Are you using different types of content marketing to execute your strategy?
If not, it’s time to start. Maintaining a diverse content library boosts the overall ROI you’ll earn on your content. Plus, it makes you more competitive in a crowded online content landscape — HubSpot found at least 7 types of content commonly used by brands in 2021.
Image Source: HubSpot
In the sections that follow, we’ll walk through these types of content and more. We’ll cover how each of them earn unique results for your brand, plus ways to execute them effectively for your business.
Quick Takeaways
Blogs increase indexed pages by more than 400% and earn more site visitors and views.
Video content will account for 82% of all online traffic by the end of this year.
Case studies are a powerful form of social proof because they demonstrate real results.
Interactive content is a differentiator — it stands out from the massive amount of static content created by brands.
People share infographics 3X more than any other type of content on social media.
Ebooks and whitepapers are popular types of content to use as lead magnets.
User-generated content comes from brand advocates like customers, employees, and influencers.
Why should you use different types of content marketing?
Content marketing is all about attracting traffic to your website with engaging, high-value content. A diverse content library expands your brand reach through these efforts and aligns with different audience preferences. It enables your content to be shared across a range of channels and engage various customer segments.
It also provides a way to always share information in the most optimized way. Some examples: a large list of statistics made more digestible on a visual infographic, a client success story made more relatable through video interviews, or a blog post made more shareable with social media.
In short: when you publish different types of content, you have more opportunities to connect with your potential customers, which translates to more sales and revenue for your business.
8 Types of Content Marketing to Include in Your Strategy
Blogs
If you’re going to choose one type of content to start with, absolutely make it your company blog. Blogs are the foundation of every good content marketing strategy. They’re a driver of organic traffic and a platform for sharing your various other types of content, too.
Some quick stats that show the huge ROI of blogging: businesses with a blog on their website have, on average, 434% more indexed pages, 55% more visitors, and 97% more inbound links than sites without a blog.
Blogs are most effective when they’re extremely active. Research has found that publishing 11-16 times per month results in 3.5X the organic traffic than blogs that publish less frequently.
Image Source: Hubspot
You can even capitalize on content diversification within your blog strategy with different types of blog posts. These include:
Ultimate guides – cover your foundational topics and serve as evergreen content
Listicles – easy-to-read (and write) posts that can cover just about any topic
How-to posts – walk through the steps to completing a task or solving a problem
Case studies – tell customer success stories and demonstrate brand value
News and opinion – provide commentary on current events in your industry
For more on making your blog an effective source of organic traffic for your brand, check out our guides on setting up your company blog and writing the perfect blog post.
Video Content
Video is emerging as the future of online content. Cisco predicts that by the end of this year, 82% of all online traffic will be made up by video. Users prefer it over other types of web content and brands use it for customer engagement across platforms — think YouTube channels, social media posts and stories, videos embedded in blogs, client interviews and more.
Brands often think that video content is beyond their content creation capabilities, but that couldn’t be further from the truth in 2022. While it’s true that some brands outsource video for professional production, many others create content in-house using smartphones and other easy-to-use technology.
Commonly used types of video content include:
Webinars – online events around topics that demonstrate brand expertise and feature company leaders
Vlogs and social media stories – more casual types of video content that provide a behind-the-scenes look at a brand
Product demos – walk through product features, benefits, and operating instructions
Viral video – increase brand visibility by participating in popular online video trends
Branded video – branded advertisements features on various platforms like your website, email, or social media pages
Case Studies
Qualtrics reports that 93% of customers look for online reviews or other forms of social proof before they buy a product. Case studies that tell customer success stories are a powerful way to provide this assurance for your audiences.
Not only do case studies demonstrate brand value through real-world examples, they provide testimonials directly from your actual customers to boost brand trust.
The good news: B2B research has found that 83% of customers are willing to share the positive experiences they have with brands. This means that to build a library of case studies, all you need to do is ask your happy customers if they’re willing to participate. Best practices for case study content include:
Featuring a diverse set of customers to relate to your various customer segments
Focusing on the problem solved or need fulfilled
Sharing clear, measurable results in the form of numbers or statistics
Including quotes and direct testimonials from your customer
Interactive Content
Interactive content stands out from the massive amount of static content that already exists online, and it gives potential customers a chance to interact with your brand directly even before they decide to make a purchase. It includes things like quizzes, polls, games, interactive maps or infographics, surveys, and calculators.
Image Source: drumUp
Like video, interactive content often gets an inaccurate reputation as difficult to execute when in fact it exists everywhere online. You likely engage with branded interactive content all the time without even thinking about it — i.e. voting on Twitter polls, using monthly payment calculators, completing customer feedback forms, and more.
Most CMS, social media, and email marketing platforms now have built-in tools for building interactive content without having to code or have any sort of technical experience. Smart brands are also using interactive content for lead generation (by collecting contact information) and to continually improve strategy and offerings (by analyzing the insights users share through their engagement).
Infographics
Infographics visually represent an information set around a particular topic. They’re especially useful for sharing a high volume of and/or complex information in a digestible format. They’re also extremely shareable — they’re shared 3X more than any other type of content on social media.
Infographics may require some assistance from a graphic designer, which are easy to find on sites like Upwork and Fiverr (if you don’t have designers in-house).
Whitepapers and Ebooks
Ebooks and whitepapers are similar types of content — both are developed to showcase brand expertise on a topic — but have slightly different audiences. Ebooks usually cover topics in an introductory way and target more general audiences. Whitepapers, on the other hand, are more academic and in-depth. They’re aimed at audiences that already have some level of knowledge on a topic.
Ebooks and whitepapers are also used at different stages of the buyer journey — ebooks in the beginning stages, and whitepapers in the later decision-making stages.
Both of these types of content lend themselves well to be used as lead magnets, or high-value, downloadable content offered in exchange for user contact information.
Here’s a simple, actionable tutorial on creating lead magnets that convert:
Social Media
Social media can serve a two-fold purpose in your content strategy: first, you can create original content through posts and stories. Second, you can amplify content from other channels by sharing it on your social media platform. Social media content is powerful because it seamlessly fits into natural buyer behavior — nearly two-thirds of American adults are already on social media, and 90% of people buy from brands they follow.
User-Generated Content
Last but definitely not least — you can leverage the power of your audience to become brand advocates and create user-generated content (UGC). UGC comes in the form of social media posts, reviews, social media recommendations, influencer content, and more. Your employees can also be brand ambassadors by creating branded content (like blog posts) and sharing your existing content on their own professional platforms (like LinkedIn profiles).
Over to You
Ready to level up your content marketing strategy? The team of writers and SEO experts at Marketing Insider Group can deliver you optimized, ready-to-publish content every week for a year (or more!).
We can also work with your team to develop a customized content strategy that includes other types of content marketing tailored to your audience, including ebooks, video, infographics, and customer success stories.
Check out our SEO Blog Writing Service or schedule a quick consultation to get started!
The post 8 Types of Content Marketing You Should be Using in 2023 appeared first on Marketing Insider Group.
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Advertisements are pricey. While they are a “necessary evil” for any marketing strategy, ads can burn through your entire budget faster than you can say “help!” Enter: content marketing.
Content marketing is a cost efficient way to get your name in front of prospects most likely to convert. By creating and publishing your own content using proper SEO practices, you can cut down your advertising costs for good.
SearchEngineJournal.com says:
Organizations now have content teams with specific people and resources focusing exclusively on creating content, using it to engage specific audiences and drive business.
Having a designated team doesn’t fix all of your problems though. Over 54% of the companies surveyed claimed their biggest content marketing challenge is creating content that generates leads.
Here’s a quick brush-up on content marketing from Ahrefs to get your creative juices flowing:
Quick Takeaways:
Companies spend A LOT (even too much) on advertising
Content marketing is an effective tool to reduce spending and increase traffic on your site
Providing content people want to read is the most important part of the puzzle
So is content marketing that difficult? Well, it can be – but it is worth the effort. Content marketing is sustainable and gives the benefit of offering exponential growth to your brand.
There are some rules and guidelines you should follow to give yourself the best chance for optimal SEO rankings:
How To Effectively Use Content Marketing
Create must-see quality content
At the end of the day, content marketing is a business opportunity. How can you publish pieces that get the most out of this opportunity? You have to be relevant, credible, and aware of your prospects’ thinking processes.
Think about what your target audience is asking themselves on a daily basis. If your business was in power tools, your prospective clients might be researching DIY how-to projects around the house.
Publishing content like “10 ways to modernize your bathroom” or “Tools you should go buy TODAY” is a great way to build a portal directly to your site for an ideal prospect that you couldn’t get from a traditional ad.
These prospects are more likely to convert than say, someone who is not in the market for a drill seeing your advertisement on a banner ad. Creating organic interest in your product drives up your credibility, and thus your brand authenticity with a prospect.
Follow a distribution plan
Source: Ingram Content Group
Creating content is all well and good, but ultimately means less if you aren’t sharing it everywhere you can. A good first step is a social media audit. Where is your company plugged in – more importantly, where do you have a voice?
By keeping up on your social media presence, you are also opening an avenue to get your content in front of your customer’s eyes. Posting your new content across different platforms gives you a variety of outlets to send the same message to different people.
Not to mention, an open comment section is a place for your community to discuss ideas and connect with each other. This organic engagement is important to the viewership of your content and the overall value of your brand.
You don’t just have to use social media! Content marketing automation has made it easy to send out newsletters across different platforms quickly and easily. Places like Mailchimp and Constant Contact can keep your reader lists organized, not to mention provide excellent metrics for analysis.
Measure your efforts
Source: E-Commerce Germany News
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 content marketing
Measuring hours of work put into content marketing vs money put into ad spending
After you define your relevant KPIs, you tackle key these metrics to support your conclusions:
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 where exactly your views are coming from. This will show you where your efforts are succeeding and where there’s room for improvement.
Conversions:
Views are great, but what happens after the initial click? Conversion rate shows how many prospects are becoming customers. This metric is the real meat and potatoes of your content! Converting prospects should be your number one goal with content marketing.
SEO:
Seeing how your organic search rankings are performing is crucial to a healthy content marketing strategy. Keywords drive your content, because the higher you rank with keywords, the higher you are on Google’s search results. Be honest, when was the last time you clicked the seventh link down?
Put it all together (get help if you need it!)
You CAN and SHOULD use these tips to improve your content marketing. By creating quality sustainability, you can increase traffic to your site and awareness of your brand.
If you have a small operation, or simply don’t have the time to put into a content marketing campaign, hiring help could be the option for you. Hiring quality blog writers to work for you can be an important addition to your marketing team.
That’s not your only route though! You can also hire a marketing agency to create and curate content for your website. Many companies have experience with a wide array of clients, providing valuable insight you might not get from just hiring one or two writers.
Regardless of which way you go, content marketing is here to stay. If you’re only pouring money into advertisements, you’re missing out on free engagement with the most important people to your business – your customers.
Do you want to use some of the marketing strategies seen here on MIG’s site but need some help or advice? What luck! 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. If you’re ready to boost your revenue and cut down on ad spending, let’s talk. Get started today and generate more traffic and leads for your business!
The post Stop Wasting Money on Ads and Start Attracting Audiences with Content Marketing appeared first on Marketing Insider Group.
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Artificial intelligence (AI) is the simulation of human intelligence by machines. Once a thing of science fiction, AI is now a part of our everyday lives. We use it in ways we might not even realize — through digital assistants like Siri and Alexa, facial recognition that gives us access to devices, and “smart” household appliances.
We even see AI-powered writing in action when Google (and the like) finish sentences for us as we write emails.
But what about AI-generated content marketing? Can machines generate quality digital content that engages real human customers?
The short answer: yes. The long answer: it’s complicated.
There’s no doubt that AI-generated content marketing writing is getting smarter and more “human” as time goes on. In fact, we have all probably read articles written — at least partly — by machines without even knowing it.
But if you ask me (and Google, and many content marketing industry experts) we’re still a long way off from AI replacing human writers. There’s an X factor — empathy — that even the smartest AI-powered machine writers just can’t replicate (and likely won’t any time soon).
That said, there are ways AI-generated content marketing can be used by companies to make their content strategies more informed and efficient.
In the sections that follow, we’ll explore AI-generated content marketing from all of these angles. We’ll cover:
The definition and history of AI-generated content marketing
Google’s take on AI-generated content
Why humans are still so important to content creation (and will be for the foreseeable future)
Ways to use AI-generated content tools without sacrificing quality
Let’s dive in.
Quick Takeaways
The release of OpenAI’s GPT tools has powered huge growth in AI-generated content marketing.
Google considers AI-generated content to be in violation of its Webmaster Guidelines and thus categorizes it as spam.
AI-generated content tools can generate content that sounds human, but they cannot capture unique brand personalities or write with empathy for the customer.
GPT and similar tools are powerful for enhancing content creation and strategies, but are not suitable to replace human writers.
AI-generated content: definition and brief history
What is AI-generated content?
As its name suggests, AI-generated content is content created by AI-powered tools. Founded in natural language generation (NLG) technology, AI-generated content mimics human writing with its ability to scan the internet for data (existing content) and summarize it the way a human writer would.
For a long time, we heard about the pending emergence of AI-generated content marketing, but it was slow to take. OpenAI’s release of its Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) tool in 2018 changed that. With only a small amount of input, the GPT tool can generate large volumes of sophisticated AI-generated text.
Every version of the GPT tool brings new capabilities and higher levels of intelligence. The biggest jump occurred with the release of GPT-3, when the tool achieved its most significant jump in skill and accuracy.
Image Source: SEMRush
The evolution of OpenAI’s GPT tools
GPT-1 proved that AI-generated content could be created with zero-shot performance — in other words, the tool could classify data it hadn’t seen before in training models, then use it to carry out tasks. GPT-2 expanded on this with a larger dataset and more parameters to make its language processing capabilities (like translation and summarization) even stronger.
What made the GPT-3 model so much more sophisticated than those that preceded it is its massive size — with more than 175 billion parameters, it was 100X larger than GPT-2. This gave it an unprecedented ability to generate unique content that reads like a human wrote it.
Here’s a visual of how that number compares to other NLG tools:
Image Source: TechTarget
Now, to give you an idea of how much more advanced GPT-4 is expected to be, it will have 100 trillion parameters. It hasn’t been released yet, but is expected to be here some time in 2022.
So what does this all mean to us regular folks without technical knowledge of AI?
Basically, each GPT tool has expanded the knowledge base on which it operates — the datasets it has stored and the variables (parameters) by which it draws conclusions and “learns,” — and thus the sophistication level of the content it produces has gone up with each new version.
The question remains then: at what point will it get to the same sophistication level as actual humans?
An obvious place to turn for insight here is Google. For content marketers, Google is very much the master of our fate in many respects. It determines what ranking factors will place our content at the top of SERPs and evaluates what we publish with near-human ability. And as we already know, Google cares most about content being human-first.
If any doubts were arising about that with the emergence of GPT tools, Senior Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller put them to rest in a recent Google SEO Hangout, where he discussed this very subject.
Let’s examine what he had to say.
What Google has to say about AI-generated content
Google’s SEO Hangout: A Recap
John Mueller’s remarks about AI-generated content were sparked by a question about his recent comments on a Reddit thread, on which he said creators should not be using AI to create content.
Reddit moderator Rohan Chaubey asked him to expand on the topic, to which Mueller said:
“[For] us, [AI-generated content] would, essentially, still fall into the category of automatically generated content. Which is something that we’ve had in the Webmaster Guidelines since almost the beginning . . . for us, if you’re using machine-learning tools to generate your content, it’s essentially the same as if you’re just, shuffling words around, or looking up synonyms, or doing kind of the translation tricks that people used to do.”
“My suspicion is that maybe the quality of content is a little bit better than the really old-school tools, but for us it’s still automatically-generated content, and that means for us, it’s still against the Webmaster guide. So we would consider that to be spam.”
When asked if Google was capable of recognizing AI-generated content, Mueller said:
“I can’t claim that. But for us, if we see that something is automatically generated, then the web spam team can definitely take action on that. And I don’t know how the future will evolve there, but I imagine, like with any of these other technologies, there will be a little bit of a cat-and-mouse game, where sometimes people will do something, and they get away with it. And then the web spam team catches up, and solves that issue on a broader scale.”
“But from our recommendation, we still see it as automatically-generated content. . . . Currently, it’s all against the Webmaster Guidelines. So from our point of view, if we were to run across something like that, if the web spam team were to see it, they would see it as spam.”
You can find John Mueller’s full remarks about AI-generated content in the video below around at the 22 minute mark.
The Takeaway
So — a pretty clear position on the subject. It’s not totally surprising, given that Google has continually emphasized the importance of putting your human audience before any attempts to please the algorithm. It’s why keyword stuffing is so heavily penalized, and why Google has released guidelines like E-A-T/YMYL and the Page Experience update.
Google wants its users to have a positive experience on their site. To them, that means finding content that has been authentically created — by a human. And according to these recent comments, this human element is not negotiable and won’t be any time soon when it comes to the way Google evaluates content.
Empathy: the X factor content marketing will always need
If GPT tools (and others like them) are becoming so good at writing content that sounds like a human, why can’t they actually replace humans?
It really comes down to one essential factor for making content marketing successful: empathy.
Content marketing is ultimately about helping people. Content helps people solve problems and address needs. It provides value before a user ever makes a single purchase.
It creates a connection that makes people want to know more about your brand — and then eventually become paying customers — because their lives will in some way be made better (or at least easier) from doing so.
In the age of information overload that we live in today, this ability to empathize with users and make them feel understood is key to standing out from the crowd.
Right now, AI-generated content marketing tools can assess all of the existing content in the world and spit out pretty high-quality (and yes, human-sounding) original content based on what’s already out there.
But these tools don’t know your customers, or the nuance that goes into making content resonate just for them. They don’t know your brand personality, or how to maintain the voice and tone that makes you original. These are the things you still need humans to do.
Without humans, you risk publishing accurate but generic (or worse, tone deaf) content that misses the mark for your unique audience.
All of this said, there are several ways you can utilize these powerful tools to make your content strategy more efficient and give your writers a launch point for creating the content you need.
Let’s explore 4 of these valuable use cases.
Using AI-generated content marketing tools (without sacrificing quality)
Idea generation
GPT tools can be utilized to help generate ideas around the topics you know are most important to your brand. You can give the tool starting information, such as focus keywords, and ask it to generate blog titles or ideas for other content pieces based on other content that already exists on the web.
If skyscraper content is part of your strategy or you’re looking for a way to edge out competitors on certain topics, AI-generated content marketing tools can help you do it at high volume and in very little time.
Here’s an example of an inquiry I made in the tool for blog post ideas about content marketing. You can see the simple query at the top — “List of blog post ideas for keyword ‘content marketing’” — and the 10 ideas it generated for me in just seconds.
One place where I’ve found the GPT tool to be somewhat limited is in the generation of long-form text. While it can generate content that’s grammatically sound, it isn’t as nuanced as long-form content created by a human.
However, I can see this as a helpful tool for giving writers a starting point and asking them to expand on an AI-generated draft with more brand-specific content (like real-world examples and expert takes on a topic).
Data curation
AI-generated content marketing tools can help you quickly scour the web for statistics related to the topics you’re writing about. I made a quick inquiry for “List of statistics about content marketing in the SaaS industry” and this is what the tool came up with:
Image Source: Marketing Insider Group
The one limitation I found with this use case is that the statistics don’t come with sources. That said, I was able to easily find the original sources for most of these stats with a Google search.
Editing
This use case may not be the most original (or the most necessary) given that word processors automatically edit spelling and grammar as you write. Still, it’s important to note that you can ask the tool to edit text you’ve written and it will do so in just seconds.
To test it, I pasted the intro to this blog post with intentional spelling errors, and the tool caught them all.
Fighting writer’s block
The use case perhaps most appreciated by human writers is the ability for AI-generated content marketing tools to help combat writer’s block — that dreaded feeling that often comes along with a blinking cursor on a blank page. If you’re writing about a topic and you don’t know where to start, you can enter your keywords and/or title in the GPT tool to generate an intro that gets you started. You can even enter it a few times to get some different ideas.
Putting it all together
I think the big takeaway when it comes to AI-generated content marketing in 2022 (and for the foreseeable future) is that it should be embraced, but only as a tool — not as a replacement — for human writers.
AI tools clearly have the power to help brands generate ideas at scale and better understand competitive content. But they can’t capture unique brand personalities, messages, and audience needs. Depending on them to do so puts you at risk of not only being dinged by the search engine powers that be (AKA Google) but of failing to resonate with your customers.
Over to You
Ready to boost your content marketing results with customer-focused content? The team of writers and SEO experts at Marketing Insider Group can deliver you optimized, ready-to-publish content every week for a year (or more).
Check out our SEO Blog Writing Service or schedule a quick consultation to get started today.
The post Why AI-Generated Content Marketing Can’t Fully Replace Humans appeared first on Marketing Insider Group.
Content marketing is one of the most powerful ways to build your brand and connect with customers online. But it’s also time consuming! If you aren’t sure how to optimize your content and your strategy, you risk dedicating a lot of time in exchange for mediocre results. In fact, SEMRush reports that only 19% of businesses felt their content marketing was “very successful” last year.
Image Source: SEMRush
This is why many businesses choose to hire a content marketing agency to handle it for them.
So what is a content marketing agency? In short, they work with you to execute a content strategy that earns you search rankings, organic traffic, and new customers. They help to ensure you get the highest possible ROI from your content.
If you’re considering hiring a content marketing agency, you’ve come to the right place. The sections that follow will cover
Quick Takeaways
Content marketing earns 3X more leads and 6X conversions than traditional marketing at a 62% lower cost.
More than three-quarters of high-performing content marketers had a documented strategy behind their efforts.
Content marketing agencies support businesses in both content creation and strategy.
Hiring a content marketing agency can actually be more affordable than executing content marketing internally.
Content marketing agencies typically provide frequent, detailed performance reporting
What is content marketing?
Content marketing is the creation of consistent, high-value content used to drive organic traffic to your website and ultimately earn new customers. While content itself is nothing new — brochures, catalogs, flyers, guidebooks and other traditional marketing pieces all fall under the category of marketing content — digital content created for search engine optimization (SEO) has more power than any other kind of traditional marketing.
Here’s why: it’s authentic.
SEO content naturally attracts the right users to your website and your brand. It provides value to those users before they ever make a purchase, and it builds trust in your brand that leads to stronger customer relationships down the road. It demonstrates your expertise and value proposition, and it helps you establish your brand reputation. Ultimately, it drives more traffic, leads, and conversions to your website, resulting in more sales and revenue for your business.
The numbers speak for themselves: research shows content marketing generates 3X the leads and 6X the conversions of traditional marketing methods, all while being 62% more cost effective.
Image Source: Blogging Wizard
Sound too good to be true? When some clients hear about these benefits, they think it is!
But it’s not out of reach — content marketing really can unlock so many new opportunities and transform the way your brand connects with potential customers online. You just have to know two things: how to get started, and how to execute a content strategy the right way.
That’s where content marketing agencies come in.
What is a content marketing agency and what do they do?
Content marketing agencies create content for businesses that attracts new customers through SEO. This content usually includes blog articles but could also be things like ebooks, infographics, videos and more. They work directly with their clients to learn about their target audiences and develop content ideas to resonate with them.
Most content marketing agencies (like Marketing Insider Group) offer a more comprehensive set of services along with content creation — things like keyword research, SEO audits, content calendar development, publishing, and frequent performance reporting.
These services are the major benefit of hiring a content marketing agency over freelance writers or even hiring your own team in house. With an agency, you get content, expertise, a customized strategy, and support in executing it. This strategy piece is so important — brands that have a well-developed, documented content marketing strategy consistently perform better than those that don’t.
In 2021, 78% of marketers who reported their content marketing efforts were successful had a documented strategy. Conversely, 81% of those that were unsuccessful did not have one.
Image Source: SEMRush
Of course, hiring a content marketing agency is an investment. It still requires some time investment on your part to build and maintain your strategy, and there is the obvious ongoing cost for services.
But for businesses in need of content marketing support, the ROI far outweighs the time and financial expenses. Let’s look at 7 reasons to consider taking the leap and hiring an agency.
7 Reasons to Consider Hiring a Content Marketing Agency
Focus on your core business
Running a business is a full-time job — and so is creating high-volume, high-quality content on a consistent basis. When you try to do both, unfortunately both often suffer. No amount of content marketing in the world can make your business successful if you can’t stay focused on providing a great product. When you hire a content marketing agency, you can be confident your strategy is being well executed while you handle the most important part of your business: serving your customers.
Cost savings
This one might sound hard to believe at first, but it’s the truth: hiring a content marketing agency can save you money, especially if you’re choosing between an agency and hiring a new in-house team to handle content.
Hiring in-house requires paying salaries and benefits, providing office space and equipment, and managing a team. Once you hire your team, it’s hard to grow it or downsize quickly. On the other hand, you pay a content marketing agency a set ongoing fee to handle everything for you.
You can easily scale your efforts up or down as your budget or business demands, so you’ll never have to spend more than what you need to execute your strategy.
Publish frequent and consistent content
Frequency and consistency in publishing are two of the biggest factors in determining how much traffic your content will drive to your site. But did you know getting the best possible SEO results requires publishing 11-16x per month? HubSpot found that companies publishing at that frequency earned 3.5X more traffic than those publishing less often.
Image Source: HubSpot
If you consider that it takes about 3-4 hours to write an average blog post, you’re talking 60+ hours every month just on writing. When you’re handling content marketing in addition to other business responsibilities, it’s easy to fall off schedule.
When you hire a content marketing agency, you’ll never experience a lag or gap in your content publishing plan.
Add SEO expertise to your content
Search engine optimization is more than just keywords in 2022. Google’s algorithms are smarter than ever, and they’re looking for content that both checks the right SEO boxes but also provides real human value. A content marketing agency has the expertise and experience to help you strike the right balance.
Keep in mind, too, that Google ranking factors constantly evolve (Google updates the algorithm thousands of times every year) and you need to keep up with it for your SEO to work. Hiring an agency means confidence in knowing your content aligns with the latest SEO standards.
Access to the right tools and resources
Agencies use a number of technology tools to power your content marketing — SEMRush, Ahrefs, Google Analytics and more are all used for things like keyword research and performance analytics. In addition, agencies have full teams of writers and SEO experts who contribute to your content strategy and creation.
When you hire a content marketing agency, you’re investing in more than just content. You’re also gaining access to a range of resources that help inform and scale your strategy and boost your results.
New perspectives and ideas
Bringing in a new content marketing team gives your brand a fresh perspective on the tactics and approaches that have likely become second nature to you. Agencies are both objective (they use data-driven research and reports to build strategy and measure results) and creative (they come up with new ideas for blog topics and other content pieces). They can give you honest feedback and partner with you to come up with new and exciting ways to earn results.
Detailed performance reporting
Performance reporting is the main way content marketing agencies demonstrate their value and effectiveness. This being so, you can expect frequent and detailed reporting that shows you your content marketing performance against KPIs and your overall return on investment from the agency.
The value of getting data-driven insights on a regular basis can’t be emphasized enough. It helps you capitalize on what’s working, pivot your strategy when needed, and prove the value of your investment to company leadership.
Thinking about outsourcing content creation?
If you’re a business owner or leader, you probably don’t have time to spend hours every week writing content. It’s why more than 70% of businesses today outsource their content creation. The team at Marketing Insider Group can help. Our team of writers and SEO experts can deliver you optimized, ready-to-publish content every week for one year (or more!).
Check out our SEO Blog Writing Service or schedule a quick consultation to learn more!
The post What is a Content Marketing Agency and Why Do You Need One? appeared first on Marketing Insider Group.
https://www.sydneysocialmediaservices.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/MIG-Feature-Image-Template-19.png540960exposurehttps://www.sydneysocialmediaservices.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/sydney-social-media-services-white.pngexposure2022-07-27 00:43:252022-07-27 00:43:25What is a Content Marketing Agency and Why Do You Need One?
SEO. Social media. Websites. Blogs. Developing an effective content marketing strategy can feel daunting with so many options and strategies available. Earlier this week, we shared the results of our approach to developing content. Here in this post, I am sharing how we do it for brands like yours.
We speak with brands on all points of the content marketing journey. From those who are still learning what content marketing is and why it’s important to those who are implementing their campaigns and need guidance, we help brands develop processes that allow them to effectively reach their customers.
Quick Takeaways:
The use of content marketing continues to grow. Over 80% of marketers are intently focused on creating content that builds brand loyalty.
Content marketers should focus on solving their target audience’s problems.
Connect with your audience on platforms where they hang out. Create content in formats that they prefer to consume.
Brands need to recognize that employees are their most powerful marketing resource and figure out how to activate them.
An effective content strategy involves data, brainstorming, alignment with the consumer journey, and constant monitoring of key metrics.
As many brands have figured out, content marketing is critical to a brand’s survival in today’s economy. Content Marketing Institute’s 2022 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends announced that 43% of marketers report their organization’s content marketing budget has grown since 2020..
74% percent of marketers say their campaigns were more successful compared to one year ago with 66% expecting their content marketing budgets to continue to increase. Respondents indicated that the more their content marketing matures, the more likely it is to succeed.
One thing is clear: content marketing is a marathon, not a sprint. We are here to help you and your brand get to the finish line with loyal customers whose needs have been met.
Here is how we do it:
1. Content Marketing Objectives
How we think about and approach marketing has shifted in the past decade. Buyers are now completely in control of their purchasing journey. It’s up to brands to fulfill the consumers’ needs with a seamless, quality experience. However, one thing has not changed: defining the objective of a content marketing campaign.
This step requires an analysis of five areas within a brand:
current audience insights
business case
current state
mission statement
budget
In short, where is the brand now? What is our mission statement? Who are our current customers? How much budget do we have to spend?
2. Defining the Target Audience
Since the buyer is now completely in control of their experience and has high expectations of the brands they’re willing to build relationships with, understanding the buyers is critical.
It goes far beyond the traditional basic data like age, gender, race, income level and location.
In content marketing workshops with clients, we always consider various other factors that may contribute to a person’s decision to buy a product. Are they happy in their lives, both personally and professionally? What frustrations are they currently experiencing? Where do they get their information? What are they curious about?
The list of possible questions is extensive but it helps us begin to build the framework for a successful content marketing campaign.
3. Publishing Content
Defining where and how your target audience consumes information frames where you will be publishing content.
We’ve noticed some confusion when it comes to platforms. We don’t blame you! There are at least a dozen social platforms that millions of people frequent. Add to that the scores of content management systems that you could build your hub with. It’s easy to get lost.
However, we place the most value in the location where a brand can own their content – just look at what the best in content marketing are doing. While they are a great place for content distribution, the constant flux in social media algorithms and user agreements make them an unreliable platform to build a content marketing strategy.
4. Content Marketing Workflow
Next, we identify the best way we can work with you and your brand. This process includes defining how we will ideate, approve, create and publish your content marketing campaign. For some clients, this is a relatively simple process. Others have required additional steps set by law or previously defined internal procedures.
5. Editorial Strategy
Once we have a good understanding of a brand’s goals, who their target audiences are and what platforms to reach them on, we can start defining the editorial strategy. This includes figuring out content themes, topics, and types. For example, at Marketing Insider Group, we identified four key themes:
content marketing workshops
content agency
employee activation
content marketing for events
Then we built out topics around these themes, such as tools to use or how to use video in your content marketing strategy. How these articles are actually written depends on the topic but the content may include general articles, lists, how-to articles, infographics and why posts.
6. Brainstorming
Part of building an effective content strategy includes brainstorming. We collaborate with our clients to explore the various ways we can reach your target audience. It can be (and in my opinion, should be) one of the most fun parts of the process.
We implement tactics such as design thinking where each individual comes up with a list of ideas and then the group categorizes them.
Don’t worry, analytical types. We use data-driven tactics to brainstorm.
Google is one of the first places we start. It provides suggestions based on the volume of searches done for a topic.
AnswerThePublic is another great resource to categorize the most frequently asked questions around a keyword.
BuzzSumo helps us identify content that has performed well in a specific time span. We are able to look at our own content as well as what competitors have done that’s worked. The platform also enables us to find high performing content by topic.
7. Consumer Journey: Where Does the Content Fit?
The journey to reach a consumer who has never heard of your brand is going to vary from the consumer who follows you on social media. We work with brands to determine what demographics should fall into the three stages: early, middle, and late.
This stage also determines the frequency in which we create or repurpose content and how we reach the consumer (blog posts, email, social). One thing we always have in mind: buyers are not searching for product specifically. They are looking to solve a problem.
8. Content Distribution
Your content marketing campaign has multiple platforms to choose from: website, social, podcast, video, paid advertising, and harnessing employee activation. It’s here that we work with our clients to help determine which tactics will best help reach their goals.
We encourage the brands we work with to look within when deciding the best way to promote their content as their strongest marketing tactic exists on the payroll: employees. When employees share their employer’s content, it can generate up to 8 times more engagement and increase 14 times more brand awareness than brand-only content.
9. Content Marketing Measurement
Research indicates that for every one buyer, there are 100 pieces of content produced. This statistic makes measurement a key component of a content marketing strategy and is also most likely where your CEO will be most interested.
Early in the process we help brands determine what metrics need to be monitored depending on their goal(s) and buyer stage and provide them with a dashboard to help keep track. Our reporting schedule varies but is optimized to ensure a brand has a successful content marketing campaign.
Let Your Content Differentiate Your Brand
Good content marketing is imperative for distinguishing your brand and positioning yourself as a thought leader in your industry. It can be hard to keep your ideas fresh all the time, especially because your competitors are going to be turning out content as well.
Not only that, but every time you come up with something new and exciting, you can bet that your competition will be following behind shortly. Here are some tips for differentiating your brand using content marketing.
1. Position Yourself Strategically
It’s important to differentiate yourself from the competition by using your content to show your unique perspective.
Before you can get your brand into a good position, you need to get to know your target market, key content marketing trends in your industry and some research on what your competitors are getting up to.
Find out what sort of creative direction the competition is pursuing. Look at the kind of tone and aesthetics they favor. Some good places to get a sense of this are their logo, mascots, and even the colors they select.
What sort of themes are they working with?
What is their message?
What kinds of campaigns are they running?
If you want to stand out, you need to know what you’re trying to stand out from. Make your brand unique so it can fill a niche. Take what your competitors are doing and do it better, or put a fresh spin on it.
2. Focus on Customer Experience
“Customer experience can be an excellent way for you to differentiate your brand. Instead of approaching this with the mindset of there being one ideal customer experience, try and find out what your customers are looking for. Different customers use different brands because they enjoy the unique experience that brand provides,” writes Jerry Estes, content marketer at Revieweal.
The experience should align with your positioning; it should suit your brand’s personality and also include variety.
3. Create Quality Content
There are a lot of good ways to create quality content your customers will love. One good way to start is figuring where your niche will be. Think about an area that is underserved and therefore hungry for content that appeals directly to them. You can amass a loyal following of people if you are able to appeal to a niche that has not been receiving much attention from other brands.
Another good direction is to make your primary focus educating and informing people. Find out what your customers’ most common questions are and create content that addresses those questions. Use forums and blogs to find out which topics are most popular when people search for your brand or industry, then create content based on that information.
4. Pursue a Long Term Growth Strategy
Fads will come and go, but they should not determine how you lay out your strategy. Your strategy should be based on long term growth, and not the flavor of the month.
The internet has a very short attention span, and a rapid turn-around cycle. If you start trying to work this week’s sensation into your strategy, your brand will end up looking out of touch very quickly.
“Think long term and also see how far your boundaries extend. Look for new areas, that lie within your sphere, where you can expand and continue on with sustained growth. Just remember that you should make sure that when you do expand, you don’t contradict your brand’s positioning or message,” recommends Doris Tanguay, ecommerce content writer at Essay Services.
5. Use Online Resources to Improve Your Content Writing Skills
A lot of people have great content ideas but struggle with writing good copy. The good news is there are many resources available online that can teach you how to write like an expert.
Here are some good ones to get started with:
Studydemic / Academadvisor
Use these resources to get your grammar knowledge up to speed. You can really discredit yourself and your brand if you’re publishing content with bad grammar.
Assignment Writing Service / Essayroo
These online proofreading tools will give you content copy that is flawless. Just a single typo is all it takes to make you look like an amateur.
StudentWritingServices
Writing is so much easier when you’re using a guide. This writing guide will walk you through the process from start to finish.
UKWritings / BoomEssays
Editing can be tedious, and not a lot of people enjoy doing it, but these resources will make the process easier and faster.
6. Segment and Distribute
A lot of brands struggle with segmenting based on the wants and needs of the different segments of their audience. When you’re segmenting your audience, it’s smart to be thinking about where each group lies in their journey, in terms of awareness, engagement, conversion, and loyalty.
Segment your content based on pricing, customer care, product lines, and services. It’s also important to factor in geographical location and relevance to your segmentation.
Differentiation affects both your short term profits and the long term viability of your brand. If you’re just a less interesting version of someone else, why would anyone bother with your brand? It’s important to position yourself well, and keep up with what other similar brands are doing, so that you can find a unique angle to work on.
Best Examples of Brands with a Great Content Strategy
Thanks to the explosion and the proven value of content marketing, it seems like every brand these days has its own publishing house and an elaborate content marketing strategy to boot. They’re creating content on dedicated websites to target their demographic, convert visitors, increase their exposure, and establish themselves as voices of authority within their industries.
However, like much of the content out there on the internet, most branded content is not exceptional. Some brands just don’t get their customer base, while others recycle articles, photos, and videos instead of producing original pieces and are too pushy trying to sell their products.
If you’re gearing up to start your own branded content website, and want to get the most content marketing ROI, you should research what the best-of-the-best brands are doing. We spoke to five of them — IBM, Casper, GE, Barneys, and Williams-Sonoma — about how they built their sites and consistently put out excellent content.
These content creators discuss about their content marketing strategies, their methodologies, and their goals when it comes to building a branded content site.
IBM: Creating a real-time content desk
Tami Cannizzaro, who designed a real-time content desk for IBM way back in 2014 has this to say about branded content or messaging: “I don’t think I’ll get too many opinions to the contrary when I suggest that effective marketing is getting harder every day. Consumers seem to have developed an allergic reaction to anything that smacks of selling. Banner ads are essentially wallpaper with a dismal .1% conversion rate. Television ads have been all but eradicated by the DVR. Text ads are brand destroyers unless they’re pushed at point of sale while the discounted coffee is still piping hot. I could go on.”
So what can you do to insert your brand into a welcome conversation? Successful marketing is all about building relevance and utility for your brand. A social network is often the beginning of the conversation and should extend into the entire brand experience. Here’s what Tami and her team did about it at IBM: They built a real-time content desk. It’s a system that changes the way we build and disseminate branded content.
There are essentially five stages—here’s how you can build one for yourself:
Monday – The Beat Box: Ask what’s happening in the world that’s relevant to your customers and find the hot conversations. Social listening tools can help to identify the latest topics. An agency like Sparks & Honey can help you tap into significant cultural trends. They run a daily report on relevant world events, consumer trends and general cultural shifts. Build themes that align to the identified areas of interest in the marketplace.
Tuesday – Editorial Sync: Figure out what content you want your audience to consume and how. This is best done by a seasoned PR expert working with your marketing team to provide guidance and direction. Examples might include the fact that election season is coming up and you want to show how your software can help to identify the right candidate, or it’s Valentine’s Day and you’re selling overpriced gifts for lovers.
Wednesday – The Angle: Brainstorm on what content will be produced. Our agency, Ogilvy & Mather, supports the desk with a creative team and content strategist to develop a mix of short, consumable content as well as longer-form content. A fact-filled SlideShare, a report that ties in to an upcoming holiday, a short video series—all great content candidates.
Thursday – The Deadline: Determine how you will deploy the content across branded properties. Lay out a strategy for how content will be amplified through paid, owned, and earned media. Adding technologies like retargeting can help to bring consumers down the funnel.
Friday – The Analytics: Perform a weekly assessment of winners and losers. What types of content are consumers engaging with and sharing? Understanding which content types and themes are successful is critical to increasing brand engagement.
The real-time content desk helped IBM become experts at creating content that resonates. The nirvana for this type of desk is “news jacking” in conversations, like pushing a SlideShare into a competitors’ conference stream or being the top tweet that goes viral during a popular world event.
As consumers, we hate being sold. As marketers, we know we need to sell. In order to be heard by consumers today, brands need to align with how people experience the world and find a meaningful, relevant way to make the right connection. A content engine like IBM’s is a great way of driving that engagement.
Casper: Focusing on awareness, not conversion
Casper is a startup that provides “outrageously comfortable” mattresses sold directly to consumers — eliminating commission driven, inflated prices.
Since its launch in April 2014, the brand has grown rapidly, generating $30 million in revenue over a 10-month period and expanding its team from five to hundreds of people.
While Casper has always powered an on-brand, on-domain blog, the brand made a surprising move in June 2015, announcing its launch of Van Winkle’s, an off-brand, independent editorial venture.
Quality Journalism Exploring All Aspects of Sleep
Per Casper’s announcement on its branded blog, Van Winkle’s is an “independent editorial venture, staffed by an award-winning team of journalists. Van Winkle’s’ original features and stories explore all aspects of sleep, from science to pop culture.”
Luke Sherwin, Casper’s Co-founder, explains the editorial strategy further, saying the site will publish “weekly in-depth features, hard-hitting investigative pieces, columns, explainers, and relevant product reviews.” Reporting will also cover cultural topics and issues “through a lens grounded in rest and wakefulness, like the societal implications of Benzodiazepine, experimental interrogation techniques, or the limitations of quantification.”
The brand is clearly putting the mission of providing quality content at the forefront of its strategy, staffing experienced journalists from Maxim, Travel + Leisure, Salon, Mic, Gawker Media and Men’s Journal. The team will be led by Elizabeth Spiers, a former editor in chief of the New York Observer and a founding editor of Gawker.
An Independent Venture
While we’ve seen unbranded content marketing endeavors before (i.e., L’Oreal’s Makeup.com), it’s typically a move done by brands that a) are trying to disassociate from a negative brand perception, b) are trying to repair trust issues with customers, or c) have a house of brands rolling up into the same parent company. Casper fits none of these cases.
Instead, it seems the reason for the site was simply to fulfill a journalistic gap for an area of existing interest. As Sherwin describes it, Casper sees itself not just as a seller of mattresses but as a lifestyle brand at a time when people are concerned about work-life balance and are wearing fitness bands to track not just their activity but how much sleep they are actually getting. It seemed that if it wasn’t up to Casper to fill this void, then who?
While the site is funded by Casper, Van Winkle’s maintains its independence in terms of its branding, online identity and budget. The site is not designed to be a marketing vehicle or to drive traffic to the Casper site. It isn’t even part of Casper’s marketing budget. Van Winkle’s has no indication of its association with Casper, with the exception of a small “Published by Casper” disclaimer at the footer of the site.
Van Winkle’s online identity is also separate with independent social accounts and an unassociated URL (vanwinkles.com instead of something like casper.com/vanwinkles). Finally, it’s interesting to note that the goal of the site is to be “as self-sustaining and independent as possible. There will not be any shoppable links or e-commerce.” Most brands that choose an un-branded strategy will typically still include shoppable links sparsely throughout their content.
While still in its infancy, the site has already drummed up buzz and been covered by Wall Street Journal and the New York Business Journal. At a time when content is the “in vogue” marketing strategy of the moment, Van Winkle’s is an exciting experiment that will interesting to watch and sure to influence other brands’ content marketing strategies.
The Strategy
Van Winkle’s editor-in-chief Jeff Koyen does not consider himself to be a marketer. Instead, he’s a journalist who manages other freelance journalists. Like traditional reporters, they strive to tell good stories and raise awareness about certain issues. For Koyen, that issue is sleep.
“We are not converting people to Casper.com, which is what makes Van Winkle’s unique,” he said. “We are not measured by conversions or mattress sales.”
The goal is to invent a new vertical, sleep, and try to have “more eyeballs on Van Winkle’s. If we do create the sleep category, ultimately, Casper will benefit from it. They will get people to say ‘Gee, we need a better mattress.’ It’s my job to create cultural awareness. My competitors may benefit from it too, but it’s ultimately up to Casper to position themselves in a way that they will be there when customers want to make a purchase.”
So, what has Koyen found that his readers are most interested in when it comes to sleep? “Not surprisingly, posts about boners perform well,” he says. “I did one on morning erections. Another one is about how to wash your sheets. Those two posts had a far reach on social.”
Koyen’s advice for other brands hoping to start their branded content websites is this: Don’t be too cautious. “It takes bravery to let an editorial entity launch and run on its own,” he says. “When most people get to launch day, they think someone on the brand side will blink and say, ‘I don’t know if this story is on message for the brand. They may overthink it to death. If you want something that’s publishable, you need to be brave and trust your editor. If you just want to convert eyeballs or sell Red Bull then don’t do this. If you want to do higher level real journalism, you have to find the right editors and make sure they answer to themselves.”
Why It Works
Undoubtedly there will be many skeptics and naysayers of this seemingly risky endeavor, but there are several factors in this site’s strategy that have set it up for a successful future. First, the site is powered by an experienced team of journalists who know how to create compelling content. Regardless of the topics they write about, they’re staffed to be able to meet the high-quality expectations they’ve set for themselves.
Second, the site’s broad topic of “sleep” influences all aspects of life. Since sleep can be woven into just about anything, they’ve given themselves the flexibility to be able to write about topics that will be genuinely interesting. Six months from now, they won’t find themselves writing a stale story just because it’s the only thing left that fits in the site’s overarching theme.
Third, the unbranded strategy fits perfectly with Casper’s mission. Casper’s direct-to-consumer business model eliminates inflated prices and benefits consumers. Any business that is built on benefitting the end consumer has a leg up on an honest and trustworthy brand perception. Launching an unbranded editorial site, filled with amazing content, with no direct strategy to drive e-commerce enhances that positive perception even more.
Finally, the executive team’s expectations are realistic, open and prepared for adaptation. Sherwin does not expect the site to be a destination that readers will check every morning. Instead, the objective is to provide interesting, valuable content that will spread itself.
Sherwin explains, “We live in a world where being a destination site is not necessarily the primary goal of all content sites. The quality of the content still has value.” Casper’s CEO, Philip Krim, is also aware of the risk and prepared to alter strategy if need be. He explains, “If it isn’t well received we’ll have to reevaluate, but if we do succeed in creating some awesome content then I think we’ll have an interesting standalone business here.”
Barneys: Provide exclusive content
Your brand has a unique perspective and access to individuals and information that other brands don’t. On The Window, which is the branded content site for Barneys, the staff knows this.
The content that does the best on the site, according to editorial director Marissa Rosenblum, is interviews with Barneys’ designers and “things you could only get from visiting The Window,” she says. “This is because of the access we have at Barneys. You can’t read about the exclusive collaborations we’re doing elsewhere.”
The Window has a plethora of this kind of original content, from written pieces about their designers, to pictures from Barneys’ photo shoots, and videos of their runway shows.
If brands want to succeed, they need to stick to the old advice and write what they know, says Rosenblum. “Tell the stories you’re an expert on, and people will care about your brand’s point of view. They’re interested in what we have to say about emerging designers, fashion, and style. We’re still trying to sell them something, but it doesn’t change the fact that our point of view is well respected and regarded.”
Williams-Sonoma: Aim for return visitors
Success cannot simply be defined by how many visitors your branded content site converts. Don’t forget that loyal, returning customers are crucial to your brand.
Merritt Watts, the senior manager of content at Williams-Sonoma, says that with their website, Williams-Sonoma Taste, they want to keep people coming back for more content. “A return visitor means we’re truly connecting with our customers. They may not be purchasing every time they visit the blog, but when they do they’ll come to a trusted place — a place that’s already successfully shown them cooking techniques, offered inspiration for hosting a memorable holiday brunch, and recommended some restaurants to visit on their trip to Austin. That’s the kind of long-term success we are after.”
To encourage customers to return, Watts and her team of in-house and freelance writers produce content that adds value to their customers’ lives. “Our main target is the home cook,” she says. “They don’t have to know how to sous-vide or be able to whip up a soufflé without a recipe (though we have a hunch that plenty of our customers do!) (editors note: Seamless?!) but they are people who want to be inspired, who love getting their kitchens a little messy, and setting a table for friends and family with a meal they’re excited to serve.”
Some recent pieces for their demographic cover planning a spicy cookout, how to construct ice cream sandwiches, and making homemade pasta by hand.
GE Reports: Find the scoop
In creating GE Reports, Managing Editor Tomas Kellner (read a full interview with him here) says that the brand wanted to tell their own stories and appeal to a B2B audience. They also hoped to be seen among influencers as more than just an appliance company.
To do this, they report on innovations in technology. They find out the latest on topics like 3D printing, medicine and science, and information technology, and then aspire to have it distributed by other publishers like Gizmodo and Fortune, which have large readerships.
“With one of our stories on 3D printed jet engines, we got hundreds of thousands of views on the site, and it got picked up by other sites, which generated another large universe of impressions,” says Kellner. “Ultimately, the impression is more important than the traffic you bring back to the site.”
Since GE produces technology, Kellner has access to these stories in innovation. He looks inward at what stories he thinks would be a hit among his readers, and then he assigns them. “If I just try to sell to my readers, they’re just going to walk away,” he says. “You have to be authentic and tell the truth, but also be informative, newsy, and useful.”
How Can We Help Your Brand Succeed in Content Marketing?
For as much as I have helped brands create successful content marketing campaigns, I truly enjoy the discovery process because I learn something, too. Whether it’s working to get past an internal hurdle or reaching an obscure target audience, we’re here to help brands succeed!
Curious about how we can work together? Contact us today!
The post How We Help Brands Like Yours Develop a Content Marketing Strategy appeared first on Marketing Insider Group.
https://www.sydneysocialmediaservices.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Screen-Shot-2022-05-24-at-1.56.10-PM.png5661114exposurehttps://www.sydneysocialmediaservices.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/sydney-social-media-services-white.pngexposure2022-07-19 06:35:362022-07-19 06:35:36How We Help Brands Like Yours Develop a Content Marketing Strategy
Want to give your content marketing a serious boost? You can do it with content experiments.
Today’s technology enables us to experiment with our content tactics in lots of ways: different audiences, content types, channels, timing — you name it. When you do this consistently over time, you can be confident it will show in your performance results.
In this article we’ll cover how you can get started with content experiments right away. You’ll learn more about discovering what works for your audience, making small tweaks to increase ROI, and ways to implement low-risk experiments to inform larger strategies.
Ready to get started? Let’s dive in.
Quick Takeaways
Content experiments keep your strategy agile and enable continuous improvement.
You can minimize risk when trying new ideas by experimenting with sample audiences.
Experimenting with content is an effective way to capitalize on what’s working and eliminate what isn’t.
Brands can diversify their voice through experiments with content types, partnerships, and new distribution channels.
Content experiments help brands maintain data-driven strategies and make informed decisions.
What are content experiments and how are they valuable?
Content experiments allow you to test new ideas, tactics, and strategies to continually refine your content strategy.
If you’re a marketer, you know we live in a world of constant change. Much of what we thought was best practice 10 years ago (hello, keyword stuffing) is now considered poor form. New technologies, updated Google ranking factors, and the millions of other things that affect what consumers want all make it a tough job for marketers to always know the best approach.
Read: we don’t always know the best approach.
That’s why we need content experiments to help us figure it out. When you perform content experiments on a regular basis, you can figure out what works and what doesn’t — with low risk of affecting your larger strategy.
You can also identify what’s working best and do more of it, and find out what’s not working so you can either fix it or stop altogether.
Perhaps most importantly, content experiments keep your content strategy agile. They help you to identify issues, recognize new opportunities, pivot when needed, and apply what you’re learning as you go.
In his book The Lean Startup, Eric Ries says that at the core of any new startup is the ability to turn new ideas into products. For us, the product is content. When we look at it from The Learn Startup’s build-measure-learn perspective, we can see how content experiments allow us to continually get better:
Image Source: Twitter
So when is it time to conduct a content experiment? How exactly do you do it? In the next section, we’ll walk through 6 reasons you should think about doing a content experiment and examples for how to execute.
6 Reasons (and Ways) to Run Content Experiments
Try new ideas
Trying new ideas — even when your content strategy is working — is the best way to keep your content fresh and exciting. The thing is, you don’t want to try everything at once, and you don’t want to go all in on an idea before you know it’s likely to work.
The solution: a content experiment.
Think about the new ideas your marketing team has come up with over the past few years. Maybe it was to try a new social media campaign, or change up the look of your branding, or integrate some interactive content into your emails and blogs.
The key to experimenting with new content ideas like these is to start small, then build out as you see success. Consider the interactive content idea again. Rather than add it into every email or blog post, it’s a better idea to choose a sample audience (like your most engaged subscribers) and test how they respond to the new content. Perhaps after that, you build it into an A/B test for a larger email blast.
If you keep seeing high engagement, you know it’s something to make part of your larger strategy. If not, no harm done.
Expand your audiences
As companies grow, they often expand to include additional target audiences. Perhaps you see an opportunity for your product to add value in a new industry. Maybe you’re offering new solutions that are relevant for larger audiences. Maybe your company is just growing, and it is ready for a larger customer base.
If any of these apply, you can use content experiments to test the waters with new audiences you plan to engage.
One of the best ways to do it is with niche content. Helping a new audience see exactly how your solutions can benefit them will pique their interest and establish your brand as an expert from their perspective.
An example from our experience at Marketing Insider Group is with SaaS agencies. For a long time, SaaS brands were known as slow adopters to content marketing. At MIG (like other content agencies), we saw the value of content marketing for SaaS, so we planned a series of blog posts around the topic.
We wrote about SEO for SaaS, Content Marketing for SaaS, and other topics to engage with this audience and show them how our services can be valuable to them.
Image Source: Marketing Insider Group
You can experiment with niche content like this for your own potential new audiences. Then, monitor how they respond and then dig deeper into what resonates most with them.
Blogs aren’t the only way to do it. Social media posts, videos, infographics, ebooks and more can all be used to experiment with engaging new audiences.
Capitalize on success
Doing more of what’s working seems like the obvious approach, but you can’t actually do it without insights to inform your decisions. Content experiments provide data that can give you the objective information you need to make the right strategy decisions for your content.
With content experiments, you can drill down into the specifics to optimize your content’s performance. You can optimize send time for emails or posting days for blog articles. You can test subject lines, HTML formats, CTAs and any number of other factors to determine what’s most successful for your brand and keep doing more of it.
Each of these seemingly small factors may not seem impactful on their own. But when you use content experiments to optimize them as a whole over time, you’re sure to see a boost in performance results.
Eliminate unsuccessful content
Similarly, content experiments can tell you when something is not going well. Data can help you spot issues early and pivot quickly to improve your content’s performance. You can also recognize when something is just not working and eliminate it before its negative impact is felt.
Consider, for example, that you’re launching a new email newsletter. If you’ve never done one before, you may be unsure about which types of content to include. You might have to figure out how to segment your audiences so that each one receives a newsletter that’s relevant to them.
If you intentionally experiment with content and lists, tracking important KPIs like open and click-through rates while performing A/B tests, you can quickly and continuously refine your email newsletter so that only the most engaging content stays in, and anything that gets no traction is removed.
Diversify your brand voice
Diversifying your brand voice by producing varied content, featuring guest contributors, and serving as guest contributors for other brands can significantly widen your reach. They’re also all great ways to conduct content experiments for increased brand awareness.
Again — you may be doing some of this already, but the key is to approach it as an experiment.
Some ideas for brand voice diversification:
Expand your content types beyond blogs. Try video, social media stories, infographics, or even podcasting.
Feature guest writers on your blog. Make them part of a series or regularly do one-off guest posts on various topics.
Contribute to other blogs or podcasts where your audience may be engaging. If you’ve already established your brand well, you may get requests to be a contributor. You can also reach out about potential partnerships to brands you want to connect with.
Try influencer marketing. Consumers trust influencers and buy products based on their recommendations.
Partner with brands on co-branding initiatives.
One of the ways Marketing Insider Group has experimented recently is with infographics. We’ve used them to create visuals that summarize some of our most important articles.
Here’s a portion of our infographic about how to write the perfect blog post:
Image Source: Marketing Insider Group
By experimenting with different content types, partnerships, and distribution channels, you can find new ways to expand your audience, make your content more shareable, and ultimately drive more traffic to your website.
Uncover valuable insights
It’s worth noting again that one of the most critical reasons to regularly perform content experiments is to gain data-driven insights about your performance.
When you continuously and systematically collect data and analyze it to inform your strategy, you’re enabling your team to make informed, objective decisions. Over time, this will seriously boost your ability to engage and save you both time and money.
Read more creating a data-driven content strategy and how data plays a role in your content success.
We Can help You Run A Year’s Worth of Content Experiments
Content experiments (and your larger content marketing efforts) require the creation of a solid content strategy, lots of ideas, frequent, high-value content, and measurement to show results. Our team of SEO experts, writers, and client service managers can deliver you optimized, ready-to-publish content every week for one year (or more). And we help you to measure what works!
Ready to get started? Learn more about our SEO Blog Writing Service or schedule a quick consultation today.
The post 6 Ways to Run Content Experiments That Drive Growth appeared first on Marketing Insider Group.
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In their most recent report, CMI shared that 77% of marketers reported their organization has a content marketing strategy.
That sounds nice and all but here’s the truth: What many marketers are calling a “content marketing strategy” is merely a collection of topics and a list of random acts of content stored on a page. That is not a content marketing strategy!
If 77% have a strategy, most of them aren’t very good and today I’m going to tell you exactly why. Most content marketing strategies aren’t up to snuff, but yours doesn’t have to be one of them.
The overwhelming majority of content is so poorly constructed that it’s simply bad and therefore accomplishes nothing—for you or your audience.
Not All Content Marketing Strategies Are Created Equal
Marcus Sheridan has long discussed his They Ask, You Answer philosophy to Marketing.
The premise is beyond simple, as it’s spelled out right there in the title of his book. Inside its pages, you come to realize that, ultimately, what buyers want is information on seven types of questions:
Who, What, When, Where, Why, How, and How Much?
These seven questions are the things your content needs to be addressing at each and every turn. The brands doing it most successfully are not only dominating search rankings but likely experiencing the fruits of their labor.
Discovering What Makes Your Audience Tick
Productive content strategies are data-driven strategies. But simply relying on our own historical data sets us up to fail in the future. What was true yesterday may be true tomorrow, but for how long?
To truly find what your audience and prospects need, you need to combine your own data (ICP, CRM, and other audience data) with valid, third-party sources that leverage first-party buyer behaviors. Doing so allows you to compare and contrast how your audience differs from larger pockets of users.
Here are a few ways you can use buyer-level insights and your own audience data to build a dynamite content strategy.
How Real-Time Consumption Insights Reveal Actionable Behaviors
Accomplishing all of this requires quite a bit of information, both from a historical and an active perspective. Ideally, you’d be able to leverage your own customer and legacy data to find many of these answers to help set the table but you won’t be able to find everything.
Since Amazon doesn’t sell a Marketing Crystal Ball, we have to be strategic in how we go about filling in the gaps…however, there is a tool called Audience Explorer. NetLine’s Audience Explorer tool is powered by millions of first-party registrations from across the web. The site shows what users are and have requested in real-time over a rolling 180-day average. Essentially, if a B2B audience exists on the web, Audience Explorer will have information on what a given group is searching for.
For our purposes, we’re going to focus on B2B professionals working in a Marketing job area—specifically content marketers across a wide swath of industries.
Setting the Table
Audience Explorer allows you to filter consumption with five sub-categories. For the Marketing Job Area consumptions, here’s how we’ve filtered to best reflect the Convince & Convert audience:
I chose to leave the Employee Size and Industry filters untouched considering the myriad of folks who use Convince and Convert.
What you’ll see now is a Total Buyer Content Recommendations count of 49,244 – meaning that in the last six months, NetLine has suggested nearly 50,000 assets to B2B users. While this is a good number to understand, it’s not the juicy bit marketers can sink their teeth into.
Who’s Most Active
The first thing that should pop out to you is just how active Content Managers, Directors, and Senior Managers are when it comes to content consumption. In this grouping, they account for 93.3% of all requests (Directors and Managers represent 81.6%), with C-Level professionals making up less than 1% of registrations.
Takeaway: No matter which industry you reside in, mid-level employees are the best group to target with your content. Yes, you need to make sure you have something for each Job Level, but these professionals are the bell cow in every business you’re trying to gain influence in.
Topic Level Interests
The next slice of information worth noting is the Top 10 Trending Topics; an aggregate accumulation of the most popular topics from the past 180 days. The first two are Marketing and Marketing Strategy; a pretty predictable outcome given this Job Area. Healthcare Services in third also aligns given the nearly 12% audience share from professionals in the healthcare space (6% – Biotech and Pharmaceuticals, 5.7% – Healthcare/Medical). The one I’ll focus on, however, is B2B Marketing in the fourth spot.
Since the start of the pandemic, interest in B2B Marketing has grown steadily; Google Trends confirms this, as well, with search volume peaking twice in the past year. While conferences and in-person events have returned, B2B Marketers have realized they can get a sizable ROI for their hybrid or strictly digital efforts.
Takeaway: B2B Marketers are constantly looking to educate themselves, especially on the basics. Six of the top seven trending topics are related to foundational pieces of building a strategy—a sign that everyone simply wants to better themselves and/or their employer.
Most Consumed Content Formats
In NetLine’s annual Content Consumption Report, we shared that eBooks were the dominant content format, accounting for 43.3% of all registrations. Here, we see a similar outcome, albeit not as drastic. eBooks represented 31.6% of consumption with Guides trailing at 23.06%. What we also shared in our annual report was that eBooks were uber popular, Report, White Paper, and Webinar registrations all indicated greater purchase intent.
Takeaway: While the majority of this group of B2B Marketers are browsing at the top of the funnel, nearly half of them (45.3%) are beginning to invest significant time in formats that would signal their intent to make a purchase decision. Considering that NetLine expects roughly 31% of B2B buyers to be in market over the next 12 months, the behavior of these B2B Marketers could mean investment is coming.
Getting More Granular
Understanding what’s happening at a macro level can be quite helpful when shaping the direction of your content calendar. But of course, you’re going to eventually need to come back to the audience that butter’s your bread.
To highlight just how specific and relevant Audience Explorer can be when it comes to informing your content marketing strategy, let’s switch and focus on the Advertising/Marketing industry rather than the Marketing job area. Again, we’ve filtered to best reflect a segment of the Convince & Convert audience:
There’s a greater number of filters in play here, which will naturally shrink the size of the audience analyzed. The big benefit here, however, is how much more accurate and impactful these findings will likely be.
Our learnings from the Job Area analysis showed us that Directors and Managers were the pros most likely to seek out content. In this cohort, Directors (84.2%) requested far more content than their Managerial peers (15.8%). Because their interest was so much greater, we’ll lean further into their consumption habits and remove Managers from the Job Level filters. The Buyer Research Stream also tells a similar story, with five of the eight examples focusing on some variant of Marketing Strategy with each user being a Marketing Director.
Takeaway: Marketing Directors are often responsible for setting, executing, and overseeing content strategies. If your solution is helpful in assisting content marketers achieving their goals, be sure to start by addressing the needs of the Marketing Director first; content for other Job Areas, Levels, and Functions can follow.
In looking at the Sub-Industries, nearly 66% of consumption came via professionals working in Advertising/Marketing (General). Since this is such a generalized group, let’s get more niche and dive into the habits of professionals working inside Advertising Agencies and Marketing Services.
Just as we saw with the Marketing Job Area, Marketing Strategy and Marketing are the top two topics, only they’ve swapped places. Healthcare Services also remains in the three-hole with Pharmaceuticals in 4th and Biotech in 10th. Given that Ashfield Health was the most active in-market company in this cohort (and by a wide margin), there’s a sizable influence from the healthcare field here.
Hiring Strategies and Performance Management are also quite popular in this audience. It’s long been established that vendors are held to lofty standards by their clients, especially at the start of a relationship. Therefore, it’s natural for agencies and service providers to hone in on finding and getting the most out of their talent.
Takeaway: The best insights are always the ones that exist below the surface. Sure, it might be easier to find the patterns at the top, but the ones that are “buried”? Those are the money beets.
The Most Consumed Content Formats pie chart also tells an interesting story. 63.6% of all registrations came from White Papers, Webinars, and Reports—formats that signal impending purchase decisions. It would be fascinating to see the break out between the types of content being consumed in each format but alas, Audience Explorer doesn’t provide this.
Takeaway: Professionals working for agencies and service-oriented businesses are constantly on the hunt for the next big solution. While buyer-level intent data might suggest these registrations should send up the Batsignal of impending purchase decisions, take a moment to pause and remember that these pros must keep tabs on everything occurring in the market. Best to keep context in all situations as the data can’t know everything.
Honestly, there’s enough here to keep going, but let’s frame these findings into how they can best inform your content marketing strategy and propel it forward.
Using Buyer-Level Insights to Your Advantage
Combining first-party behavioral data with your own audience and client data is a recipe for success. By simply mixing these two elements together, here’s what you can begin to piece together.
Addressing the 7 Key Questions
Starting with Google Analytics (or whatever site traffic tool you’re using), you can begin to see what your audience has been glombing onto in recent days, weeks, and months. To make sure you’re not missing anything. Leveraging resources like the Top 10 Trending Topics and Buyer Research Streams are excellent ways to see what the larger market or, better yet, your own niche, is investigating.
Once you know the kinds of information your audiences are seeking inside and outside your world, the easier it will be to answer who is asking questions, what they need to know, how they trying to get it, and when they might be looking to buy.
A Different Kind of Content Gap Analysis
Traditionally, a content gap analysis surveys where you’re missing out on key search keywords, phrases, and topics. In using tools like Audience Explorer and Google Trends in tandem, you can see the kind of macro- and micro-trends occurring within your spheres of relevance. Anything on strategy will likely be an evergreen topic. But information about performance management in the healthcare field specific to Marketing Directors working inside of companies employing less than 10,000? That’s something SEO tools will never surface.
Uncovering Potential Purchase Intent
eBooks, Guides, and Cheats Sheets are three of the most popular content types on the web currently. It’s crucial to remember, however, that these kinds of registrations are associated with top-of-funnel behavior.
If you’re noticing that your segmented audiences are consuming Webinars and White Papers elsewhere but you’re only offering a blog and a few PDFs, you could be missing out on some important lead gen opportunities and foregoing some high quality intent signals.
Put Audience Explorer to the Test
The audiences we dove into today are just a teeny, tiny taste of what this tool has inside. With access to more than 300 unique industries and sub-industries, this tool has millions of different audiences to analyze. Hopefully, this tool can give you visibility into consumption behaviors that make your marketing strategy work smarter.
The post How to Inform Your B2B Content Strategy with Real-Time Buyer-Level Insights appeared first on Convince & Convert.
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One of the biggest questions I hear from clients who are just starting their journey with content marketing and those who want me to help create an effective content marketing strategy for them is, “Where do you find the time?”
The simple answer is that everything you do with content marketing doesn’t have to be a manual process or done by you and your team.
Maybe when we use the term “automated content marketing” you might be thinking of AI-produced articles or robot-narrated explainer videos, but that’s not exactly what I’m talking about.
Quick Takeaways:
Automation helps brands improve their content marketing effectiveness.
The right workflow applications can help automate and distribute content effectively.
Use paid promotion to increase the visibility and reach of your content.
Track how many visits, leads, and conversions you’re getting as a result of content automation.
What is Content Marketing Automation?
Content marketing automation is the approach of identifying repetitive content marketing tasks and then out-sourcing or automating those tasks through tools and applications.
The goal is to help marketers and brands to improve their overall content marketing strategy effectiveness.
Content marketing automation can be applied to really just about any phase of the content marketing process from strategy and planning, through creation, distribution and measurement.
A 7-Step Process to Automate Your Content Marketing
1. Decide what you want to automate
You can use Google Alerts to identify what other content is being created on your target keywords. I find it especially useful when it comes to curating visual content like infographics and video. You can also setup content alerts in paid tools like Buzzsumo.
2. Use a content workflow process
My team and I use DivvyHQ to automate the stage, status and process of the content we create for this blog and for our clients. These tools are called workflow applications or calendar tools and they allow us to identify content that needs to be created and updated and it alerts us to the tasks when they are due. They also help to schedule publishing your content out to your social channels as well as your WordPress website.
3. Share your content across social media
We use Hootsuite to automatically share content from my website’s RSS feed to LinkedIn and Facebook and share content from other top marketing and business publications. If you want to compare social media management tools, you can also check out Buffer and Sprout Social.
4. Pay to promote your content
Part of my marketing automation process includes using content promotion tools such as Zemanta for digital advertising — it gives me the best opportunities for my content to appear on well-known publisher sites. SimpleReach tells you which content is performing well on social media, helping you to decide whether to use paid promotion or extra boosts on Facebook, Twitter, QuuuPromote and/or Google Ads.
5. Automate your email newsletter
We use MailChimp to send our daily newsletter once a blog post has published. MailChimp also lets you automate personalization and email nurturing of your leads. While MailChimp is arguably one of the best priced email marketing tools available, other platforms to consider are Marketo, GetResponse, Constant Contact, Aweber, and HubSpot.
6. Connect various content marketing platforms
We use Zapier to automatically add the leads collected on my website into my main newsletter list. It also helps me monitor my social media platforms by sending me an email notification when someone mentions me on Twitter so I can respond. Similar platforms include the well-known IFTTT.
7. Find out how your content marketing is performing
The nice part about many content marketing tools is that they are easily customizable. Each month, Google Analytics automatically emails me a report showing me which content and pages are driving the highest amount of traffic and conversions.
BONUS: Blog Writing Subscription Service
You can also automate your content marketing from creation to conversion. Our Content Builder service identifies the keywords your audience is using, the content they are consuming, and then suggests 100 or more content ideas for you to approve.
We then deliver 1, 2 or even 4 or more articles every single week for an entire year. We can even load them onto your website, share or promote them on social, deliver leads and measure your results.
Content Marketing Automation – The Why
Content, as we know it, is essential for brand building, nurturing relationships, and tapping the full potential of a business. It is the fuel that drives content marketing.
Not automating your content marketing is a mistake only amateurs make, and if you take top content marketing influencer Jeff Bullas’ word for it, only social media purists would think otherwise.
And why should you believe him? Well, Jeff occupies the eighth spot at Forbes’ list of The World’s Top 40 Social Marketing Talent. Simply put, his authority should not be taken lightly.
But keep in mind, content isn’t all there is to content marketing. As such, content marketing automation has ceased to be a nice-to-have. If you want to squeeze the most results from your content, however you feel about automation, it has to be done – and done well.
According to Quick Sprout:
“Content is a marketing pillar. It’s trustworthy, value-driven, and compelling. Coupled with marketing automation software, content can amplify the success of your relationship-building efforts.”
In the same vein, Uberflip asserts that content marketing automation gives context to your content in a way that makes sense to both your audience and marketers, allowing you to tweak your strategies towards more favorable results.
Perhaps more importantly, content marketing automation enables you to piece every facet of your content marketing strategy together, as opposed to a siloed approach where visualizing the big picture can be a challenge.
Studies suggest that automating content marketing can help you maximize campaign ROI:
Gartner found that companies that automate lead management produce a 10% increase in revenue in six to nine months.
The Annuitas Group found that businesses using marketing automation for lead nurturing experience a 451% increase in qualified leads.
Pardot’s users boosted sales revenues at an average of 34% after using content marketing automation.
According to the Aberdeen Group’s research published in 2012, companies that use marketing automation experience 53% higher conversion rates and 3.1% higher annualized revenue growth rate compared to non-users.
The bottom line is that content marketing automation helps you to save time, money and effort.
It provides a way to streamline those content marketing processes that do not require human intervention. It allows you to spend your valuable time measuring, optimizing and testing new ideas in order to improve your content marketing outcomes. It even lets you ride the current trends in content marketing. All this frees up your time to focus on improvements that will move the needle.
Content marketing automation also allows you to be working when you’re not working. Sure, you could stare at your twitter stream and try to decide the best time to share your latest article…OR you can use content marketing automation tools to do that simple task for you. All while you sleep!
The reason so many content marketers use automation is that it simply helps them to do their jobs more effectively.
Content Marketing Automation – The Basics
Great content requires talent and skill to pull off. It requires a human touch, with a dash of artistry and a hefty serving of creative knowhow. To put it simply, content is not something you can automate with little thought.
However, that is not to say that our content marketing strategies can’t benefit from a little automation. In fact, marketing automation platforms can provide a serious boost to our content marketing endeavors.
Everything from strategy creation to content positioning, flexibility, and analysis can be assisted by applying marketing automation.
“Drive thy business or it will drive thee,” is a familiar Benjamin Franklin line quoted in The 5 P Approach to Copy that Crushes It, a free ebook from Copyblogger.
According to the ebook:
“The premise in this case would be that the key to business success … is to have systems in place that allow you to work on your business, not in your business.”
And that is what automation can do for content marketing. It is a system you build to allow you to work on your business, develop a sound strategy, and generate better ROI, all while the more repetitive duties of sharing content on social media, emailing potential prospects, replying to inquiries, measuring the results, among others, are automatically handled by the system you have in place.
To get started with content marketing automation, there are some things you need to have/implement:
Blog or website to host your content, which must be useful and tailored to your target audience
Social media presence to engage in a more personal and immediate way with your audience
SEO to make your site searchable and available for specific industry terms, search keywords, and topics
If you’re new to the game, content marketing automation can be pretty overwhelming. But to get you started on the right path, here are some content marketing automation best practices to keep in mind:
Choose marketing automation software that comes with email tracking, website visitor tracking, lead management, CRM and social media integration, and built-in reporting and analytics features.
Optimize your website to attract your ideal prospects. Remember that customer profiling starts on day one. The goal is to build an email list over time.
Based on the user’s profile, connect with them by sending relevant content such as informative articles, white papers, ebooks, and special discounts.
Use your marketing automation software to create triggered responses. For instance, if a user clicks on content A (an article on your site), does B (downloads an ebook), C (requests a white paper), or D (browses your products), program your software to send the appropriate response for each action.
Marketing automation software with A/B testing capabilities (built-in or integration with third-party apps) helps you test and tailor your message to the needs and preferences of your target audience. Remember the goals that A/B testing should allow you to accomplish: To identify, locate, and attract high-quality leads and turn them into buying customers – and ultimately, brand advocates.
Create an editorial calendar. Gmail and other calendaring apps let you set reminders via various mediums: email, in-app notifications, text messaging, and so son.
Use your marketing automation tool to establish key metrics for identifying and scoring leads. Software like HubSpot and Act-On have a lead scoring and analysis feature.
Build your target’s profile using progressive profiling where, instead of requiring your target to fill out forms with lines and lines of data they may already have supplied your organization in the past, you only ask for new, valuable data, keeping your forms short and easy to fill out.
As a lead moves further down the sales funnel, only send targeted content and offers based on their behavior, interest, preferences, and other demographic details such as economic standing, educational background, professional background, purchasing power, and so on.
Use your automation software to create email templates and signatures, and message formats tailored to each goal or user, e.g., webinar invitation, invitation to view a recently posted article, share news on social media, or download a newly published case study.
Consistently post educational, actionable tutorials or other types of helpful resources that answer your target audience’s questions. Schedule and link these to your social media accounts using tools like Buffer, Tweetdeck, or Scoop.it so that followers on various platforms can be reached.
Continuously monitor and measure your results via your software’s analytics, and pivot if necessary. This means being agile enough to quickly respond to changes in your target audience’s preferences. A campaign that generates great results in the first month may not perform as expected in the next month. Be able to redesign your campaign accordingly.
Diligently track which campaigns yield the most benefits and focus on those.
Maintain ongoing relationships with existing users. Retention and upselling by being ridiculously helpful will be your next goals.
Content Marketing Automation – The Tools
If you’re in the market for content marketing automation software, here are some suggestions:
HubSpot – covers list building, email management, lead tracking and scoring, lead segmentation, and many more
Eloqua – has lead management, targeting and segmentation, sales enablement, web marketing, and marketing measurement features
Marketo – provides sales intelligence, lead targeting, scoring, and nurturing capabilities
Pardot – carries email marketing, lead generation, lead management, ROI reporting, and sales alignment functionalities
Autopilot – has sales management, split testing, third-party integration, and extensive tracking capabilities
InBoundio – inbound marketing software with social media and email management, lead nurturing, lead management, and reporting functions
Act-On – provides lead nurturing and scoring, list management, and A/B testing features, among others
Content Marketing Automation – The Risks
When sharing content, the important thing is to ensure relevance. If the person on the receiving end does not think the content being sent to them do not answer their questions, problems begin and you end up with unsubscribes, and spam and abuse reports.
When you automate content marketing, always make sure that your targeting is accurate:
Send actionable, educational, useful content to new leads who are only just starting to get to know your business.
Send more detailed information packets to leads that already trust your brand but want to know more about your products.
Send links to your sales page to leads that are ready to purchase.
Bottom line, the experience you deliver must be tailored to your intended audience, or your marketing will certainly backfire.
Another problem is ease of use. A lot of the tools available today are so dynamic (not to mention flexible enough to work across multiple platforms), leveraging the technology to actually implement a more robust strategy isn’t easy. More than half of B2B marketers feel the implementation process is difficult. And, only about 38 percent are using automation to pull-off more advanced marketing techniques like progressive customer profiling.
Strategize Your Way into the Future
Don’t live your content marketing life on a “hand to mouth” basis. It’s a waste of time and resources. Instead, have the bulk of your content scheduled way in advance, giving you the opportunity to plan ahead of time and integrate content directly into your long-term goals.
The key here is to balance evergreen content with time-specific content, gaining the best from both worlds. It is likely that this time-specific content is going to need to be produced on the fly and delivered in a precise and timely manner directly where and when it’s needed. Your content teams should be able to handle this endeavor but will find it difficult if the content queue is jammed up with additional, evergreen content pieces.
This should never happen. Instead, everything should be planned out well in advance and scheduled ahead of time. This is a major labor-saver, freeing up your content team to produce great pieces of time-specific content when it’s needed.
Be Proactive
Modern customers don’t just want convenience; they expect it. This has altered the landscape of traditional content marketing somewhat. Perhaps, once upon a time, it was enough for businesses to react to the needs of the customer, or to provide solutions as and when required. This is not the case any longer.
Now, business owners need to be proactive. They need to understand the needs of the customer ahead of time and position themselves in a way that enables the direct implementation of a solution. Automation can help us to achieve this.
Marketing automation provides us with the data we need to really get to know our customers. By using this data, we can start segmenting customers into different groups and provide proactive services via our content strategies.
Leverage your martech stack to store and use data from each and every customer interaction. This includes data on purchase groupings, access points, and search queries. By commissioning reports from this data, we can begin to understand the different people who interact with us, and their different motivations. This enables us to provide content of genuine worth.
This is really not possible without marketing automation and provides another example of a time when marketing automation helped us to go the extra mile for customers.
Respond Quickly and Spontaneously
True greatness – in the sense of content marketing – is achieved with flexibility and responsiveness. We’ve discussed the importance of being proactive, getting our content into place before the user even realizes they need it; but this is not always possible.
Part of the reason why business is such a beautiful and rewarding – if occasionally infuriating – discipline to get into is its unpredictability. We can use data and analytics to make predictions, and we can set Strategy A, B and C in place to safeguard our actions, but the market or wider social conditions affecting our industry will always throw us a curveball sooner or later.
This is why we need to be able to respond quickly and easily. Marketing automation enables us to do this by handling the heavy lifting for us, leaving our content teams the swiftness and freedom required to get in quickly.
An extreme example of this is found in the automotive industry, when a manufacture suddenly issues an emergency recall. Without marketing automation, we have to manually locate customers who are affected, divert other content initiatives while emergency content is drafted, and deploy the content where it is required.
With marketing automation in place, we can swiftly access a database of the affected customers, contacting them directly via pre-programmed messaging. Our content teams are already free to draft up the important public service piece for hosting on our site and social media, and the content delivery architecture is already in place. The word spreads, and it spreads fast. Our goal is achieved.
As mentioned above, this is an extreme example, but the fundamental principles translate across the board. Give yourself the ability to respond quickly and effectively when required.
Keep it Dynamic
Fields such as content marketing and marketing automation are constantly evolving; in fact, they could be described as dynamic. It makes sense, then, for you to introduce dynamic content to your email marketing and to your website, providing your users with content offerings which are as smooth and pleasing to the reader as that segue.
Content marketers now have the tools at their disposal to upload content which changes based upon the location and preference of the user. Utilize these tools and create a much more personalized effect. This personal touch is something which is too often lost during the automation of your content strategies. It is important to reclaim it whenever you can.
Build a Long-Term Narrative
This one comes down to planning. Once you have launched a killer bit of content, what comes next? Do you consider that content done and dusted and move onto something else? Or do you carefully consider the next steps in your journey and that of your audience?
Plan your content carefully. Make each piece worthwhile and useful in its own right but look to build an ongoing narrative, with each piece leading into the next. Refer back to your content marketing mission statement to ensure you are heading in the right direction.
Segment, and Segment Again
We are already well aware of buyer profiles, but the idea of the buyer profile is not simply to segment your audience into manageable chunks, but to whittle your categories further and further to provide the most tailored experience possible to customers.
So, if your buyer profiles are not achieving the right result, segment again, narrowing them even further. Be as specific as your resources will allow and achieve far more bang for your content buck.
Understand Your Channels
Your automation platform has a reporting function, so use it. This function tells you where leads and prospects are accessing your content, which pieces of content are proving the most effective, and which devices are yielding the most conversions.
This represents an astonishingly valuable bit of insight. Knowing which channels are pulling their weight and which ones need further work gives you a strong indication of what you should do next.
Be Human
Automation can, occasionally, become a little too automatic. If this seems like a ludicrous statement, bare with me a moment. What I mean is that we should take every opportunity to inject a bit of humanity into our marketing.
Unless you have shelled out for a particularly incredible bit of software, the content you deploy via automation is not created automatically. You have to write it or produce it, so have fun with it. Add your own voice and don’t lose sight of your humanity. Your audience will reward you with a positive response.
Get Inspired
There’s no harm in casting a glance sideways every now and again to check out what the competition are up to. In fact, this is positively encouraged. Plagiarizing content is always wrong, and provides no benefit to marketers anyway, but sealing ourselves off from the outside world is simply pointless.
Look around you, look at what others are doing, think about how you could do it better. Inspiration is the driving force for creativity and, no matter how much you try to bury yourself in facts and figures and conventional wisdom, your content must be creative.
Keep it Fresh
Your audience are only human, and humans get bored from time to time. It is up to you to combat this boredom and to maintain interest in your content. To do this you need to look inwards.
What do you do when you get bored? You find something else to read, watch or do. What sort of things keep you from being bored? Things that remain fresh, interesting, diverse and useful. Work to introduce this freshness to your content marketing.
Play with different forms of media, invite guest bloggers to work with you, or form content partnerships. The definitions of fresh and exciting change all the time; make sure you are alive to these changes.
Better Understand Your Audience
The AI involved in a lot of today’s automation tools makes it easier for you to define who your customers are. Your technology makes segmenting simpler and more accurate by grouping customers based on specified information – such as purchasing history, website activity, and demographic data. The beauty of today’s tech is that it also gives us a more accurate perception of buyer segments because it takes into account how buyers change over time.
As your software continually ingests information, your buyer segments become more sophisticated, and they are allowed to evolve with the changes in terms of buyer needs and wants. Sure, customer interviews, market research and customer feedback surveys are still valuable for optimizing your personas, but, combine this knowledge with what automation technology offers, and your personas become a lot more effective. This gives you the insight you need to develop more effective content marketing strategies – that are both segmented and at scale. Taken another step forward, you can further segment your content with buying stages. Almost half of marketers use dedicated content for three to five distinct buying stages.
This type of streamlined marketing can help to boost sales numbers because your audience will be more receptive to content created and delivered specifically for them. Better personas, more effective segmentation, and the ability to deliver customized content at scale… you can’t beat these kinds of results. Told you automation is an ROI machine for your content marketing!
Create a Better Customer Experience
And then there’s customer experience. Nothing helps marketers deliver a better CX than technology. And CX is one area in which the bar is always rising. Customers grow accustomed to a better experience with brands that excel at CX, forcing other companies to either catch up or lose market share.
You already know that investing in CX will drive the ROI of your marketing. Research shows that there’s a $3 return for every $1 invested in the customer experience.
With automation, there’s a lot you can do to improve your CX:
Lose less leads with an organized lead capture system. Every lead is contacted, exactly when they are supposed to be, with the right content. This means, potential customers aren’t neglected.
Send leads exactly what they want based on how they interact with your website.
Lead nurturing can be behavior based. Leads who probably do want another email to hear about your latest life-changing blog post will receive it in their inbox. Those who would perceive another email as overkill, won’t.
Develop more relevant content. This is a big one for improving your strategy. You can track which content your audience responds best to and what type of content helps you achieve certain goals. Then, use these insights to refine your content development, giving your audience what is the most useful and engaging for them.
Content can be personalized. Something as simple as calling someone by their first name will actually help to increase sales – studies show that personalized emails increase the average order value by 5 percent. Take personalization even deeper by using other information you’ve learned about your audience, and you’ll get even better results. Deep personalization can drive a 17 percent revenue increase.
Strategize Smarter with Predictive Analytics
Predictive analytics are a gold mine for your content marketing strategy. With automation, you can connect the dots of how your buyers are interacting with your content at each stage in the customer lifecycle. And from this information, it’s possible to get a reasonable prediction of what each part of your content marketing strategy will result in.
This goes further than being able to offer more relevant content for a better customer experience. With this type of analysis, you can assign values to different content offerings along the journey and project how effective each component, as well as the whole strategy, will be at driving sales – based on past performance and historical customer data. This makes it easier to determine how much to invest in different types of content in order to achieve the desired return.
With attribution modeling reports, for example, you can tie a conversion or a sale to actions a customer or lead took when interacting with your content, such as downloading an ebook or registering for an event. Another useful step, for those with a big enough budget, is to tie big data from third-party sources into your marketing tools, giving you more information about who is interacting with your content and how.
Focus on Value
The bottom line of content must always be meaningful and valuable. You can craft a flashy bit of content, publish it, and then distribute it via your marketing automation platform, but your efforts will be wasted if the content is found to be ultimately of little to no value.
Your audience are smart; they engage with you because they have a specific problem and require your expertise or killer product to resolve this problem. As such, marketers must respect this intelligence and make sure that each piece of content hits this target.
Ask yourself: what is the point of this content? What is it trying to achieve? And is it successful?
Continue to Support Your Customers
Once we start achieving results from the content we launch, it is tempting to get a little carried away. We spend time creating great content. We carefully select the automation platform which best suits our needs, then we put the two elements together and… hey presto… a rapid upturn in conversions and new customers.
But what about the other end of the scale? What about the customers you have already acquired? Don’t they deserve love and support too? They certainly do and failing to provide that support can be costly. A study found that 67% of customers who churn cited bad experiences as the reason for their leaving the fold – i.e., they were pushed away, rather than pulled by attractive offers elsewhere.
Content can play a major role in preventing churn. Consider your interactions with displeased customers; what was playing on their mind? what issues needed to be resolved? Could these solutions be supported or provided with content?
Measure Results
What’s the point in implementing a strategy without metrics to measure its success? Without such metrics, we can’t tell if our strategies have worked or failed, we can’t know if we are going forwards or backwards, in fact, we can’t be sure of very much at all.
Fortunately, with the right kind of systems in place, the metrics we need to apply to data are within reach.
There are many different ways to achieve success in the content marketing game. Many marketers set their sights on boosted traffic via inbound marketing channels, while others are aiming for enhanced brand authority and social media shares. Some may aim to garner improved customer lifecycle value via content-based support.
Decide which outcome suits your organization and then what you will do to accomplish your aim. If boosted traffic was your target, analyze referrals and search engine keywords among visitors to your site to gauge if you have been successful. If enhanced brand authority and social media shares were your desired outcomes, use plug-in tools for your analytic software to assess whether these have been achieved.
Alternatively, if enhanced support was what you wanted to provide, commission reports on data from your customer feedback channels to check on this. Use the data and the functionality at your disposal; then set about planning the next steps of your content strategy.
Measure the ROI of Content Marketing Automation
The right marketing automation technology can push the reach of your content marketing strategy, giving you more impact and providing insights to help you improve even further. The outcome? Content marketing that’s more efficient and more powerful, and which offers a better return on investment; always a welcome trio of advantages.
Your marketing automation, when you break it down, is one of the most effective tools you have for boosting your content’s ROI. This what you can use to demonstrate your demonstrate the worth of your content marketing, thus driving more support for your campaigns. 45 percent of agencies use their automation platforms to track and prove ROI.
In order to seriously improve your conversion rates, to capture more lead data, and to boost sales, automation has to be viewed as much more than a time-saver and a platform for churning out automated content. While, for a lot of companies, automation started out with email and then social media, today it is a lot more than this.
Some time back, I hosted one of GetResponse’s Automation Hub webinars, in which I discussed several formulas that will help marketing professionals identify and calculate ROI for their content marketing efforts.
The owned platform is important – that’s the big difference. Remember that by the time a consumer is ready to make a purchase, they’ve already completed 90% of the buyer’s journey. And that’s where the various calculations for ROI on automation can help. That growth over time can come in the forms of sales as well as savings on other marketing costs.
If you need simple, mathematical formulas that can put a monetary value on your content marketing automation efforts, watch this video today!
View automation as the intelligent, AI-inspired machine that it is, and work towards unleashing its full potential for your overarching content marketing strategy. Then you’ll start seeing the ROI you want and deserve.
Marketing Automation Works!
Content marketing automation isn’t automatic marketing, as a Contently article insists. There are many different ways the strategy can sabotage your marketing success if you don’t apply the technique mindfully. Content marketing automation is just one aspect of the bigger marketing pie, and as HubSpot puts it, “it needs constant care in order to flourish.”
At a recent content marketing workshop, someone mentioned that they started following me on Twitter and that I’d tweeted a few times during the group discussion. I laughed and mentioned that it was content marketing automation at work. This is something you can do as well!
How can I help you get started? Contact me today!
The post How to Effectively Automate Content Marketing appeared first on Marketing Insider Group.
Remember when actual brands set the trends for successful marketing? Ah, the good old days.
Today, it’s influencers who are in charge, showing brands what it means to really connect with an audience and successfully promote new products on social channels. Content marketing lessons from influencers are a valuable source of inspiration, particularly for small- and mid-sized businesses (SMBs).
SMBs in particular can take advantage of some of the ways influencers build their niches and connect with smaller audiences.
This article will cover 4 important content marketing lessons from influencers for SMBs, with a few examples to help inspire you.
Quick Takeaways
Influencers are pros at building trust — one of the things valued most by consumers about their brand relationships.
Authenticity and connection are two reasons influencers resonate so much with their audiences.
Social profiles are just as important for representing your brand as your website.
Social media stories give your audience a more casual, down-to-earth view of your brand.
Influencer marketing: a quick history
The modern social media influencer may be a new phenomenon, but influencer marketing has been around for centuries. In the 17th and 18th centuries people looked to royalty for the newest fads. The early 20th century saw brands getting in on the game with fictional influencers (think the Marlboro Man) and one of the first true celebrity versions in Coco Chanel.
Later in the 20th century, celebrity endorsements became the norm — and a game changer for influencer culture. Michael Jordan for Nike, Cindy Crawford for Pepsi, and Paula Abdul for LA Gear (among others) proved just how much influencers help a brand resonate with consumers.
There’s one thing about pre-social media influencers, however, that separates them from what we see today: the brands were mostly in charge.
While influencers were the face of the brand, it was still the brand controlling the message. The influencers still depended on the brand to give them a platform.
Today? It’s the influencers who built the platforms and craft the messages. And, quite frankly, it’s often the influencers leading the way on marketing trends and best practices.
Smart businesses have recognized this flip and are willing to learn from it and participate. SMBs in particular stand to benefit from the lessons influencers can teach about creating a niche, connecting with target audiences, selling a lifestyle and more. In the next section, we’ll cover 4 specific content marketing lessons from influencers that every SMB should know.
Consumers today can spot a fake sell from a mile away. The reality is that in a digital world, brands can no longer pick and choose what to share with consumers. Information is out there, and consumers are really good at finding it.
This means brands must know who they are and represent themselves authentically to their audience. It means that brands can’t run from their mistakes — they have to acknowledge and own up to them. It means that the things they post and share have to be honest, because they will stick around forever online.
Most importantly, authenticity builds brand trust, and trust is valued by consumers over all other aspects of their brand relationships. When consumers trust a brand, they are most likely to recommend it, buy from it, and choose it over other alternatives.
Image Source: Marketing Charts
Influencers are really good at this. They know how to build a niche and stick to it. They’re pros at creating #ads that still scream authenticity and make consumers want to buy. And it’s working — the Edelman Trust Barometer found that 63% of consumers trust influencers “much more” than what brands say about themselves and that 60% of consumers have purchased a product based on an influencer’s recommendation in the past six months.
So: what are the takeaways for SMBs here? First, be authentic in the way you represent your brand online. Second, partnering with influencers to build brand trust is a smart strategy, and it doesn’t require connecting with the biggest names. Studies show that micro influencers (less than 10,000 followers) have the best engagement.
In other words: it’s not about finding the influencers with the largest following, it’s about finding the ones who most authentically align with your brand.
Connection with consumers
From authenticity and trust comes connection with consumers. Influencers have perfected the art of connection and evoking emotion in their audience. The way they do it is by showing what a brand’s products do in real life — for real people.
When we consider again that most people trust influencers more than brands, one of the reasons is no doubt that they can picture themselves in an influencer’s shoes. Influencers show products in their real day-to-day lives, not a shiny advertisement.
The obvious way for SMB brands to benefit is by connecting with influencers who can promote their products. But another way brands can execute on this content marketing lesson from influencers (and at lower cost) is to encourage and share user-generated content (UGC). UGC is effective in creating connection in much the same way influencer content is — consumers report that they also trust fellow consumers more than brands themselves.
Ways for SMBs to encourage user-generated content include:
Asking for reviews and sharing them online
Creating hashtags for products and campaigns
Incentives for UGC (like a gift card giveaway)
One great example is the City of St. Petersburg, Florida. They’ve been using the hashtag #sunshineshere for a few years now to encourage user-generated content from brands, visitors, and residents alike (like this example from Gallagher’s Pumpkin Patch).
Image Source: Instagram
Curated profile pages
Social media pages are often a consumer’s first point of contact with your business. As such, it can be just as important as your website in representing your brand. Since influencers rely solely on their social profiles, they create profiles that represent their own personal brands in much the same way traditional websites do for businesses.
It’s a content marketing lesson from influences that SMBs in particular should not ignore. Social profiles can be a huge opportunity for showcasing your brand personality, products and services, and happy customers all in one place.
Social media companies themselves have recognized this and created features that make it even easier to build website-esque social profiles.
Some best practices we’ve learned from influencers that SMBs should know:
Nail your first impression. Have a profile picture that really represents your brand, and complete the introductory information (like your bio, contact information, etc.).
Take advantage of highlight features on your social profiles. For example, Instagram has story highlights. Facebook has featured photos. TikTok has pinned videos.
Be intentional about what you post. Yes — brands can definitely keep it casual in many cases on social media. But that doesn’t equate to haphazard. Make sure your posts have a purpose and positively represent your brand.
Here you can see a few SMB brands doing it right on Instagram:
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Image Source: Later
Social media stories
While profile pages may be the curated representation of your brand, social media stories can give your audience a more down-to-earth, unfiltered look at your business. Influencers have no doubt been the pioneers of leveraging social media stories for brand marketing, transforming them from a casual way people shared their lives to a powerful tool for increasing brand reach.
So how can SMBs do the same? Here’s what to know about using stories well:
You can be more casual. Stories give your audience a peek into the day-to-day operations of your business. Use them to pull back the curtain and really showcase your brand’s personality.
Stories can amplify other content. Sharing an important post to your story or streaming an event there can amplify its visibility.
Interactive stories engage customers. Not only can customers feel connected by participating in surveys or polls on your stories, they can give you important feedback! Use questions and polls to get your audience’s opinion and feedback on products or other important topics.
Level up your content marketing
Ready to use these content marketing lessons from influencers to level up your entire content strategy?
When you consistently create great content, you have more to share on your social feeds and bigger opportunities to engage with your audience.
The team of writers and SEO experts at Marketing Insider Group can deliver you optimized, ready-to-publish content every week for one year (or more!).
Check out our SEO Blog Writing Service or schedule a quick consultation with me to get started.
The post 4 Content Marketing Lessons Influencers Can Teach SMBs appeared first on Marketing Insider Group.
Content marketing is leading the way for effective marketers. Many businesses hire content marketing agencies to help develop and distribute their messaging. However, there are some potential content marketing agency problems you want to consider.
The advent of the internet and social media has revolutionized the world of marketing. Information is more accessible than ever before. Consumers can be more selective in the brands they want to patronize.
For this reason, content marketing is crucial to a company’s success. Brands must deliver the right message to the right audience at the right time. Content marketing agencies can help build a successful strategy for this. In fact, 46% of marketers spent up to $10,000 last year on content marketing efforts. Businesses appreciate the value of investing in content and hiring qualified professionals to create high-quality material.
Source: Statista
A good agency can help build your audience. They can create valuable messaging that earns your audience’s trust. This, in turn, can increase your revenue. After all, 71% of consumers will spend more money to support a brand they trust.
Content marketing agencies offer numerous benefits. However, they also have their downfalls. Do your research. Make sure hiring an agency is the best decision for your business.
Quick Takeaways:
A content marketing agency provides expertise, objectivity, resources, and saves you time.
When you hire a content marketing agency, there’s going to be a learning curve.
Agencies could sacrifice content quality based on your budget.
A content marketing agency might bump the priority of your assignments.
Why Consider a Content Marketing Agency?
There was a time digital marketing simply involved sending promotional emails to prospects. Today, consumers expect to receive useful information. Emails don’t just sell a product. They provide helpful information that educates the consumer.
Content marketing agencies are full-service allies for your company. They can supplement an overwhelmed internal team. Or they can completely take over the role of creating articles, guides, information graphics, and reports. All of these drive traffic to business websites.
People search the internet because they have a problem or a question. Content that solves those problems and answers those questions earns customer loyalty. When your audience views you as a reliable resource, they’re more likely to value you and spread the word about your offerings.
Agencies employ a long-term strategy that drives traffic and growth. They present your company as a resource, enabling you to develop ongoing relationships with your customers. This leads to loyalty, conversions, and word-of-mouth advertising.
Content marketing is part of a company’s digital marketing campaign. Agencies assist businesses in solidifying their online presence. They help develop high-quality content that engages people.
By delivering useful, targeted information, an agency attracts potential customers. They can provide anything from email campaigns and web content to social media posts and even develop articles that employ a weekly blog subscription service.
Source: Pinterest
Some benefits of outsourcing to a content marketing agency include:
Expertise: An agency provides a collective experience and skill set. They’ve tried numerous approaches. They’ll know the best way to develop strategized content for your business. They also have a well-rounded team working for you. They can provide a wealth of knowledge on multiple content topics.
Objective third-party perspective: A content marketing agency has no personal ties to the inner workings of your business. This perspective gives them the freedom to offer insights and recommendations. They can identify missed opportunities without the pressures of internal bias or loyalties.
Valuable contacts: Content marketing is only successful if it reaches the right people at the right time. It can be challenging to build relationships with publications that target your audience. An agency can provide a list of contacts to help deliver your message effectively.
Timesaving efforts: A content marketing agency is continually evaluating the latest trends. They do all the research and analysis needed to develop a successful marketing strategy for your brand. Then, they create and distribute your content for you. This saves you the time of gathering, writing, and publishing your content.
A content marketing agency can help in many ways. However, there are potential content marketing agency problems. It’s best to know them to determine whether hiring an agency is the right option for you.
4 Potential Content Marketing Agency Problems
Content marketing can be achieved with the help of an agency. It could also be done by an internal team. Before you decide which is best for you, do your homework. Here are four little-known facts about content marketing agencies.
1. There’s a Learning Curve
A professional agency brings diverse experience to your projects. However, no one knows your brand better than you. Before committing to a long-term relationship, discuss your business in detail. Find out whether the agency has worked with brands in your industry.
Keep in mind an agency will need a little time to become well-versed in your field. As you set your content calendar, allow padding for edits, rewrites, and polishing in the beginning. It shouldn’t be long before the agency is creating quality content that resonates with your audience.
Source: Athletic Institute of Excellence
2. Transparency
When you outsource your work, you surrender some control. While this can be hard, it doesn’t have to be a negative. Employ an agency that understands the balance of taking the lead while keeping you informed.
Hiring a content marketing agency doesn’t mean you have no say over your messaging. There should be checkpoints where you give approval and feedback. A strategy shouldn’t be implemented before you know what it is.
If you find yourself in a relationship without transparency, you might have to reconsider your agreement. An agency should be able to explain their strategy clearly. They ought to come to you for consent. If they don’t, they may not be a reputable company.
3. They May Sacrifice Content Quality
Hiring a content marketing agency can be pricey. As you may expect, fees are typically charged hourly or per package. What you may not know is that many agencies use freelance writers. These writers charge the agency their own rates. Then, the agency has to mark up their cost to cover the fee of the writer and any other project expenses.
Depending on your budget, an agency may have to employ the cheapest writer available. Not the best one for the job. This could mean you’ll be getting a writer with less experience. This may result in more mistakes and more work. When discussing fees, be sure to ask about writer experience and how it correlates with your budget.
At Marketing Insider Group, we only hire the best writers. And then we treat them like the best. We respect their rates and experience. We do not force them to join client calls. We let them do what they do best: write. They also love that our clients are n it for the long term. So they can become experts at the tone and topic needed for each client.
4. They Might Bump Your Priority
Content marketing agencies only have so many writers. As assignments come in, they’re constantly having to re-prioritize their workload. Some jobs get bumped down the list based on deadline, relationship with the company, and even budget.
Turnaround time is impacted by edits, rewrites, and the addition of new projects. A quality agency has the capacity to adjust schedules without causing delays. They should be able to reassign projects or move deadlines without upsetting your timeline. You’ll want to ask these questions ahead of time to ensure your deadlines won’t be jeopardized.
Powering Your Content Marketing
Looking for a reputable content marketing agency? We bring you real-world marketing experience to create programs that don’t just make an impact. They also matter to you and your business. We’re ready to help you develop content that converts. Let’s begin driving more traffic and bringing more leads to your business.
Schedule a free consultation to learn about our how our content marketing agency’s Weekly Blog Writing Services makes quality content seamless.
The post 4 Little-Known Truths About Content Marketing Agencies appeared first on Marketing Insider Group.
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