categories are the most relevant to your team so you can format your spreadsheet in a way that is easy to interpret. The outcome may look similar to the figure below – an organized list of key phrases with monthly keyword data.
5. Review Your Keywords to Identify Trends
The final phase of keyword research involves reviewing your data to pinpoint trends. Look for keyword phrases that inspire high-quality, relevant topics for your audience and business. Many of them will be long-tail phrases that searchers use to ask questions or find a desirable solution.
Below, we’ve selected a few phrases that we could use to produce relevant content marketing topics for our example client.
As selecting keyword phrases in this phase, consider the months in which particular keywords are popular. Highlight the months with the highest search volume so you can maximize your SEO traffic potential at the right time of year for every piece of content you publish.
6. Determine Your Publishing Schedule
After conducting keyword research and before building out your content calendar, you need to pick a content publishing schedule you can stick to. Consistency is the key to success when it comes to content marketing.
Aim for publishing at least one or two blog posts per week.
According to our research, the sweet spot for publishing frequency in terms of traffic and conversions is two to four times a week. Of course, this will depend on your business’s size, goals, and industry. However, as a rule of thumb, the more often you post on your blog, the more traffic and conversions you tend to get.
Source: HubSpot
Your volume will depend on your available resources, so choose a blogging frequency you can stick to long term to start seeing positive results over time. Identify deadlines for each stage of the blogging process: outline, first draft, copyediting, and publish date. Also, schedule in time to update older blog posts so they remain relevant. Remember that blog post traffic compounds, meaning it gains more traffic exponentially over time.
Setting up a clear framework will help you get everyone on your team on the same page. Having a clear plan upfront will also allow your team to work ahead of schedule.
6. Construct and Organize Your Content Calendar
It’s time to put together your content calendar. Once you know your topics and have decided on a plausible content schedule, the next step is choosing the types of content formats that fit well with the topic, your business resources, and your target audience. As we mentioned earlier, the buyer’s journey should also help you determine which types of content will work best for each stage.
Here’s a quick list of content types you could work into your content calendar:
Next, we’ll move onto the final step in the process: choosing a tool for building your content calendar. DivvyHQ and Google Sheets are what we use but there are plenty of great tools for content marketers who are serious about staying on schedule and making trackable progress.
Google Sheets
We like using DivvyHQ for our medium to large enterprise clients with multiple formats and a large group of collaborators. Google Sheets works for our smaller clients because it’s easy to share, update, and customize. Our content marketing templates includes space for due dates on topics, different content formats, brief details about the project, target keywords, personas, and calls to action/offers.
We recommend setting up your content calendar similarly so you know the purpose of every piece of new content you produce. Try to include these core components at a minimum:
Topics
Working headlines
Content format
Target keywords and phrases
Calls to action or offers you want readers to click on
You can break down your content calendar by week, month, or topic, depending on your publishing volume. You could also incorporate social media planning into your calendar to know where you’re going to distribute which pieces and whether you’re going to pay for promotion.
Trello
Trello has various templates you can use, including one specifically labeled “Content Calendar.” It allows you to add specific rules for your team to follow, use color-coded labels for different categories, and build your workflow – right into the platform.
I’m personally allergic to Trello but some of our clients use them or other project management tools like Asana because their team is already on those platforms.
7. Celebrate Your Progress
Once you’ve filled out your content calendar, take a minute to congratulate yourself. You spent a lot of time researching and planning an effective year-long strategy to set your marketing team up for success. That deserves recognition. Next, it’s time to start creating content.
Leave Your Content Calendar, Blogging, and Marketing to the Pros
If building a content calendar and keeping up with consistent blogging sounds overwhelming, we’d be thrilled to step in and lend a hand. Our Content Builder Service includes keyword strategy, content planning, content creation, regular blog publishing, and SEO. We also measure search visibility for our clients and report ROI so you know exactly what you’re getting from us every step of the way.
If you’re ready to get more organic traffic to your website using quality content, we’d love to get you on the phone for a quick consultation. Start bringing more traffic to your website to get the results you’re looking for.
If you are ready to get more traffic to your site with quality content published consistently, check out our Content Builder Service.
Set up a quick consultation, and I’ll send you a free PDF version of my books. Get started today and generate more traffic and leads for your business.
The post How to Plan Your Blog Content Calendar for the Entire Year appeared first on Marketing Insider Group.
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Content marketing is an organic way for marketers to create owned assets and increase views through quality publishing and composition. Not to mention, less of the budget burned on traditional marketing efforts.
But executing a content marketing strategy can be overwhelming. A content management workflow is a game changer to perfecting your content marketing strategy.
Imagine the ideal outcome from your content marketing efforts. Then map out the steps to get there! This is your content management workflow. This involves every step from the planning phase to the distribution phase.
By creating an efficient content management workflow, you can maximize the efficiency of your marketing efforts, saving overall time, money, and resources.
Here’s a quick rundown of a good content management workflow from Megan Minns to get you started –
Quick Takeaways:
Good planning leads to consistency
Every strategy is unique and should fit to your business’ needs and goals
Content management is crucial to staying organized and up to date with your content publishing
So what does a content management workflow look like? It’s a pretty straightforward plan of attack:
Deciding what content fits your brand and strategy
Assigning and distributing workload
Creating quality content
Using a software / calendar to map out publishing
Distributing across different platforms
Maintaining and adapting
Let’s dive into it:
Deciding what content fits your brand and strategy
Content marketing in 2022 looks a little different for every business. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all strategy for everyone (wouldn’t that be nice). This means that you have to be particular about the content you’re focusing on.
What’s done well for you in the past? What are your competitors doing that seems to be going well? What kind of content do you like to read? These are all important questions to ask yourself when considering a content marketing strategy.
What’s done well for you in the past? What are your competitors doing that seems to be going well? What kind of content do you like to read? These are all important questions to ask yourself when considering a content marketing strategy as a whole.
What specifics should you consider? Well, there’s two big things to give you a “North Star” so to speak:
Buyer Personas
Buyer personas are what your ideal customer looks like, their interests, their hobbies, generally speaking who you think you should be marketing to.
Your buyer personas should be your main reference point in deciding what content to produce, assuming that you have identified who or what they are based on market research and customer data.
SEO / Keywords
Having a healthy content marketing strategy depends on knowing how your organic search rankings perform. Be honest, when was the last time you clicked the seventh link down?
You need to talk about the stuff that matters to your target audience. Look to others in your industry for guidance on what to focus on. Your enemy is your best friend in this case. You should be covering all the topics they are, but better.
So now that you have an idea of what you want to write about, you must consider what methods of writing or creating will reach your audience the best.
Content Types
Blog Posts
Blog posts are one of the biggest methods of content marketing. Blog writing brings customers onto your site that might not even know they need your service or product yet.
It’s like door-to-door selling but your prospects are the ones knocking, not the other way around! Use blogs to entertain and inform your audience about information relevant to them.
They aren’t quick to write but are a great long-term marketing investment. In fact, CoSchedule.com says
Further research from content marketing software specialists estimates that the average blog post takes around 6-7 hours to write, edit and publish; promoting a piece of content on social media will take around 2 hours; this includes writing the promotional posts for your social channels.
Don’t be alarmed though! This is a case of time and effort = yield, trust us!
Video Packages
Videos can showcase your product or employees in a way text cannot. Things like testimonials or introductory videos of your staff builds credibility with site visitors.
Creating good video will come at an expense. Ideally, you’ll want to:
Hire a professional company to shoot the videos. You might think any video is better than no video at all, but a poorly made video could actually hurt your credibility
Show the product from every angle and make sure to highlight its best features if you’re in a product industry
Employ someone to actually be in the video and talk the customer through the product or use an employee that your clients would be working with
Case Studies
Researching out case studies is an easy way to build credibility and inform your audience about relevant topics. Oftentimes you can accomplish one in house, or you can hire an expert to conduct one and write it out for you.
Social Media Posts and Graphics
Graphics and platform-specific posting is tricky, but not impossible. Make sure whomever is creating this content is familiar with basic design principles as well as the product or service you are selling.
A good social media team and campaign goes a long way in 2022!
Assigning and distributing workload
A good plan won’t accomplish much without people to execute it. Take it from communications and marketing experts, making sure your people and you are on the same page is super important.
Think about what you have to work with in terms of your writers or content creators. Who has an eloquent tone? Who looks most confident in front of a camera? Who is ALWAYS on social media? Wielding your marketing talent is important and knowing who is strongest with different forms of content can save you some headaches down the line.
Writing quality content and doing it consistently can be challenging. If you find yourself burning to midnight oil all to often to get blogs out week after week, it might be time to hire some help. You might look into hiring experienced content writers or a content marketing agency to do the research, writing, and publishing.
Creating quality content
Above all else you need to focus on the quality of your content. The more you publish quality content, the more your readers will want to come back to see what else you have to offer.
The key to creating quality content is to focus on relevant information that your prospective customers really care about. An easy way to do this is to write about their problems and how to solve them.
Say you sell couches. You’d write articles like How to Pick the Perfect Couch for Your Space or 10 Ways to Know It’s Time for a New Couch. These topics are a great way to reel in a sales qualified lead that you might not have with just paid advertising. This lead is much more likely to convert than someone who stumbled upon one of your ads a week after they bought a new couch.
When maintaining your blog, it’s important to follow these rules to give you the best shot at SEO rankings. Playing this one by the book is important as browsers are picky about what gets put at the top of search results and what goes on page 4.
Check out some of our insider trick to writing the perfect blog post:
Plus, a summary of the must do’s:
Aim for longer articles
Google likes articles with some substance to them. Too little words might keep your hard work from topping the search page! An ideal range is 1,000 to 1,800 words.
Stay focused on keywords
By understanding the terms most relevant to your topic and audience, you can successfully optimize for search. If your company sells couches, words like couch, living room and interior design, are what you want to focus on.
Have a compelling meta description
Source: Kinsta
Hook, line and sinker! Having a succinct, direct and eye-catching description under your article will help reel in clicks.
Internal Links
Internal links are hyperlinks in your blog content that link to other pages within your domain. You should include 1-2 internal links in every blog post.
Call to Action (CTA)
The CTAs is where you direct your readers to their next step. A good CTA can increase conversion rates by 121%! Optimize your CTA to increase interaction with your brand and promote sales.
The internet is a distracting place, so you really have to lay out the next step for your viewer plainly before they move on. Imagine someone reading your blog about couches and totally missing the fact that you sell them! Then they leave your page and Google “couches near me” and click on the first sponsored ad from Raymour and Flannigan… The horror!
Create a distribution plan
Content isn’t worth much sitting in your drafts folder all day. Once the content is created, it’s time to schedule it out using a program or calendar.
How often should you be sharing your articles?
The more often you publish blog posts the better they perform, so the short answer is as often as possible.
There are a few other factors to consider as well when it comes to publishing places other than your website.
Twitter timelines move a mile a minute, so you can easily share multiple times a day without dominating someone’s timeline. If you’re creating videos to push out on YouTube, you might be uploading less frequently because of the time it takes from ideation to creation.
On slightly longer-form platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn, once a day is plenty. Remember: when you spend the time creating an online community of people interested in your product or industry, you’ll reap the benefits in views and engagement.
Use services like MailChimp and Constant Contact to create subscriber lists out of customers and prospects that visit your site. Then you can share your content directly to their email as often as you see fit. Read more on email marketing to find the best method for your business.
Distributing across different platforms
Creating a great video or case study can take a decent amount of time. To capitalize on the time and money spent creating content, you should be sharing it everywhere you can! Way more people will see your case study if you publish it on your website, LinkedIn and promote it on Twitter.
The first thing you might try is a social media audit. Where does your company have a voice or a community?
By maintaining your social media presence, you are creating an avenue to get your content in front of more prospects. Social media is the land of sharing! Say a handful of your followers repost your content. You just contacted hundreds of more people without having to lift a finger.
Social media also offers interactivity online. A comment section is the modern-day coffee house. It’s an ideal online space for your community to discuss ideas and connect with each other.
Some metrics to measure the success of your social media: how many followers you are gaining and how often posts are being engaged with.
Engagement is any comment, like, or share of your posts. The more engagement your posts get, the more likely it is that social media platforms will promote your content. It all always comes down to understanding and mastering the algorithms.
Maintaining and Adapting Your Strategy:
When creating your content marketing process, you have to define your key performance indicators (KPIs) and be sure to measure them at every turn!
Examples of KPIs include:
Sales team productivity
Customers generated from content marketing vs. traditional marketing routes
Time and money spent content marketing vs. paid advertising
KPIs are driven by things like traffic, conversions, and your overall SEO rankings. KPIs keep your content management workflow on track to crush your marketing goals.
By taking a step back and analyzing how your content workflow and production efficiency is doing in relation to your KPIs, you can gain insight into your successes (and failures!).
With insight, you are better equipped to see what things are working, and what strategies should be reconsidered or tweaked so that your content marketing is thriving.
Wrap Up
Content management workflow really comes down to quality planning and understanding of your goals. The content itself is the hard part, and keeping it moving and efficiently through your process will keep things running smoothly for your marketing team.
Now that you have the knowhow, it’s time to go build your content management workflow strategy!
Do you want to use some of the marketing strategies seen here on MIG’s site but need some help or advice? Marketing Insider Group has a team of 35+ experienced writers ready to produce content for YOUR business. Check out our weeklyblogcontentservice or scheduleafreeconsultation.
The post How to Build a Content Management Workflow That Works appeared first on Marketing Insider Group.
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I’ve been around the world, to marketing conferences, to large brand marketing team meetings, and I’ve spoken to hundreds of marketers who think marketing with content is the same thing as content marketing.
In this post, I’m going to give you the definition, the reason why many leading companies use it to drive 6x more ROI from their marketing while spending 62% less. And why you should start using it right away!
So what is content marketing really?
Content marketing is the process of consistently publishing relevant content that audiences want to consume in order to reach, engage, and convert new customers. It involves brands acting more like publishers and creating content on a destination you own (your website) that attracts visitors.
Content marketing is not the same thing as marketing with content. It is customer-focused, answering important customer questions and meeting their needs and challenges.
Content marketing creates a financial asset. It allows businesses to reach, engage, and convert customers they would have never seen by using the keywords customers use and creating the content they consume on your own website to answer those questions.
Content marketing represents the gap between what we produce as brands and what our audience is looking for. It leads to quantifiable business value.
Quick Takeaways:
Content marketing is an opportunity to reach and convert new customers.
Content marketing drives measurable results and ROI over more traditional marketing tactics.
Content marketing allows you to build relationships that enhances brand trust.
Content marketing focuses an organization on telling brand stories that resonate with customers.
[Do you need to start your own content marketing program? Check out our weekly blog service that includes an annual plan and monthly reporting!]
What Is Content Marketing Really?
Content marketing, when you peel away all the layers of techniques, trends, and possibilities, is a business opportunity. Because it’s a tool they can use for growth. As businesses struggle to achieve growth in a challenging business environment, we’re seeing more interest and budget shifting to content marketing as the best choice for marketing budgets.
That makes it really different than advertising (more on that in a bit).
What makes content marketing different than other types of marketing is in the ROI and business value it delivers over time.
Content marketing allows any business to increase their presence in organic search because it focuses on sharing thought leadership. By using SEO and content insights as critical components, content marketing is increasingly more and more aligned with customer needs.
However, for content marketing to work, it must be well-executed. That includes developing a content strategy.
Successful content marketers align themselves to a content calendar – 12 months of content ideas based on data. Then that plan is executed and optimized on a regular basis
For many companies, content is randomly published based on requests from executives. These random acts of content do not support strategic goals and often produce little in the form of business results.
The Business Advantage of Good Content Marketing
Unlike other approaches, there is something special that makes content marketing stand out as the best of modern marketing methods: It’s sustainable.
When done well – with a strategy behind it and relevancy within each piece – it offers the benefit of exponential growth, building brand awareness and trust, winning over prospects and convincing leads, and endearing your customers, helping to build a loyal base of brand advocates.
Once you get your content marketing strategy going, it’s that positive snowball effect in action. Your brand presence gets bigger and more impactful. It becomes easier to achieve your marketing goals with future content because you already have a foundation in place – a vast content library of written, visual, and experiential content, all designed to resonate with your target buyers.
This is in contrast to traditional marketing. Advertising, even with today’s sophisticated digital ads, can create overexposure. Audiences become saturated with brand promotion that offers no genuine value to the people you’re trying to build customer relationships with.
Content Resonates, Advertising Saturates
A critical factor in your content marketing is relevance. What are your customer’s challenges, pain points, and needs? That’s what you should be writing about, not producing a commercial for your brand. Well-written, insightful content draws your audience in and sets you up as a thought leader.
On the contrary, advertising, even digital ads, leads to overexposure and saturation. You haven’t attempted to build a relationship with your audience. Instead, you’ve only captured a story about your brand as the star with no room for the real hero, your customer.
To sum it up, as I said a few years ago, the right content is “a vehicle that can deliver us from the throes of the ‘death by SPAM’ illness that still persists in many marketing organizations.”
The Impact of Content Marketing on Business
So, you may still be wondering, why content marketing? Isn’t it just throwing up a blog every now and then? How do you know content marketing has real ROI (return on investment)?
It’s normal to have apprehension about investing in something that seems hypothetical in nature. But the stats don’t lie. Consider these impressive numbers:
Web traffic growth: Companies that blog have, on average, 434 percent more indexed pages than those that do not. More content equates to more traffic, and content marketers have seen 7.8 times higher year-over-year growth in unique site traffic. (Source: Aberdeen)
Leaner budget but bigger results: Content marketing garners three times more leads than paid search advertising. Additionally, it costs 62 percent less to execute content marketing versus any other type of campaign. (Source: Demand Metric)
Higher conversion rates: Brands that use content marketing can expect 6 times higher conversion rates. (Source: Aberdeen)
More chances for your brand to get in front of the right eyes: 47 percent of internet users read blogs daily. (Source: Statista)
Buyers crave content in the decision-making process: 80 percent of business owners and executives prefer to learn about brands through articles rather than ads. 41 percent of B2B buyers consume three to five pieces of content before talking to sales. (Source: Demand Gen Report)
Thought leadership: Developing a credible library of content that signals your authority and expertise draws in decision-makers. In fact, 60 percent of buyers said thought leadership convinced them to purchase a product or service they had never considered previously. (Source: Edelman-LinkedIn)
The numbers don’t lie. This is but a short collection of what you can expect when you put momentum behind your content marketing. You can realize these benefits and more. However, you have to start with a strategy, discerning what content marketing means to your business and how you’ll go about being intentional with what you produce and disperse.
There are plenty of excellent content marketing examples from brands big and small across all industries. I’ve got one great example to share with you now, which is even more meaningful given the current environment.
Cleveland Clinic, one of the most respected healthcare brands, established a campaign around its value of putting “Patients First.” The objective was to have all its 40,000 employees, which they call “caregivers,” to engage with this value and live it every day.
To do this, they created a video, “Empathy: The Human Connection to Patient Care.” The powerful video was first used internally but was then posted publicly on social media and its blog, Health Essentials. The blog saw substantial growth, with 6 million visitors each month!
It was a huge win for their content marketing team, led by Amanda Todorovich. They understood their audience, both internally and externally, and created content that had a lasting impression. I talk more about Amanda’s well-thought-out strategy in my book Mean People Suck.
As I said a few years ago, “Content is the vehicle that can deliver us from the throes of the ‘death by SPAM’ illness that still persists in many marketing organizations.”
It’s the solution to the dwindling impact of traditional marketing techniques.
Take advantage of this business opportunity and you have a lot to gain.
What Content Marketing Isn’t
It’s important when using content marketing to understand what content marketing is, versus what it isn’t.
With this in mind, content marketing isn’t just pieces of content – randomly publishing blogs, social media posts, videos, landing pages, email, etc. and hoping something sticks.
It isn’t more “stuff”
Where a lot of brands go wrong with content is they fail to get the strategy part, unleashing content campaigns without the direction of where it should take the business to and an understanding for who the content is for.
Without strategy, you may end up with a promotional video, for example, that looks a lot more like a promo ad for your business than content. A promo video, as high-quality as the video production may be, isn’t a piece of useful video content designed to resonate with a target group at a specific stage of the buyer’s journey, and that is connected to the other content within your strategy.
A blog doesn’t constitute a content marketing strategy
Yes, blogging matters substantially in content marketing, but simply having a blog does not make you a content marketer.
It’s a part of the equation, but not the only aspect. Content marketing is about providing information, and that can happen in many formats and channels. The central theme of this information is that it is useful to its intended target.
Only when company blogs are structured like publishers – with 3-5 key themes and a consistent publishing schedule – can they be considered the key delivery mechanism of your content marketing.
Content goes far beyond blog posts. It also goes far beyond the digital world. Content is information, but it can be delivered through myriad channels (video, graphics, live events, apps, social media posts, emails). What differentiates this information as content is that it is designed for a specific audience, for a specific purpose.
It’s not a commercial
The mistake many companies make is that they think all they have to do is create content with no direction. In turn, they begin to develop things that revert back to the old ideas of advertising.
A video that should explain how you make a customer’s life easier turns into a commercial about features. That’s not the kind of content that will engage your audience.
It’s not about posting on social media
You don’t own Facebook, YouTube, or LinkedIn. And while these platforms can be helpful in sharing your content and distributing your thought leadership on the platforms they use, social posting in and of itself is not content marketing.
Social media’s value comes from bringing people back to your website. The social platforms decide what content is shown to which audiences. Unless you pay them to target specific people. That’s just advertising.
Consider social media an effective platform for distribution in your content marketing strategy.
It’s not pay for play
With content marketing, you own the distribution channels, from your website to your social media profiles to your email list.
You get to formulate how the story will go and build relationships with your intended markets.
Advertising, on the other hand, is pay for play. You don’t really control where it will appear or who will see it. You simply hand over money to a third party for rented space.
It’s not meaningless
Think about it. What problem does your Facebook ad solve? How has your company’s last AdWords campaign made a positive difference for your customers? Content is supposed to solve a problem. It’s this genuine intent to help your customers that offers the authenticity that consumers are so attracted to. Take this one step further, from providing value to your buyer to providing value to society, and you’ve landed on the future of content marketing – purpose driven brands.
It’s not rented space
Where content stands out is that a brand owns the distribution channels – the website, the in-person events, the social media profiles, the eBook series. Advertising, on the other hand, is rented space – you have to constantly purchase a media channel in order to market.
How the Experts Define Content Marketing
Joe Pulizzi’s Content Marketing Institute defines content marketing as:
“Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience – and ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”
Neil Patel takes this definition a little deeper:
“[It’s] a long-term strategy that focuses on building a strong relationship with your target audience by giving them high-quality content that is very relevant to them on a consistent basis.”
And one of my favorites, from Rebecca Lieb:
“It isn’t advertising. It isn’t push marketing, in which messages are sprayed out at groups of consumers. Rather, it’s a pull strategy – it’s the marketing of attraction. It’s being there when consumers need you and seek you out with relevant, educational, helpful, compelling, engaging, and sometimes entertaining information.”
And my definition:
Content marketing delivers the content your audience is seeking in all the places they are searching for it.
So, if you can weave together the endless list of possible content choices and channels, with the strategy that speaks to your audience in the voice of your brand, you know exactly what content marketing is and how to make it grow your business.
Why Content Marketing Matters (and Always Has)
You may be carefully rethinking your content right now. Big changes have disrupted basically every industry. Content marketing isn’t new. It’s been gaining prominence for the last decade, and its acceptance as a critical strategy is fortified. This is especially true when compared to the “failures” of traditional marketing, which is now ignored more than watched.
Now, the playing field is more level because a company doesn’t have to invest millions in ads to get noticed. They can use content marketing instead to build a community and deliver a refreshing new spin on old problems for their audience.
Content marketing matters because your customers say it does. Maybe not verbally, but the statistics and data about how much content buyers consume support this statement. Nobody wants to be sold to, no matter the makeup of the audience. They want to be informed and engaged. They react much more to a story that shows them how to overcome their challenges than a dry, disjointed approach that may play on fear.
Get this: Buyers are still craving valuable content.
No matter where most companies began 2020, they are in a unique, new place now. They may have the same problems, compounded by the pandemic, or new ones. Either way, they still need direction and help. Your brand can offer this with content that looks at your customers where they are right now and seeks to bring them solutions.
Content Strategy: Your Foundation for Everything Marketing
Back to the starting question of what is content marketing, it’s often called a strategy. It is and must be based on a strategy. It all comes down to purpose – the questions why, who, how, and where.
You’re probably already aware that it’s a must-have; otherwise, you don’t have a vision or any way to know if it’s working. What you can be sure of, now and in the future, is that your content strategy must be nimble.
If you are just now creating a strategy or revisiting it now due to the pandemic, follow these crucial steps.
Define your mission, purpose, and goals: Who is your audience, what is your purpose in improving their lives, and what do you want to accomplish?
Understand your audience: You need to flesh out your buyer personas so you know what challenges them and motivates them. It’s more than just demographics; it’s preferences and what matters to them. This is certainly an area to reconsider right now.
Determine your priorities: In this step, you need to determine what content formats and channels should be a priority based on audience preferences. Remember, you need to publish content continuously, so these steps get you to a place where you’re establishing how you’ll do this.
Work out the details: The previous steps set up parameters. Now it’s time to get a plan of action ready, defining the essentials like keywords, topic generation, social media usage, promotions related to big moments for your brand or industry (i.e., industry events or new product rollouts), and creating a publishing process.
Start executing and creating content: With all the pieces in place, it’s now time to execute your strategy. If you’ve hammered out all the necessary parts of your strategy, you have the framework in order.
These steps aren’t rigid. You can go back to each one as needed, depending on what’s happening. In that time, you can also discover channels or areas where you can innovate.
Let’s take a closer look at some tips you can use to make your strategy stronger and able to adjust to new demands.
Content Marketing Tips You Can Use Right Now
In searching for what content marketing is and how to leverage it, it comes down to the execution of your strategy. Maybe you already have one, but it’s been derailed by the pandemic.
As noted, your content marketing strategy must be nimble, no matter what. Most disruptions aren’t foreseeable, but here are some things you can do now to use content marketing to continue to cultivate connections with your audience.
Use LinkedIn to Support Your B2B Content Marketing Strategy
LinkedIn has cemented its position as the social media site for B2B companies (although consumer brands have found success here, too). Its prominence is supported by the fact that 94 percent of B2B marketers use LinkedIn for content marketing.
But how can you more effectively use LinkedIn in your content marketing strategy?
LinkedIn has advantages over other social media sites. Those benefits are just as critical now as they were in 2019, including:
Better Targeting
What’s great about LinkedIn is it’s a place where you can find decision-makers at all levels of a company. You can target based on both job titles and demographics. Of its over 630 million users, LinkedIn even breaks down the levels of influence, enabling you to zero in on those who ultimately drive purchase decisions.
Why does this matter even more now? Because people are still heavily using the site to find answers to new problems – problems they didn’t consider until now. Think of the business that’s now having to transition to a remote workforce. They’ve got lots of concerns, and companies that can offer them technology can be the answer.
Image source: LinkedIn
Strategy Alignment
Before you begin to try something new on LinkedIn or start at all, you need to ensure that how you use it aligns with your content strategy.
Why are you using it? Thought leadership, lead generation, building awareness?
How are you using it to generate traffic? Where do you want them to go?
How will you interact with customers, partners, and industry experts on the site? And how will this help you meet your content marketing goals?
Optimizing Content Marketing for Ecommerce
Ecommerce retailers are in a new boat now. Even if they had physical locations, the demand for online purchases is now the only channel for most. While it may seem like ecommerce and content marketing aren’t a great match, many online sellers are leveraging it. They’ve found that optimizing content for their ecommerce brand can drive success.
That’s true for B2B ecommerce as well. B2B ecommerce is expected to grow to $1.8 trillion by 2022. Why the growth, which could actually outpace B2C ecommerce?
Much of it has to do with a changing B2B buyer (millennials now account for 73 percent of the B2B buyer group). They are digital natives and enjoy the convenience of buying online and look for content to support their buying decisions.
Additionally, given the improvement in logistics and delivery, it could take less time to get what they need online, instead of visiting a physical location. Now, it’s probably their only option, so it’s time to consider how you can optimize your ecommerce content.
Key things to do for optimization:
Revisit keywords in your content.
Emphasize user-generated content (UGC) to plug into your social media profiles to improve your credibility.
Know your customer and what they expect and create content based on this.
If it makes sense to adopt new channels and formats, then do so. For example, if the audience you want to engage with is on TikTok, investigate how you can connect with them here.
While it’s good to be experimental in ecommerce content marketing, you don’t want to alienate your audience by trying too hard to leverage new trends as opposed to focusing on the message.
Image source: Sprout Social
Content Marketing Metrics: What Defines High Performance?
Now that we’ve discussed what content marketing is, it’s time to talk about how you can measure its performance. Once you have a strategy that’s clicking and you’re rolling out high-quality, meaningful content, you should pay attention to these content performance metrics.
Defining Content Marketing KPIs
When defining your key performance indicators (KPIs) for content marketing efforts, it’s different from answering the question of ROI. KPIs focus on the operational side of content marketing. The most important aspect of KPIs is your “why.” Why do you do what you do? That’s what people buy – not what you do.
Some KPIs to consider include:
Measuring how a content marketing campaign impacts your sales team’s productivity: Does your sales team understand the objectives of the campaign and why it would deliver leads to them? If you have a disconnect here, leads won’t blossom into conversions.
Understanding the percentage of customers that were marketing-generated: Knowing what new business was won from content marketing shows its influence.
Time to revenue: How long does a campaign need to generate interest? If the time seems long, you need context (i.e., is your solution’s buying cycle long, have you inserted urgency into your campaign?).
Customer acquisition costs (CAC): Calculating the CAC for each campaign provides key insights on how to streamline operations to reduce it.
Metrics to Support KPIs and Give You the Real Picture on Performance
After defining KPIs, you should put your attention on these key metrics:
Traffic
Look at users, pageviews, and unique pageviews in Google Analytics.
Learn where your traffic is coming from and make changes based on this. For example, if referral traffic is coming from your Pinterest page, you should consider developing more content for the site.
Conversions
Is your content driving conversions? It’s a simple question, but not a linear answer. You can see from traffic that your content is getting more eyes, but what do they do next? Determine how you can link conversions, however you define them, to content to understand its sphere of influence.
Engagement
Traffic is great; engagement is better. Engagement happens when people spend more time on your site and how many pages they view in a visit. Those are all metrics you can find on Google Analytics.
Another element of engagement is what you’re doing on social media. Is your content being reacted to, shared, and commented on? The more this happens, the more it’s likely to drive more credible traffic.
SEO
Organic search rankings are vital to a healthy content marketing strategy. Keywords matter because that’s how your audience looks for answers. You should consistently monitor your keyword performance, including your current position for each keyword you’ve targeted.
Check this at least every 30 days. See where you’re rising and falling and find out why. It’s also imperative to optimize every piece of content, including having correct meta data, as well as a good ratio of keyword to content (how many times you use the keyword in your word count – 3 percent is ideal).
Authority
Authority isn’t easy to measure, compared to the other metrics described. The objective is for your website to have a strong domain authority (DA), which is a number between 1 and 100. The higher the score, the greater the authority.
Building authority improves SEO and conversions and is measured by Google. Google looks at things like backlinks from sites with good DA, as well as how much the content is shared, which Google would consider an illustration of the content’s quality.
Your Questions About Content Marketing Answered
In the course of working with brands across the business landscape, a few questions come up time and time again. What is content marketing? Why is it important? Who should care? What should they do about it.
It reminds me of the classic journalism approach of answering the who? what? when? where? why? and how? questions to get to the bottom of every good story.
So here is my attempt at answering those basic questions.
Why is content marketing important?
Content marketing is important because the world has changed dramatically since we started carrying around all the information on the internet. Add this to our the ability to connect with anyone in the world at any time, with social networks and our mobile phones.
Traditional marketing is broken. 86% of TV ads are skipped. 99.99% of banner ads are ignored. US Newspapers have lost $40 Billion in the last 10 years. Advertising isn’t working for publishers or brands because we have been taught to tune it out.
Brands need a new way to connect with their audience. The approach that is working is the continuous creation of content people want. That’s content marketing.
Who needs to worry about content marketing?
Strategic digital marketers all need to understand the importance of content marketing. They should be able to define it. They should be able to talk about why it’s important in today’s digital + social + mobile world. They should be able to point to good examples of it. They should be able to discuss how to get it done in their organizations.
This starts with the CMO and his or her role in building a culture of content that connects with the target audience. And it falls all the way down to the person building websites, creating social content and building editorial calendars.
What are the biggest mistake marketers make with content marketing?
The biggest mistake marketers make is thinking that this is just another tactic where you can promote yourself. We did that with social. As Linkedin and Facebook and Twitter emerged, brands started pushing out the same old ads they used on more traditional channels. But social networks are just the plumbing. It’s content that fuels social connections. Content that people want to consume and share.
So many marketers think in terms of campaigns and promotions. When their audience is looking for stories – entertainment that makes them smarter, makes them laugh or inspires them in some way. Effective brands are taking themselves out of the story. They make it all about the audience. They don’t talk about themselves or their product but they talk about what they do for their customers. They talk about how we can make the world a better place.
As the mother of content marketing Ann Handley likes to say, they make the customer the hero of the stories they tell.
How can a brand get started with content marketing?
Brands typically get started with because they are seeing their marketing efforts suffer and they are seeing their competitors take leadership positions as publishers in their markets.
Brands should begin by trying to understand who they are trying to reach and how their brand can help that target audience. You should then start to identify the questions your customers are asking, the content they consume and the places where they hang out online. Then, begin to craft a strategy to help the client meet those customers’ needs with content – delivered regularly, across many channels and types.
When should a brand get started with content marketing?
Every business, whatever its size or revenue, needs to get started yesterday. Or they risk losing market share as they lose mind share to their competitors. Or not building up any.
You can get going in as little as 30 days. (I’d be happy to help Within 90 days you could be a leader on certain topics. Within a year, you could begin to see a return on the investment. Or even sooner depending on how well you execute. Within 3-5 years, the content marketing efforts could become the largest source of value the marketing organization brings to the brand.
What are the common roadblocks to content marketing success?
The common roadblocks to success, besides the fear and lack of courage to change are leadership support from the top.
Content marketing needs to be a CMO-led initiative. He or she needs to put someone in charge and give them the budget and the resources to get it done.
The next thing is usually skills. Training and enablement are one of the key responsibilities of the content marketer because content is created all over the organization.
Finally, brands need the technology to manage the flow of content between their people, and all the channels they manage. This is the only way for content marketing to scale across the enterprise.
How do you overcome the roadblocks?
Strategies to help brands get unstuck include a competitive assessment or to do some social listening to determine if your brand is losing market share where it counts – on the digital, social and mobile web.
Additionally, brands should look at their content inventory and see if it is performing.
Finally, marketers need to shift investment away from the tactics that aren’t working. It’s not to say that advertising will ever go away, but we are seeing many brands shift investment away from their paid advertising and into content marketing.
What are some things that a company needs to do to be successful with content marketing?
The most important component of successful content marketing is a customer-centric culture that seeks to meet the needs of its customers. It is this “higher purpose” that resonates with customers. We are smart enough to see through brands who try to fake a desire to be helpful vs. promotional.
The second thing is the ability to create engaging content that answers your customers’ most important questions. The brands that are able to break through all the clutter and noise in our information-saturated society is not the one with the biggest budget, or the fanciest advertising agency. It is the brand that can create content that captures our attention, on a human level, that wins the hearts and minds of their desired audience.
The third thing is an entrepreneurial spirit. Effective content marketing is constantly iterating many ideas. That is why it must be continuous. Most of the things you try will fail. But every failure provides insights into what works. And this spirit is the foundation for creating break through content that reaches more people than you thought possible. Test. Learn. Optimize.
What does a CMO need to understand about content marketing?
CMOs need to focus on culture. Our CMO Jonathan Becher likes to repeat the line from Peter Drucker that “culture eats strategy for lunch.” Instilling a customer-centric culture is increasingly a matter of survival for firms in this age where consumers block out any messages they don’t want.
From a business case perspective, CMOs need to look across the company and identify all the content that gets created, at considerable cost, and that no one ever uses. Some content marketers have suggested as much as half of the content created inside a company, for customers, never gets viewed, even once. That is considerable cost and inefficiency. And this can support the idea for change.
So content marketing is not an additional expense. It can be funded by eliminating existing waste. And it’s an opportunity to make marketing more efficient overall.
Where will content marketing go from here?
Businesses need to plan for the future. In just a couple of years more, 90% of the web will be video and images. My kids have already resorted to using emojis more than words to communicate. So we need to be ready for entertaining, visual and fun content that can scale.
The future of content marketing is more human interaction. You will see brands tap into their employees to reach out, often through social networks, to customers. You will see brands hiring comedians. You will see more brands creating much more video content, and even sponsoring content more commonly created by entertainment companies.
To set themselves apart, many brands are beginning to build production houses to create entertaining — even funny — content. Imagine that for a B2B brand? But there are already examples at places like Cisco with my good friend Tim Washer, and GE and Red Bull and Netflix and Amazon.
Ready to Reposition Your Brand with Content Marketing?
If you are ready to get more traffic to your site with quality content published consistently, check out our Content Builder Service.
Set up a quick consultation, and I’ll send you a free PDF version of my books. Get started today and generate more traffic and leads for your business!
Editor’s Note: this post was updated with new stats and research on September 14, 2021.
The post What is Content Marketing, Really? appeared first on Marketing Insider Group.
Getting views on the content you publish for your website isn’t exactly the easiest thing to accomplish. It’s really easy to throw money at paid advertising to bolster your impressions on your content marketing efforts, even if it does hurt to see a chunk of your marketing budget disappear.
But believe it or not, organic search rankings can help out your website traffic even more than paid advertising! Not to mention, it’s a cheaper way of going about marketing your site. Fueling the SEO machine is an important part of getting your content in front of your prospects’ eyes.
Copypress.com defines organic search rankings as:
those that come from simply typing in an area of interest. The results come from algorithms that are not impacted by advertising in any way. They are set apart from sponsored results that have pay-per-click ads or results in which the search engine is paid for showing certain results or gets money for each click gained.
The distinction between promoted and organic is important, as they both accomplish different goals.
New to SEO? Here’s a quick video to give you the cliff notes on organic search rankings from Brian Dean:
Quick Takeaways:
Search engine optimization for your content and overall website is crucial to building your organic search rankings
Content marketing is a sustainable way to create new traffic to your website and draw new eyes to your new product, but you can boost your views with paid content marketing
Creating your content with SEO practices in mind will boost your overall engagements online
Getting general
Let’s get some definitions out of the way so we’re all on the same page!
Traffic:
Traffic is about pageviews and users. Services like google analytics can give you an accurate read of this data. It also helps you see exactly where your views are coming from.
Conversions:
Views are great, but what happens after the initial click? Is the reader just clicking your ad then exiting the page? Are they sharing it? Are they actually purchasing your product or scheduling your services?
Conversion rate shows how many prospects are becoming customers. Converting prospects should be your number one goal with digital marketing.
SEO:
Source: WSI Proven Results
Remember, it’s not just the content itself, but how you write it out. Good SEO/SEM practices are everything. They are how you make sure your articles rank above your competitors when prospects are searching for information.
Some quick steps to improving your SEO rankings are:
Modifying your URLs
Utilizing keywords and keyword research in your content
Designing your page for the most user-friendly experience
Using different tools and software to make the process easier
An added bonus of using SEO tools is the ability to measure your progress through content marketing automation. We’ll come back to this concept later, but by utilizing distribution software you can ensure your content is performing optimally.
If SEO intimidates you, you can always hire writers that already have the know-how to do it for you. This practice can elevate your content overall, not just with search engine optimization.
By seeking the best writers for your staff or as a consultant, you can take all the guesswork out of proper content marketing.
Why are organic search rankings so important?
Organic search is for the prospects you haven’t made contact with yet. When they’re searching for general terms related to your product or service, it’s your aim to be one of the very first things they see on the page. It’s you or your competitors.
Source: Marketing Charts
For example, let’s say your startup sells grilling aprons. Creating content focused around keywords like recipes or grills will bring your target prospects (grillers) to your site. As they read your blog, they’ll realize “wow, I DO need a grilling apron for all this brisket I’m cooking!”
Some articles you’d write using this example would be:
The 15 Best Tools for your Grill
Top BBQ Recipes for the Summer
What Sauces are best for Grilling?
This isn’t just for selling products – the same idea applies to selling services too! If you’re trying to gain clients for say, your real estate business, some article ideas include:
What to Look For When Buying a House
10 Things First-Time Homeowners Get Wrong
Best Places to Live In (Your Area Here)
By creating content based around the things your prospects are interested in, you’re giving them a portal directly to your site.
Measuring your organic SEO rankings:
What’s the point of putting in all this effort if you can’t tell what’s working? When creating your content marketing process, you have to define your key performance indicators (KPIs).
Examples of KPIs include:
Measuring how a content marketing campaign impacts your sales team’s productivity
Understanding the percentage of customers that were marketing-generated and what business was earned from organic search
Measuring hours of work put into content marketing for organic search vs money put into ad spending
KPIs are your benchmarks for success, and every other metric is what defines your KPIs.
Seeing how your organic search rankings are performing is crucial to a healthy digital marketing strategy. Luckily – there’s some B2B tools designed to help you analyze your key metrics and strategy like Mailchimp and Google Analytics.
Followers and engagements:
An easy metric to check out the success of your social media is how many followers you are gaining and how many times your posts are being engaged with.
You can check out what posts lead directly to a prospect or customer clicking through to your profile and clicking the follow button to stay up-to-date with your company.
Socialmediaexaminer.com says:
The number of social media followers you have matters because bigger numbers translate to higher levels of engagement and more traffic.
Followers aren’t everything though, engagement is! Engagement is any comment, like, or share that happens to one of your posts. Driving up engagement leads to social media platforms suggesting your content to their users.
Being on the front page of someone’s social media timeline is the golden goose of digital marketing. This is done through quality content appropriate to each platform and consistent monitoring of what is successful and what isn’t.
Conversion rates:
Conversion rate shows how many prospects are becoming customers. This metric is the real shining gem of your content marketing efforts! Again, converting prospects should be your number one goal with content marketing.
Oftentimes the places where you are producing and publishing media give you excellent analytics tools to help assess what ads or content is producing the best conversion rate.
By figuring out what content does the best across what platforms, you can make better, more informed decisions on what media to spend the most time on.
Wrap up
Organic engagement isn’t always easy to build, and you might be tempted to cheat a little and strictly use paid advertising. What’s important to remember is that organic engagement works best in tandem with paid forms of advertising!
Keeping diverse methods of distribution will bring your clients in from every part of the web. Now that you have the knowhow, it’s time to work on building your organic search rankings!
Do you want to use some of the marketing strategies seen here on MIG’s site but need some help or advice? Marketing Insider Group has a team of 35+ experienced writers ready to produce content for YOUR business. Check out our weekly blog content service or schedule a free consultation.
The post Yes, Organic Search Rankings Are Important! appeared first on Marketing Insider Group.
“Does content marketing work? How long does it take to start seeing the results I want? Why does content marketing take so long?” We get these types of questions a lot.
And yes, content marketing works. It can take around four to five months to start seeing substantial results.
Keep in mind that the answer for your business could look very different. You might see Content Marketing ROI more quickly, depending on how much effort you put into strategy, production, and promotion.
Conversely, it may take you much longer to see the same results based on your content output and focus. Your timeline will depend on these factors:
Business model
Industry and market
Goals and strategies
How you define success
Content marketing takes time to work. It’s a long-term strategy. If you desire immediate results, you may not find them this way. But if you want to build your business on a firm foundation and grow confidently into the future, content marketing is one of your best options.
Here are some stats that prove the value of content marketing:
Over 90% of B2B marketers and 86% of B2C marketers use Content Marketing
Traditional marketing costs 62% more than Content Marketing
Businesses that blog produce 67% more leads than those that don’t
Quick Takeaways:
Every business will have different results based on efforts. How content marketing works for your business will depend on your goals and execution.
Content marketing is a long-term strategy. It can be discouraging and expensive in the beginning, but the results can be significant and compound over time.
Consistently producing quality content is crucial.
How to Tell If Your Content Marketing Strategy is Working
Learn how to set your content marketing team up for success and measure your results to see how well your strategies work over time. Here’s a basic blueprint.
1. Define Success for Your Content Marketing Efforts
To know “if content marketing is working for you,” you first need to define what success looks like for your business.
Does success begin when you make the first dollar? Are your efforts successful once you meet a benchmark for traffic or leads? Is it when you make a certain number of sales? Number of shares on Facebook or LinkedIn? Engagement? Month-over-month growth?
If your efforts achieve the goals you set, your brand will be successful. But content marketing requires consistency.
As you can see from the chart above that includes 15 of our clients, content marketing shows an increase in leads and revenue almost right away! But the real growth starts around month 6. So when is the best time to start content marketing? Yesterday!
At SAP, it took us a year to achieve $1 million in sales. But the ROI was evident on day one when our sales team used the content to generate conversations with prospects!
2. Use the Right Metrics
Before you begin setting goals and building content marketing strategies to grow your business, you must define your key performance indicators (KPIs). Make sure you choose the best metrics for your industry and business.
For example, your key metrics might include website traffic, email subscribers, and brand awareness if you’re a startup. If you’ve been in business for over ten years, you may want to focus on metrics like revenue and sales-qualified leads (SQLs).
We recommend including the following two metrics when building a Content Marketing plan, regardless of your business’s size or scope.
Traffic: Traffic is the lifeblood of a website. Without consistently growing your traffic, your content marketing efforts will fall flat.
Leads: Ultimately, the reason you’re driving traffic to your website is to generate interest and leads in your business or content.
But if you’re looking for a more detailed view, click here right now to download a FREE content marketing measurement template.
3. Research Your Target Audience and Create Buyer Personas
How will you build effective strategies if you don’t know who you’re targeting?
One of the first steps to building a solid content marketing plan is researching your audience. Develop reader personas to target your ideal consumers through your content.
Don’t create personas that have no actionability. When building personas, include things like:
Basic demographics (age, gender, income, etc.)
Background information (career, position, work history)
Personality/unique traits
Pain points/challenges
How they search for answers (where they can find your business)
After researching online, conducting interviews for more insight, and learning where your target audience spends time online, you can form your reader personas and determine what types of content they’re seeking. This will play directly into your goal setting and marketing strategies.
4. Set SMART Goals
If you don’t set goals and define what “success” looks like for your business, you’ll never know if you’re getting desirable results from your content creation and marketing efforts. Before defining and implementing content marketing strategies, set some SMART goals for your business.
Use appropriate metrics for your industry and business, as we mentioned above. Semrush found that some of the top content marketing goals include generating more quality leads, attracting more traffic to the website, improving brand awareness, and improving customer loyalty and engagement.
Here are a few examples of what SMART goals for your business could resemble.
Grow my newsletter subscription list by 500 contacts by June 1, 2023.
Increase blog traffic to 10,000 monthly visitors by the end of Q1.
Generate 100 marketing-qualified leads per month on average in Q2.
5. Analyze Results Regularly
You’ve started implementing your strategies, developing and publishing quality content, and working toward your SMART goals. Now you need to start tracking your results so you can see your progress. By measuring performance, you can see whether the initial goals you set are realistic or if you should adjust them for the next period.
Revisit your overarching goals every three to six months to ensure you’re on track. If you’ve exceeded your plans early, develop new ones to facilitate more remarkable growth moving forward.
Make sure you’re getting the feedback you need to know how effective your CM is working. You can email your contact list or send out a survey. Determine which tactics are helping you reach your SMART goals and which you should leave behind moving forward. Refresh your goals, adjust your strategies, and continue building momentum.
6. Be Patient and Consistent
Don’t rush the process or expect results prematurely. If you do, you’ll be disappointed and quit too early. It takes time for content to gain traction on search engines and your business brand to build authority and awareness online.
You may also see spikes and drops in traffic to your website. This is normal. Concentrate on the gradual and steady climb. Content marketing results grow exponentially, as opposed to linearly. What may seem like a slog at the beginning can turn into tangible progress and revenue over time.
Remember that content marketing is hard work. The top-performing articles online are long (over 3,000 words). But they get three times the traffic, four times the shares, and three-and-a-half times the backlinks of average-length articles (901-1200 words). That’s why many businesses outsource their content marketing – so they can focus on their business and leave the legwork to those who live and breathe SEO and content creation.
If you want results, you must put in the work. Invest in the right resources, and be patient – especially in the beginning. If you do, you should see sustainable and substantial results over time.
Effective content marketing will grow your online presence, boost brand awareness, drive traffic and sales, and increase revenue. Here are several additional benefits:
Build a foundation of quality, authoritative content to rank higher on SERPs
Gain higher and sustained traffic and lead volume
8 Reasons Content Marketing Isn’t Working for Your Business
If you do not see the results you want, consider the following list of reasons content marketing doesn’t work for some businesses. You may resonate with one or more of them, which means there’s hope. Make strategic adjustments to improve your efforts and results moving forward.
1. Your Budget is Too Low
If you don’t invest enough time and resources into CM, you won’t see the results you want. A larger budget can afford higher quality content and quicker results. More succinctly, you get what you pay for.
Make sure you’re consistent, regardless of publishing frequency and budget. You can focus on less expensive tactics, like blogging and free social media promotion. Skip more expensive strategies like paid ads and video marketing until you can afford them.
Keep track of which efforts have the most significant ROI for your business, and then spend more of your budget there. Decide if outsourcing CM would be more efficient and cost-effective than trying to juggle all tasks in-house with limited resources – or hiring an expert to take it over.
While content marketing can be expensive, it can have a high return on investment. It generates around three times the number of leads per dollar spent as traditional marketing (Demand Metric).
2. You’re Not Producing the Right Types of Content
59% of B2B marketers believe blogs are the most valuable channel for content marketing. Companies that blog produce 67% more leads monthly than those that don’t (Demand Metric). However, it’s not the only viable or profitable option.
If you’re not already blogging, you should start. If you are, here are some other forms of content to consider adding to your marketing plan:
Are you promoting your content after you create it? This step of the process is as critical as the creation process. Without promotion, you’ll have a hard time building engagement. Engagement leads to more traffic and higher rankings on search engines.
Start promoting your content on social media, in emails and newsletters, and on other websites or blogs when appropriate. Also consider working with influencers. Ask them to share your content with their audience and expand your reach. Just make sure you have the same target consumers.
4. Content is Low Quality or Doesn’t Provide Value
Does your content engage your target audience? Does it address their specific needs and provide value?
To be considered high quality, your content must be relevant, engaging, and well written. It also must demonstrate authoritativeness, expertise, and trustworthiness on the given topic (Google). It should encourage your readers to act – like to fill out a form or download a PDF.
If your content isn’t providing the right value to readers, it’s insufficient. If any of these statements are true, your content may be of low quality.
Your content is dull when it should be engaging.
Your writers don’t understand your market or buyer personas.
The content you’re producing doesn’t connect with or excite your ideal audience.
Your writers are inexperienced. Shoddy work will produce shoddy results.
Your content is vague or too broad rather than focused. It doesn’t have depth.
5. You Don’t Publish Consistently
We’ve already touched on this. The more frequently you can produce quality content your audience loves, the better and faster your results will be. Ensure consistency long term to build confidence with your followers. Commit to a plan you can fulfill.
6. SEO Isn’t a Priority
Are you doing keyword research and tracking your progress? Are you optimizing every new piece of content for search engines? Are you keeping old content updated so that your website stays fresh and timely? If not, you won’t succeed.
If you need help with SEO, hire an expert consultant or marketing agency. They can conduct an audit to identify SEO gaps or weaknesses and tell you how to fix them (or fix them for you).
7. The Landscape is Extremely Competitive
If you’re in a niche with steep competition, it may take longer to rank on search engines and attract the traffic you want. Here are a few tips for staying in the game if you’re in an aggressive industry:
Keep producing consistent, quality content.
Conduct content gap analysis and fill those gaps.
Go more in-depth than your competitors.
Target a more specific audience and treat them like royalty to build a raving fanbase.
To compete with much larger and more established competitors, you must be strategic, work hard, and build a devoted following.
8. You’ve Set the Wrong Expectations
If your expectations are too high, you’ll never be satisfied – even with stellar results. Don’t compare your results to other businesses or your competitors. You’ll get discouraged if you can’t reach your goals.
Instead, compare your results with how you performed this time last year or even six months ago. If you haven’t been producing consistent content that long, give it more time to gain traction.
We Can Make Content Marketing Work for Your Business
Marketing Insider Group is a content marketing agency and business thought leader. We exist to deliver strategy, ROI, content creation, branding, coaching, and more for our clients. We designed our Content Builder Service to craft custom content marketing strategies to help businesses win new customers fast.
MIG will do all the legwork for you. We’ll devise a content plan, implement crucial strategies, and help you reach your SMART goals. We’ll craft quality content that draws in the right traffic and converts leads. You can focus on growing your business.
Learn more about our Content Builder Services.
The post How Long Does It Take for Content Marketing to Actually Work? appeared first on Marketing Insider Group.
https://www.sydneysocialmediaservices.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Screen-Shot-2022-10-05-at-12.30.10-PM.png5421062exposurehttps://www.sydneysocialmediaservices.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/sydney-social-media-services-white.pngexposure2022-10-06 03:44:562022-10-06 03:44:56How Long Does It Take for Content Marketing to Actually Work?
Within 90 days you could be a leader on certain topics. Within a year, you could begin to see a return on the investment. Or even sooner depending on how well you execute. Within 3-5 years, the content marketing efforts could become the largest source of value the marketing organization brings to the brand.
