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The 12-Month Content Marketing Strategy for Startups

When you start a business, there’s a lot on your mind: how to fund all the equipment you’ll need, how to keep track of revenue and expenses, how to produce your goods and services economically enough to make a profit, and how to get the word out about what you offer. A content marketing strategy? Give me a break, you say.

Well, you could spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on some fancy ad agency to run ads no one will see since you can’t afford prime-time slots… You’re a startup.

Unless you’re independently wealthy, you’re going to need some way to market your business. The best way to do that – and statistics back it up – is content marketing.

Over 82% of companies today utilize content marketing, and for good reason. 86% of people searching on Google ignore paid ads. 70% of links clicked are organic. Content is where the people are!

That’s the power of a robust content marketing strategy. Here’s how you can put it to use for your new company.

Quick Takeaways:

  • Content marketing is the most cost-effective way to get the word out about your startup.
  • Build your new content marketing strategy one month at a time so you’re not overwhelmed.
  • Keep the focus on your customers and their needs, not your company.
  • Review your content strategy regularly to make sure you’re reaching the right audience with the right message.

January: Customer Focus Is the Secret of a Powerful Content Marketing Strategy

Content marketing doesn’t take a king’s ransom to work its magic. It only takes a little time, commitment, some imagination, and the secret sauce: customer-centric content that solves frustrating problems your target customers face. The whole point of content marketing is to position yourself as a trusted authority in your field by helping people conquer their challenges, whether in business or life.

To effectively write customer focused content, start with doing a little research on your target customers. Who is most likely to buy your products and services? What keeps them up at night? Do you have the expertise to slay any of those 3 a.m. worry monsters? My favorite question: what is their biggest challenge?

Establishing a buyer persona is important to do early on in your content creation journey. This information helps dictate your every move. Once you know who your target audience is, you can develop your brand voice based on what will reach them best.

Jot all of this down as it comes to you. This should spur the content idea that will soon turn into a full-blown content plan.

February: Choose Your Content Production Tools and Start Posting

The great part about content marketing is that it is incredibly economical. Although you can engage the services of a content marketing agency like ours for the content, there are a wealth of free or budget-friendly content marketing tools to help make that content work for you.

Here are a few we’ve found handy, especially for startups on a budget:

  • Google Docs: You don’t need to spend money on a word processor when you can get Google Docs simply by having a Gmail account. It shares many of the same features as paid word processors, and it has one advantage none of those have: you can collaborate in real time with members of your team whose input you want.
  • Google Keyword Planner: This free tool allows you to find the right words to focus your content around. Simply plug in your products and services, and the tool will spit back a long list of related words, along with the number of searches for those words.
  • WordPress: To start with, you can begin your blog with one of WordPress’s free website domains. As you gain traction and customers, you can migrate your content to their hosted paid version with a custom URL with your own brand stamped on it.
  • Google Analytics: Learn all about your blog or website’s audiences and the actions they take while they’re on your site. The more you know about your audience, the better you can tailor content to them.
  • Your smartphone and/or camera: Although it’s not exactly free, you probably already have one. Use it to create how-to videos and photos that showcase your products or services.
  • MailChimp: Use this helpful tool to send targeted emails and newsletters to various customer segments, as well as serious prospects. Keep informed about new posts, as well as exclusive offers, such as e-books or white papers, that you offer only to subscribers.
  • DivvyHQ: Divvy is a content planning and workflow collaboration platform we use with our clients to manage our annual content plans, collaborate across our team, and get content published and shared to the right social platforms.
  • Social media sites: Create a profile and use them to promote your blog posts, podcasts, or videos. Make sure you use your chosen keywords to get more eyes on your posts.
  • Grammarly: Never worry again about your fourth-grade English teacher reading your posts. Even the free version of this grammar and spelling checker finds most of your errors.

March: Dive Into Research and Create a Content Calendar

Now that you’ve published a few articles, videos, or photos, create a content calendar that can help you plan the rest of the year’s content. You have your personas identified and your platforms in order. Now is the time to start doing some more research.

Keyword and topic research can sound scary, but it doesn’t have to be. You’re a start-up, so chance are you don’t have the money to throw at expensive research tools that you don’t really know how to use, and luckily, that really isn’t necessary!

Google holds all of the answers you need. Start by looking at your competitors, what are they writing about? Begin making a list of topics you see people talking about in your industry most often. And then, put your own twist on things. How does your product or service apply in these instances? How can it help?

Don’t feel like you need to do this all in one sitting either. Come up with 10-15 topics and spread them out however works best for you. Then revisit your research in a few weeks when your list begins to dwindle. There will be plenty more inspiration by that time.

Once you have some ideas, plan to post them when they make sense seasonally. For instance, if you sell fitness equipment, you might want to plan to post an article or video that tells potential customers how to get their body in shape for the coming summer later this month or early April. Save your exercise-bike-as-holiday-gift post for say, late October or November.

Don’t forget to use your content calendar to repurpose older content for a growing new audience. If you posted an article about getting ready for tax season back in January, repurpose some of it for an early summer refresher video about tax breaks.

April: Give Them an “Easter Egg” They Can Use All Year Long

It’s springtime, and kids all over are looking forward to the annual neighborhood Easter egg hunt. No need to limit the goodies to kids. Give your email subscribers and loyal customers a resource they can use the entire year.

Whether it’s an e-book that provides details about key industry suppliers for your B2B customers or a guide on how to write a memoir for your book self-publishing business, giving away a resource they can use during the coming months will help build goodwill among your target customers.

Plus, once you create this resource, you can use it as a form of gated content on your website. Gated content is the good stuff that is only accessible by completing some kind of form. Create a landing page for your ebook so visitors have to sign up for your newsletter to gain access.

May: Publish a Case Study or Two

What your products and services have done for other customers can help drive purchases by others in a similar situation. In fact, 92% of consumer trust reviews over traditional advertisements.

Case studies are short, to-the-point stories that tell how your products or services have helped your customers solve some of their most challenging problems. Publishing them, along with a link to the customer’s website in case a potential customer wants to confirm your claims, is a great way to get potential customers to consider purchasing your product or service.

June: Take a Good, Hard Look at Your Analytics

Mid-year is a great time to assess what you’ve done so far. Look at your social media analytic tools and see how blog posts have performed with Google Analytics. Those with the most clicks to your website, the most conversions, and the most sales generated deserve an encore.

Measuring your digital marketing results throughout the year is good practice. Promote your best performers and tweak those that lag behind.

Create content similar to your best performers or repurpose them in a new context to gain a new audience.

Diversification is key in an online environment where marketers are using dozens of different forms of content to get their message out. For example, if your best performer was a video on how to change the oil in a car, create a step-by-step set of instructions on the same topic to post on your blog. Link back to the video for even more traction.

July: Adjust Your Strategy As Needed

While your head is already in the numbers, look to see whether there are any new potential customer segments that look promising – and to revisit your current ones for new insights.

Look at their demographics and where they hang out on social media. If they’re mostly on Pinterest but your main focus has been Facebook, you need to pour more effort into optimizing your Pinterest posts.

If you see keen interest in your content from a distinctly new group, find ways to target content to them. For instance, let’s say you have an automotive repair business. You’ve been targeting mostly younger males that read magazines like Car and Driver and Motor Trend.

However, the numbers show that some of your videos on DIY how-tos you’ve posted on Pinterest and YouTube have gained a wide female audience. Grab onto that new segment with new material aimed solely at them. Perhaps a YouTube live event, such as a “DIY Car Repair 101 for Women,” or a new Pinterest board with a similar title will help you gain more traction with this group.

August: Back-to-School Time!

I can hear the groans now. No, we’re not asking for you to enroll in an MBA course or anything remotely like that. However, taking advantage of seasonal changes to find new content angles is always a good bet.

Can you think of a way to tie what your business does to tie it back to whatever the season holds? Let’s look again at our fictional car repair company for an example of how you can adapt this tip for your use.

Could the owner, do you think, find ways to post content that appeals to students and their parents? Perhaps a “Car Repair 101 for Students” – or “Students: Learn How Not to Get Ripped Off by Shady Auto Repair Companies.” To sweeten the deal, you could offer an e-book or even a 20% coupon on an oil change or tune-up before students set off for school.

Utilize this approach year round for the best results. These on-theme topics help show your audience that you’re active online and paying attention to their everyday lives.

September: Create Long-Form Content

We tricked you! Now that the kids are back in school, it’s time for you, too, to put your nose to the content grindstone and create a longer piece of content like this 4500-word beast I wrote this year on how content marketing delivers ROI .

You could also turn that long form content into a white paper, a webinar, or a longer, more detailed video.

But don’t despair. Unlike when you were in school yourself, if you don’t have time to work on such a large undertaking, you can always outsource content creation to one of the many companies that specialize in that task.

A good way to tell whether outsourcing will give you more bang for the buck is to calculate how much your business earns you per hour. Now, estimate how many hours you would have to spend to create that content. If it would cost your business more to create that content than to outsource, choose outsourcing.

October: Don’t Be a Scaredy-Cat: Reach Out to Influencers and Start Guest Posting

October might be the season that sends shivers up your spine, but don’t let fear stop you from finding industry movers and shakers that can help give your content a wider audience. Influencers don’t have to be celebrities. They just need to be prominent people that your audience respects.

For instance, let’s say you manufacture equestrian equipment for show riders. You won’t get much mileage out of a Lady Gaga endorsement – even if she’s one of the world’s top celebrities. What will help you stand out among the crowd is the endorsement of a top Olympic rider.

Just don’t be afraid of the “no.” If your products and services are as top-flight as you think, you’ll eventually find an influencer or two who will be happy to point out how your products and services have helped them solve a vexing problem or two.

Reach out to prominent platforms that your audience reads and see if they’ll consider you to be a guest poster. This way you don’t have to trust someone else to tell your story, you’re still in control of what gets said and you get to reach a larger audience.

November: Review Your Reviews – And Be Thankful for Constructive Criticism

You’ve had your content marketing strategy up and running for over ten months now. It’s time to look at all the reviews you’ve received over those ten months.

First of all, be thankful for those reviews that point out areas in which you can improve. After all, it’s almost Thanksgiving!

Unless those negative reviews come from “trolls” whose complaints are only cries for attention, shore up any areas of weakness. Thank those who provide glowing reviews, and let those whose reviews are less stellar know you’re working on improving those areas.

Next, publish content that tells how you’ve improved your products and services. In that content, point out how those improvements have solved problems for your customers.

Finally, make it a point to read and respond to serious reviews during the year so your customers know you’re holding a two-way conversation, not a monologue. Customers want to do business with companies that listen to their concerns.

December: Time to Set Your Content Strategy for Next Year

Review what content performed best and plan to include more similar content during the coming year.

Sketch out content ideas for each month. If you have employees or contract workers, get their input. Often, employees with specific expertise can provide the kind of detail and technical knowledge that convinces customers to trust your company.

Set the key performance indicators that bring in the most business and plan to check them often. These numbers can help you tweak your content to bring an even greater return on your investment during the coming year.

Write your content strategy down and use it to create a content calendar for the next year. Create achievable, measurable goals and make it your New Year’s resolution to keep track of your progress toward them.

With a consistent, targeted content strategy, your startup will soon take its place among the leaders in your niche.

If you are ready to get more traffic to your site with quality content that’s consistently published, consider outsourcing and check out our Content Builder Service. Set up a quick consultation, and I’ll send you a free PDF version of my books. Get started today and generate more traffic and leads for your business.

The post The 12-Month Content Marketing Strategy for Startups appeared first on Marketing Insider Group.

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How We Help Brands Like Yours Develop a Content Marketing Strategy

chess piece showing content marketing strategy for brands

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:

  1. current audience insights
  2. business case
  3. current state
  4. mission statement
  5. 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 strategy 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 digital 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.”

Van Winkles.jpg

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. 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.

The Window.jpg

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

You cannot define success simply by how many visitors your branded content site. 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.”

Williams Sonoma Taste.jpg

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 influencers would see them 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.”

GE Reports.png

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.

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Want To Align Your Marketing Team? Try A Workshop!

marketing insider group shares how a marketing workshop can align a marketing team

Let’s face it – at some point, every business can benefit from enrolling team members in a marketing workshop. Whether your content strategy could use a refresh or your marketing strategy needs an overhaul, structured advice from outside experts can turn your current marketing efforts into a money-making master plan.

Did you know that 90% of marketers say they have a strategy but only 45% have actually written it down? And those who documented their strategy are 5x more likely to report high marketing ROI.

That’s why a workshop can revamp your business’s marketing efforts in an almost magical way. Almost sounds too good to be true, right? At first, we thought so too – until we saw the magic happen ourselves.

If you’re still not convinced, we don’t blame you. That’s why we’re sharing how a marketing workshop can get your team on the same page and working towards the same goals.

Quick Takeaways

  • A Marketing workshop can align your team around the right paths to higher ROI
  • Achieving marketing workshop gets your team on the same page on which goals to measure
  • Team alignment can help you solve your biggest marketing challenges
  • Workshops allow your strategy to be implemented consistently throughout the full year

If your marketing department needs a little TLC, a marketing workshop can do the trick. By re-aligning your marketing efforts with your audience’s needs, you can generate quality leads and turn them into paying customers.

How A Marketing Workshop Can Make You More Money

We always start our workshops with a simple question: What is marketing?

Whether attendees are in B2B Marketing or B2C the answer is hardly ever the right one:

Marketing is a conversation between your company and potential customers

Thats why the main goal of a marketing workshop is to guide your business towards identifying and implementing marketing best practices.

That means setting aggressive goals. For example, we show how our average client sees a 7x ROI and 138% increase in measurable website visits.

bar graph shows that a marketing workshop can increase ROI and generate more leads

Can you imagine seeing your content rank on Page 1 of SERPs? A marketing workshop can help you implement a content marketing strategy that turns that dream into a reality.

An effective marketing strategy:

  1. Reaches your audience using SEO keywords
  2. Engages your audience with content they want to see
  3. Converts engagement into sales
  4. Retains engagement and optimizes customer LTV, or lifetime value

image shows how an effective content marketing strategy reaches an audience and retains engagement

If that’s not enough to convince you of the power a marketing workshop has to offer, below you can learn our step-by-step approach.

A Marketing Workshop That Generates Results

No time to enroll in a marketing workshop? No problem. Here’s how we’ve built our marketing workshop to help our clients achieve success.

Our Approach

A shocking 63% of marketing professionals say their biggest challenge is driving traffic and generating quality leads. By putting prospects at the center of your strategy, you can increase your marketing ROI and generate more quality leads with minimal effort.

But since 80% of new leads never translate into sales, you need to make sure your marketing strategy is optimized for conversion by following these 5 steps:

  1. Identify. By using topic modeling, identify a master list of keywords relevant to topics and objectives within your industry.
  2. Target. Identify the target mix of the best 50-100 keywords. Consider the best keywords based on rank, competitive gaps, purchase intent, etc.
  3. Plan. Next, develop up to 100 topics using keywords with the most potential. Ask for your team’s feedback and schedule topics into your content calendar. This will help you stay on track and ensure you’re posting high quality content consistently.
  4. Publish. Start cranking out your content! Use your content calendar to make sure you’re posting new content at least once a week.
  5. Optimize. Maybe the most important step to any marketing strategy, it’s time to measure your results. Analyze your monthly gains vs. the competition to learn how you can make improvements to further optimize for conversions.

image shows 5 steps to Marketing Insider Group’s approach to the best content marketing strategy

We know this 5-step model works because we’ve seen it produce results over and over again – even for our own business. It works because when you consistently create valuable content for prospects, you can keep your audience engaged and take advantage of every opportunity for growth.

Marketing Workshop Objectives

Every great strategy works towards achieving a list of goals and objectives. At Marketing Insider Group, we know that an effective marketing workshop should:

  • Apply content best practices to your business
  • Inspire your team to create effective thought leadership themes
  • Create and deliver content across the buyer journey
  • Use an editorial approach to create effective content
  • Maximize opportunities for content distribution
  • Measure and track the ROI of your content efforts
  • Define key priorities and actions to achieving success

When a business achieves these goals, they’re building credibility, generating quality leads, increasing ROI, and cultivating customer loyalty.

Timeline

Achieving your business goals sounds great, right? But how long does it take to see results? You know as well as we do that the marketing industry is a fast-paced environment, and when it comes to generating revenue, there’s no time to waste.

That’s why we believe in quick results. Ideally, your general timeline of success should look like this:

image shows marketing insider group’s workshop timeline

Remember, learning how to make improvements is one of the most important parts of any content marketing strategy. By adjusting your strategy to what is and isn’t working, you can work your way up to publishing flawless content that increases engagement, conversions and ROI.

Our Content Framework

If you’ve been paying close attention, you probably noticed that we mentioned consistency a few times so far, but haven’t explained why it’s so important yet. By keeping your messaging consistent, you prove to your audience that you’re reliable, making them more likely to buy your products or services.

Not only does your marketing strategy need to demonstrate consistency in distribution, but also in its:

  • Foundation
  • Destination
  • Team
  • Editorial
  • Customer Journey
  • Measurement

image shows Marketing Insider Group’s content framework

By keeping each element of your strategy consistent with a well-oiled content framework, you communicate authenticity to your audiences. Customers are more likely to engage with authentic brands because they have a clear idea of what a brand is all about.

Our Success Stories

You already know that we’ve seen this approach work time and time again, but, as the old saying goes, the proof is in the pudding. Here’s two specific accounts where we’ve seen our approach do wonders for our clients’ ROI and lead generation.

5 Year Old B2B SaaS

bar graph shows how marketing insider group’s strategy achieved success for 5 year old B2B SaaS

Business Services Firm

bar graph shows how marketing insider group’s strategy achieved success for business services firm

The Benefits of Aligned Marketing

More leads and increased ROI aren’t the only benefits you’ll reap from an aligned marketing team and strategy. With consistent, high quality content, you can make a positive impact on more than just your sales.

An Audience That Sticks Around

Aligning your marketing strategy with the needs and interests of prospects sets the stage for an impressive experience. When you capture your audience’s attention over and over again, you’ll make a positive impact on prospects and keep them coming back for more.

Better Traction On Social Media

When your marketing strategy considers the importance of content, you’re more likely to gain attention on social media. Sharing impactful content makes it more likely to be shared, raising your chances of reaching new prospects on social channels.

Increase Conversions

Great content marketing gives your audience the chance to connect with your brand and the information they need to make an educated purchase decision. Not to mention, the CTAs you include in your blog posts also guide your reader towards becoming a paying customer.

More Visibility

When you realign your marketing strategy, you’ll learn that SEO plays a major role. The more often you post original content with value, the more impact it will have on your ability to rank on SERPs. Remember, posting high quality content consistently builds trust with both your audience and Google.

Established Thought Leadership

With a marketing strategy dedicated to delivering quality content regularly, you’ll start to establish your business as a credible source of new information. This positions you and your brand as a thought leader in your industry, leading to more credibility and better rankings.

Align Your Team Today With Our Marketing Workshop

There’s no doubt that the right marketing workshop will help enhance your team’s alignment, ultimately optimizing your ROI and increasing lead generation. We also know that redesigning your content marketing strategy can take a good bit of time and effort, both of which busy business leaders need to optimize.

At Marketing Insider Group, we have the tools and expertise to guide your marketing efforts towards success. Maximize your ROI and lead generation today by checking out our weekly blog content service, or schedule a free consultation now to learn more!

The post Want To Align Your Marketing Team? Try A Workshop! appeared first on Marketing Insider Group.

Did you miss our previous article…
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The Top B2B Content Marketing Strategy Ideas to Consider Using Today

people at a desk looking at b2b content marketing strategy

Do you feel like your B2B content marketing strategy has become stale and your methods don’t seem to be getting the results they used to?

In the fast-paced world of digital marketing, it’s vital to stay up-to-date with the latest trends and tactics if you want to stay relevant to your audience and avoid falling behind your competitors. If you haven’t changed up your content strategy in the last 12 months, it’s time to take stock, figure out what’s working, and consider what new tactics you can employ to make the most out of your content.

Quick Takeaways:

  • Brands can leverage AI to produce and promote content at optimal levels.
  • Personalized content improves your conversion rates and builds one-to-one brand-customer relationships.
  • Your employees can tell your brand story more convincingly than anyone else.
  • Live video demonstrates your authenticity and transparency to customers.
  • Data enables companies to continually improve and refine their strategies based on real insights.
  • Content marketing agencies help save costs and execute more scalable strategies.

AI-Powered Content Production and Distribution

The amount of data that websites, apps, and businesses are collecting about online behavior and customers is growing at an exponential rate. In fact, worldwide data consumption is expected to reach 174 zettabytes (that’s 21 zeros!) by 2024 — nearly double it’s 2021 rate.

Worldwide data consumption is expected to reach 174 zettabytes by 2024, nearly double its 2021 rate.

Image Source: Finances Online

While the sheer volume of this data means that it can be difficult for humans to process effectively and gain insights from, spotting patterns and trends in data is something that machines are very good at.

Artificial intelligence software can now assist in all stages of content marketing — from spotting upcoming topic trends in the research phase and optimizing headlines for maximum impact and click-through rate, to automatically determining the best social networks and best times to promote content.

Intelligent software can not only speed up the content production process and make it more efficient, but it can help you to make content that better serves the needs of your audience too.

Personalized Experiences

AI and increased data collection have also made it possible to deliver a highly personalized experience to each individual member of your audience.

When you have data about demographics, browsing behavior, and previous engagement with your brand, you can use this information to deliver “hyper personalized” content experiences to each user, custom-designed to be as useful and engaging as possible.

Salesforce reports that 84% of customers say being treated like a person, not a number (AKA receiving personalized attention) is very important to winning their business. This applies as much for B2C content marketing as it does in the B2B context.

Further, customers expect personalized conveniences like connected processes (think omnichannel communication), sellers who understand how they want/need to use products and services, and instant, on-demand engagement).

Salesforce research shows 84% of buyers say being treated like a person, not a number, is very important to winning their business.

Image Source: Salesforce UK

As anyone on the sales team knows, it’s making this human connection with someone that can make a sale. The same is true in content marketing. When your content is targeted in its delivery, prioritizes topics that your customers care about, and has responsive design for seamless consumption, you can expect your leads to stick around.

By personalizing your B2B content marketing strategy ,you not only streamline your sales funnel and improve your conversion rate, but also helps build relationships with the individuals making purchase decisions for their companies.

Employee Generated Content

Influencer marketing can certainly be effective, but it can also be challenging to carry out in a B2B setting.

The answer is to use your own employees as influencers — the people who work for you are the best advocates for your business. It’s for this reason that over 70% of marketers use their employees as influencers.

Employees who advocate for their companies (such as by sharing brand content!) also help drive significant growth — employee-shared posts reach a staggering 571% wider audiences, and the leads they generate are 7X more likely to convert to sales.

Statistics showing that employee advocacy drives company growth, including by reaching a 571% larger audience with shared posts, and generating leads that are 7X more likely to convert.

Image Source: Peer to Peer Marketing

Of course, for employee influencers to be engaging, genuine, and persuasive, it’s vital that they really believe in your brand and are passionate about the business succeeding.

Your internal influencers can tell the story of your brand in a way that nobody else can. But it’s essential that you nurture a positive culture of growth and support at work, and do whatever you can to make every individual employee feel as if they are an integral part of the company and the brand.

Each individual can give a unique viewpoint, and consumers tend to trust content with a human face more than generic bra. Each employee can also bring his or her unique ideas to your content plan to keep things fresh and ensure you’re never stuck for content ideas.

Your employees can be your most effective salespeople so make sure you invest in employee engagement as much as you do in your content marketing strategy.

Live Video

HubSpot’s most recent State of Video report highlights exactly why it’s more important than ever to make video part of your digital content strategy. Their survey found that 90% of marketers say video has increased leads for their company — up from 86% in 2022 and the highest rate ever reported since the survey has been conducted.

Graph showing finding from HubSpot's State of Video Report that 90% of marketers say video has increased leads for their business.

Image Source: HubSpot

Other must-know stats from the survey drive this point home even further:

  • 91% of businesses use video as a marketing tool, and 96% see it as a critical part of their strategy
  • 92% of marketers say video gives them a positive ROI (another all-time high)
  • 87% of marketers say video has a direct positive impact on sales
  • 96%  say it helps increase user understanding of their products and services
  • 96% of consumers say they watch videos to learn about products and services
  • 79% say video has directly convinced them to make a purchase

The takeaway — if you aren’t already using marketing in your content marketing strategy, the time to start is right now.

And while all types of video will continue to grow in popularity in 2023, live video, in particular, is one strategy that is certainly worth considering integrating into your content strategy.

Live video is becoming an increasingly important part of several social networks. 80% of consumers would rather watch a live video than read a blog post. And Facebook has said that users spend 3 times longer watching live videos than standard videos.

As live video is unedited, it’s a great way to demonstrate authenticity and transparency, and build trust in your brand. Live video can also be interactive and is effective at engaging your audience.

As well as being a popular content format, live content converts extremely well. One survey found that 67% of people watching a livestream would go on to make a purchase.

67% of livestream viewers purchase a ticket to a similar event.

Image Source: Livestream

Data-Driven Content Strategy

Content marketing is no longer an optional part of your marketing strategy, but a must-have in today’s digital age. In fact, you’d be hard pressed to find a business or brand that didn’t engage in some form of content marketing.

Today, successful B2B content marketers have increasingly sophisticated, data-driven content strategies with measurable goals and insights-based optimization that delivers higher ROI.

Consider this — while 94% of businesses use content marketing in some capacity, only 9% say their strategy is very successful. Many don’t even know if their strategy is successful or not. For those companies, I’d strongly venture to guess a missing piece to their puzzle is lack of data insights. Further, an overwhelming majority of marketers — 87% — say data is their most underutilized asset.

Those businesses that are serious about content marketing will use insights from available data to construct their B2B content marketing strategy and plan, then analyze the results to ensure success. They’ll look for ways to refine and continually improve their strategy to find, engage, and convert the right audiences.

Along with this increasing sophistication in content marketing will come more reliance on tools and technology to deal with the data and manage strategy. The number of martech solutions is continuing to grow rapidly year on year, and there are definitely some exciting developments to watch out for in the future.

Hiring an Agency

You may not think of hiring a content strategy agency as a way to improve your own B2B content marketing strategy, but it’s  fast becoming one of the top ways companies level up their execution. Here’s why — content marketing requires many moving parts and frequent, high-quality, high-volume content publishing. When you are running a business and focusing on serving your customers, content inevitably takes a back seat sometimes.

The problem is that your strategy then loses momentum, and you then lose potential customers to your competitors.

When you hire an agency, you have a dedicated, full-time team focused on your content. You can count on optimized content, reliable delivery, frequent publishing, and a data-driven approach. While it may mean a financial investment up front to hire your new agency, outsourcing content marketing ultimately saves companies up to 90% compared to what they’d pay to hire, equip, and manage an internal content team.

Boost Results from Your B2B Content Marketing Strategy Today

Content marketing offers too many benefits to ignore, but not everyone has the time or resources to be able to write and produce their own content in-house. Hiring a writer or the services of a content marketing agency like ours help you to produce higher quality content, save you time and money, and put you in a better position to achieve your business goals.

If you’re interested in getting more traffic and leads for your website, or documenting your content marketing strategy, check out our Blog Writing Service. Setup a brief consultation and I’ll send you a free PDF version of my books!

The post The Top B2B Content Marketing Strategy Ideas to Consider Using Today appeared first on Marketing Insider Group.

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Why Community Is The Last Great Marketing Strategy

Why Community Is The Last Great Marketing Strategy written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Mark Schaefer

Mark Schaefer, a guest on the Duct Tape Marketing PodcastIn this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Mark Schaefer. Mark is a globally-recognized keynote speaker, college educator, marketing consultant, and author of books such as Marketing Rebellion – Cumulative Advantage, and Belonging To The Brand: Why Community Is The Last Great Marketing Strategy.

Key Takeaway:

Mark Schaefer argues that brand communities are the future of marketing strategy. In this episode, he highlights the major benefits of building community from a marketing perspective and the role they play in the world of business.

Questions I ask Mark Schaefer:

  • [2:03] What’s the difference between community and audience/customers?
  • [3:45] Would you say you don’t have community if people aren’t talking to each other?
  • [6:08] Would you say there are very few people that have actually activated a community in the way you’re talking about as a marketing strategy?
  • [8:18] There’s a real hunger nowadays for community wouldn’t you say?
  • [12:01]  You actually introduce a new idea that I hadn’t heard of but it’s the genesis of a business being community-based. That this is actually how it starts as opposed to it being a bolt-on channel – could you talk more about this idea?
  • [14:26] Why do you call this book the last great marketing strategy?
  • [16:32] You suggest that if you don’t start your community with purpose first, you’re doomed to fail right out of the gate. Could you expand on that idea?
  • [19:38] Talk a little bit about the technology aspect of a community from a practical standpoint – how does community management play into this?
  • [22:43] Where can more people learn about your work?

More About Mark Schaefer:

  • BusinessesGrow.com

Learn More About The Agency Intensive Certification:

  • Learn more

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John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Outbound Squad, hosted by Jason Bay and brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network. The audio destination for business professionals host Jason Bay, dives in with leading sales experts and top performing reps to share actionable tips and strategies to help you land more meetings with your ideal clients. In a recent episode called Quick Hacks to Personalize Your Outreach, he speaks with Ethan Parker about how to personalize your outreach in a more repeatable way. Something every single one of us has to do it. Listen to Outbound Squad, wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Mark Schaefer, a globally recognized keynote speaker, college educator, marketing consultant, author of books such as The Marketing Rebellion and Cumulative Advantage. But we’re gonna talk about his latest book today, belonging to the Brand, why Community is the Last Great Marketing Strategy. So Mark, welcome back to the show.

Mark Schaefer (01:17): Thank you, John. I love writing new books cuz it’s an excuse to talk to you. .

John Jantsch (01:22): . Well, I think this is at least your third appearance, if not Martha,

Mark Schaefer (01:25): At least. At least. Yeah. Yeah. And thankfully we do get a chance to talk to each other, you know, once in a while in between, but it’s always nice seeing

John Jantsch (01:33): You. That’s right. I did run into you recently. Where in Boston? Marketing? Boston.

Mark Schaefer (01:39): Oh, Maine.

John Jantsch (01:40): Oh, well is it been that long?

Mark Schaefer (01:42): I think it might have been Maine, yeah.

John Jantsch (01:44): Oh, okay. I thought we ran into each other at a, at another, another event more recent than that. That seems like eons ago. That was like pre covid.

Mark Schaefer (01:51): Well, that was pre Covid.

John Jantsch (01:53): , yeah. That’s gonna, that’s gonna be the new like, like BC and AD now it’s gonna be pre Covid, post Covid. I don’t know. All right, let’s get into your book. Um, first off, I want to get a definition what’s, I mean, what’s the difference between community and like audience or even customers?

Mark Schaefer (02:09): Yeah. Well I think that’s an important janan one I hit right up front in, in the book. You know, I think there a lot of people might have a blog or a podcast and they say, this is my community, but it’s really not. It’s an audience and that’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with that. I look, I owe a lot to my audience. I have a deep emotional connection with my audience, but it’s one way. Mm-hmm. . And if I go away, the audience goes away. It’s a sort of a cult of personality. The beauty of community is it brings the emotional connection to the brand to a new level. Because not only do people love you, they love each other in the group. I’m sure you experienced that with your own, you know, your duct tape community. So from, for, here’s something so interesting, John. I mean, I went down a lot of academic rabbit holes on psychology and sociology when I was writing this book. But it suggests that the bonds built in the community, that those friendships and that love spills over to the brand. It almost suggests it’s more important to build these relationships in a community than to build the relationship between the customer and the brand. And it builds this emotional switching cost. Because if people have friends in the community, well, I can’t leave this brand. These, this is my place, these are my people. So it’s really quite profound when you get into the marketing benefits of community.

John Jantsch (03:45): So a couple things I want to touch on that I heard you say, one of the key differences is, is instead of one to many, it’s a true network. Yeah. So to speak. And there’s not, well, there might be a leadership structure or guide, you know, it’s really the individual. Like you don’t have community if people aren’t talking to each other. Right.

Mark Schaefer (04:02): . Yeah. Yeah. And I, and it’s a great point that you make that when you talk about the leadership structure, and I think this is one of the most important values of the book, is it talks about really the new leadership mindset required this friend over in the UK who had a B2B marketing agency and he created this community and the community is now bigger than the company. He’s gone all in on this community. This is where he is getting his revenue. Yeah. And he said it’s so intimidating and disorienting to, you know, just all the stuff we learned at the university is turned upside down about leadership, about giving up control, about nurturing people. You’re not trying to build a staff. You’re trying to, you know, build leaders in your community. You know, in marketing that you and I do over the years, it’s ephemeral. You know, you have a campaign, right? When the money runs out, you start something else. A community, there’s like this implied social contract. Yeah. That’s new for marketing. , that’s new idea. But what I hope people get out of this book is that community isn’t added through the lens of brand marketing is. Yeah. You and I have been around a long time. When was the last time you and I, when was the last time you’ve been to a marketing conference where they’ve got a track on community and it’s this obvious opportunity staring as right in the face and it’s just almost completely overlooked by the world.

John Jantsch (05:44): Well it’s interesting because as you noted, well first off, you know, churches were communities, schools were communities, small towns, you know, talk about, you know, community. So as you said, we’ve always had that tribes and the initial native tribes were communities. But then when I think when we all went online, all of a sudden we had access to people outside of our community who believed the same thing we did. And so we have been talking even in marketing circles about community for, you know, at least 15. But I think there are very few people that have actually activated a community in the way that you’re talking about as a marketing strategy. ,

Mark Schaefer (06:23): Right? Yeah. I mean, if you remember when the internet began, the first thing a lot of people tried were communities, right? Coca-Cola I remember had a community, most of the big brands, even like one of the oil companies like Exxon had like a community thing, right? I mean you can see that why that wouldn’t work very well , but everybody tried it. But you know, in the early days they were built to try to sell stuff, right? They didn’t really have the right bandwidth. We didn’t have the right technology. You couldn’t do video and it just didn’t work. So most communities failed. The communities that survived. Almost all of them are transactional. It’s customer self-service. Oh, your problem with your software, go into our community. And I think the way the world, the reason the world went that way is because it’s easy to measure. You can see the ROI of that kind of community because it’s cost avoidance. And we completely overlook this idea of if we have like-minded people coming together, we can collaborate and co-create and it builds trust and it builds loyalty. And you’ve got customer advocacy and you have di a direct line to consumer information. And it, it’s just, I think I put together a very compelling case in the book to say, Hey, yeah, wake up and at least consider this idea.

John Jantsch (07:55): Well I know over the years, you know, I have sold for years, I’ve sold courses, I’ve sold training, I’ve done one-on-one. I will tell you some of the most beneficial programs that I’ve ever run have been small cohorts of people coming together Yeah. In a group. And I think that while I wouldn’t call that a community necessarily, even if we come together five or six times over, you know, so many months or something, people get very connected. And I think that that in some ways what I’m witnessing is just a real hunger that people have for this, right? I mean, it’s not just that people need to create this, it’s that there, there’s a real hunger. There’s a, you even start the book talking about, you know, a lot of this is driven out of loneliness, which has probably gotten far worse. , you know, for a lot of people that aren’t going into offices anymore.

Mark Schaefer (08:38): Yes. The first chapter of my book is probably the most depressing chapter in the history of different books, . Cause I start off talking about my own childhood loneliness and how I was lost. I I something happened to when I was a kid that just made me a shadow. It just, it made me someone just a ghost of a person. And then a miracle kind of happened in high school where I was embraced by a community and I was always haunted by this idea of what if that didn’t happen? I mean, I was going down this road of isolation and depression and this is why it’s significant. And this is one of the reasons I wrote the book. I saw this headline in the New York Times that said the loneliest generation talking about our children and our teenagers and the pandemic didn’t cause this. No. It was, it’s been creeping up actually for decades.

(09:38): But the pandemic really amplified things. And just like you said, that we’ve got generations like just living in their rooms. And one, one of my students said my, my my daughter graduated college the last year and a half of college was spent in her bedroom cuz it was remote. Then she got a job that was remote . She said the last this important two and a half years of her life, the big change in her life has been moving from one room to another. And she’s so lonely and she’s so desperate to see people. And so we are, we do long to belong. And I’m not being Pollyannish John, this is a business book. It’s based by data, it’s based by research. You know, that’s sort of a hallmark of my books. But there’s also this aspect that community heals. It not only works as a marketing idea, but it really heals.

(10:40): I mean we need this, as you say, psychologically, sociology, sociologically even there’s a little bit of research in the book that shows h helps us physically to be happy and belong. So I mean, it it, it is a business book, but I think it also sort of creates this sort of new meaning to marketing. We, it’s the only marketing I think our customers would actually embrace because they need it. And I think that’s a powerful idea. If you create not only marketing that works, but marketing that, that heals. That’s, that’s something that appeals to me. Hey,

John Jantsch (11:18): Marketing agency owners, you know, I can teach you the keys to doubling your business in just 90 days or your money back. Sound interesting. All you have to do is license our three step process that’s gonna allow you to make your competitors irrelevant, charge a premium for your services and scale perhaps without adding overhead. And here’s the best part. You can license this entire system for your agency by simply participating in an upcoming agency certification intensive look, why create the wheel? Use a set of tools that took us over 20 years to create. And you can have ’em today, check it out at dtm.world/certification. That’s DTM world slash certification. You actually introduced what for me was kind of a new, it’s probably not a new term, but it’s the genesis of a business being community based. That that actually being the way that it starts as opposed to a bolt on channel.

Mark Schaefer (12:18): Yeah. It was new for me and really inspirational. And I guess you’d have to say this was another sort of seed that was planted in the book. You know, I was writing, it was like 2018, I was writing Marketing Rebellion. So I was like on the lookout for new marketing models. Mm. And I was at the social media marketing world and was at this, uh, breakfast held by Andy Costadina, one of our mutual friends. Mm-hmm. and Dana Malstaff was there, first time I ever met her. She started telling me she had, she was an entrepreneur, she had been pregnant and didn’t feel like couldn’t find a lot of support for being a mom and being a business leader. So she created this Facebook group, cut Boss mom. Long story short, in the first nine months she was making a six figure income. She now has 70,000 members in this group.

(13:14): It’s nearly a million dollar business. She always corrected me. It’s not quite a million dollar. She said, mark, don’t call it a million dollar business. I’m almost there. But in a short period of time, her business has been doubling every year. No sales department, no marketing department, no marketing budget. Sort of a remarkable idea. She’s a, she’s created this million dollar business in a short period of time with no marketing budget. Because if you have this community of 70,000 people, she just, they just are eager to buy her courses, her videos, her events, her coaching, her workshops, because they believe in her. They love being in this place. They belong to her as a brand. And so she doesn’t have to sell. She was careful to say, I can sell . Right. Yeah. She knew it if she needs to, but she said I don’t need to.

John Jantsch (14:11): Yeah. I suspect a lot of people underestimate, you know, how much selling probably is, but not in the traditional negative way that we think about it. Yeah. Right, right. I mean you’re, you’re selling the vision, you know, of belonging and that’s, that’s still, you know, a sales job in some ways you call this, I mean it’s in the subtitle last great marketing strategy. So you, there’s nothing left. Like there’s no more. This is it.

Mark Schaefer (14:33): Well it’s gotta be my last book. Right? Well the reason, yeah, I know it’s a very, it’s a provocative subtitle, but this is the way I looked at it. First of all, it was the first marketing strategy. You know, when, you know, my, my grandparents lived in Pittsburgh and they shopped at these neighborhood stores and the people at those stores knew my grandparents, they knew their family, they knew their kids, they knew their birthdays. They would talk and it was a community. It was a community atmosphere. And I’m just one generation away from that and I’ve never experienced that and I just long to belong to something like that. So it was really the first way that the first marketing is you belong there. And I think we live in this community, in this world now where we have this streaming economy, you know, last night, you know, I was batching it last night, so I got on to Netflix and just binge some show and then, you know, tomorrow I’m going on a trip and I’m gonna listen to Spotify for hours and hours and I might listen to an audiobook and all these hours I’m consuming content.

(15:46): I am not going to hear one ad, I am not gonna hear one brand messaging. There’s gonna be no PR spin. And so we’ve gotta find something new. Yeah. And I think when all the interruptive advertising and the spam and the robocall finally go away, the last thing we’re gonna have is community. Because we’ve always had community, we’ve always needed community and we always will. And so I think this is the one thing in this fast, crazy world we can really count on. Our customers need this. And I think this could be a long lasting strategy if it’s done the right way.

John Jantsch (16:32): It’s one of the points that you make, I think in probably has its own whole chapter. If I recall, you know, I’m envisioning somebody listening to this going, we need to do community, we need to increase customer retention by 12%. So let’s start community. Yeah. And you suggest that actually if you don’t start with purpose first, yeah. You’re doomed to fail right outta the gate.

Mark Schaefer (16:53): Well, most communities fail. That’s the hard fact. And the main reason why they fail is because the communities are created to sell stuff. Right. And that’s great and we gotta do that, but it’s not a reason to gather. So you have to think about what is the intersection between what you do and what you believe in and this and the purpose of your customers. And one of the things I’m proud of in the book is I have dozens of brand new case studies, diverse b2b, b2c, big companies, you know, small companies. There’s even a stay-at-home mom with five kids that has a community of 50,000 people in this book. So it’s very inspirational. Yep. But I will rely on good old Harley Davidson. It’s a worn out example. But you know, here’s a, it’s a transportation company, but they don’t have these crazy ads. You know, we’re going crazy.

(17:56): Come down, it’s President’s Day sale. You’ll never hear that from Harley. You never will because they’ve got points of differentiation, right. About their look and the leather and all this stuff. But the purpose that unites them, and this is, this unifies that company and I have firsthand experience with this. I’ve worked with Harley Davidson. They are obsessed with everything they can do to make you a badass. That is what, that’s what if you wanna be a badass, they’re gonna help you do that. And that’s why they never need to have a sale. That’s why they’re never in your face with all these stupid ads. Because you know, you can really only be a badass if you have Arnold Davidson . Right. So it’s all based on this pur on this unifying purpose. You wanna be a badass, we wanna help you be a badass. And that’s the way it goes. So I spent a lot of time on this in the, in the book helping cus helping businesses think through what do you want to accomplish in the world? And you can do it better if you’ve got your customers with you. There’s lots of prompts I think to help businesses think that through. And, but it does, it, it it does start with a, not just a purpose, but really a unifying purpose.

John Jantsch (19:22): I hate to get too practical from go from purpose to tools , but you did kind of mention one of the challenges early on was we didn’t really have great tools for building community. You know, there’s a whole new breed of community platform cropping up through the, you know, I’m thinking of the circles, you know, of the world. Yeah. So talk to a little bit about both the technology but then also the practical standpoint. I think where a lot of communities fail is they think that you just put a bunch of people in there and they’re gonna like mingle. And so, you know, there has to be a community management aspect as well as the, you know, whatever the technology is, doesn’t there.

Mark Schaefer (19:57): Yeah. You know, in, in that part of the book, I stay pretty high level because,

John Jantsch (20:05): Because it’s all changed already. , it’s

Mark Schaefer (20:08): Changing

(20:09): And I can’t tell you what to do because Yeah, look some pe the only piece of advice I really give in the book is it’s probably going to help if you meet in a place that’s organic to your every, the everyday experience of your community. So if the people in your community, if they go to LinkedIn every day, maybe you should be on LinkedIn. If you go to Facebook or Twitter or Slack every day, maybe you should be there. Mm-hmm . Mm-hmm , my community is on Discord. I fought and kicked and screamed not to be on Discord , my community is about learning about the future of marketing and the community said, look, if we’re gonna learn about the future of marketing, we might as well learn about Discord. So I couldn’t argue with that. So there we are. The one thing I point out in the book that I think will be fascinating to any marketer is, are these new ideas about NFTs and Web three and the Metaverse?

(21:08): And I point out in this section of the book, talking about the future of the community, why many of the things we rely on in marketing today, like social listening platforms are gonna become obsolete in some ways They already are because Gen Z, they’re not on Facebook. Yeah. They’re not on LinkedIn. Even business majors. I gave a presentation to Esther’s degree students at Rutgers, almost none of them were even on LinkedIn. It’s like they resisted, where are they hanging out? Discord. Twitch arguably the biggest community in the world. I could even say Fortnite, right. Is a community. And guess what? They’re undetectable and like gens, when we talk about Gen Z, we’re not talking about babies. The first member of Gen Z just got elected. The Congress. Yeah. They’re here, they’re buying stuff, they’re gonna be our new leaders. You know, they punch way above their weight when it comes to culture and fashion and music and art. And I mean they’re having an incredible impact on our society and they’re invisible. And so, so, and I don’t have answers to that, but I think considering where these new communities are popping up, number one they, there’s an implication there for our own communities. Number two, there’s an implication there just to for finding these people cuz they are in communities. Yeah. But you and ie. You, you may never know it. Yeah.

John Jantsch (22:45): Speaking with Mark Schaffer on his wonderful new book, belonging to the Brand Mark, you want to tell people, I know the book’s available anywhere, but uh, you wanna invite people to connect with you in any fashion as well as check out the work you’re doing.

Mark Schaefer (22:55): Sure. Thanks so much John. You know, it’s just always a joy to speak to you. And so you can find me@businessesgrow.com. You’ll never remember how to spell Schaffer. You might not even remember how to spell Jan .

John Jantsch (23:10): I guarantee you we’ve both got the that S C H in common. But other

Mark Schaefer (23:14): Than that, yeah, you can remember Grow. And if you can remember that you can find my book, my blog, my podcast, my social media connections. And I’d love to hear from you. And John, thank you so much, as always.

John Jantsch (23:25): Well, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing podcast and hopefully we’ll run into you soon. Mark one of these days out there on the road. Hey, and one final thing before you go. You know how I talk about marketing strategy, strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that, what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the Marketing Strategy Assessment. You can find it@ marketingassessment.co. Check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketing assessment.co. I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.


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A Practical Inbound Marketing Strategy for B2B Companies

Attracting leads is a daunting task for any company. Figuring out which way to go about attracting leads is half the battle. Inbound marketing might be your next best step while marketing your B2B company.

The internet has become a superhighway for communication. There are billions of avenues for users to explore. Interactive communication is what people crave most when they go online. They want to feel seen.

As a company, you should take this sentiment and run with it. You need to create content that your customers actually care about. This will get them to your website much more quickly that traditional advertising.

With inbound marketing, you can attract potential customers who are already interested in your product or services. These prospects have a higher chance of converting than those who stumble upon a poorly placed ad.

Simply put, inbound marketing is creating content that your customers care about and letting them find you. Let’s dive into the areas you need to be focusing on and some steps you can take to create an inbound marketing strategy for your business.

Want to brush up on what goes into an inbound marketing strategy first? Here’s a quick video to give you the cliff notes from Inbound Explained:

Quick Takeaways:

  • Establishing buyer personas to connect with your prospects will lead to more effective marketing
  • Complete research with your specific buyer personas in mind
  • Market directly to prospects in every stage of the buyers’ journey with purposeful content marketing

Establish Buyer Personas

But what does that mean? A buyer persona is a description of your ideal customer. You create a buyer persona using existing customer data, industry research and daily observations.

Furthermore, your buyer persona should explain what drives your customers to use your product or service. These observations can help inform future strategies.

buyer personas questions to ask

Image Source: AWeber

More simply put, buyer personas are an informed explanation of who you think your target audience should be. This is who you create content for.

This may be the most reliable way to qualify a lead.  Targeting anyone outside of this definition is a waste of time.

Research SEO Rankings

Source: FinancesOnline

Keyword research is how you’ll know what your target audience is searching for. This is what you need to write about!

Keywords drive your content, because the higher you rank with keywords, the closer to the top you are on Google’s search results. Seeing how your search rankings are performing is important to a healthy content marketing strategy. Be honest, when was the last time you clicked the fifth link down?

Organic search rankings are even better than paid advertising. With paid ads, the benefits stop with the buck. When your advertisement budget runs dry, there’s no progress left to show for it. With organic rankings, you build an owned asset that will continue to benefit your website in the long run. Prioritizing organic rankings is simply more cost effective.

How exactly do you decide what keywords to use and what content to write? Sites like SEMrush and Ahrefs grant valuable insight into keyword traffic, giving you the right knowledge to craft your content calendar.

Outline Your Content

The next step is planning out content for your website based on your SEO research. The key to a successful inbound marketing strategy is to write content for every stage of the buyer’s journey.

Top of the funnel prospects who are just beginning their research will be looking for general information on your product or service. The further you move down the funnel, the more specific you’ll want to get. Make sure you have something for everybody, even if the top of the funnel might seem elementary to you. You are the expert here. If everyone knew everything you do, you wouldn’t have a business!

For example, let’s say your company sells stock trading advice. Create content focused on keywords identified in your research that your target audience is searching, like stocks or best investments right now. Write articles like:

10 Market Trends to Watch Out for in 2022

Top Investment Consultants in (State)

Richest Investors Right Now

When you answer prospective clients burning questions, you lead them right to your company page where they realize, hey! These people know what they’re talking about, and they do stock market consulting!

Create Your Content

So, you know what to write about, but what exactly does good, quality content look like? Here’s the basic rules.

  1. Word count matters

Google prioritizes articles within the 1,000-to-1,800-word range. Not enough or too many words will keep your masterpiece from ranking!

  1. Have an attention-grabbing meta description

Not only does Google pay attention to your meta description, but viewers do too! When your article comes up as a search result, the meta description is the second thing people see (after the title of course). The meta is a window into your content, so make it good!

  1. Call to Action (CTA)

A good CTA is how you connect with your audience. CTAs are the go get it portion of your article and are crucial to getting shares and engagement from your readers.

Include calls to action like starting a free trial, subscribing to an email list, or scheduling a free consultation. Don’t leave your readers hanging and give them something to do next.

Distribute Your Content

The next hurdle you face is content distribution. You gotta get in front of prospective eyes!

First thing you should consider is how often you can post. The more often, the better. An ideal schedule of 1 article per day increases your blogs effectiveness 4x compared to once per week. But content marketing can be time consuming for any team. Take inventory of your content creators and their bandwidth. You might consider outsourcing your blogs content creation for maximum effectiveness. P.S. most marketers do!

84% of b2b marketers outsource their content creation

Image Source: Ring Central

Once you have a schedule planned, think of where your company lives online, and more importantly, where your target audience frequents. For example, if you’re a SaaS company marketing your latest AI software, you probably won’t be focusing on Instagram views. Your prospective clients are likely marketing directors or website designers who look to LinkedIn for new technological developments. Go to them! Publish your content in more than one place, every. single. time.

But wait, there’s more! Use your content in your email marketing. The more you publish quality content, the more likely people will care about what you say and look to you for industry info so, create a newsletter where prospects can sign up to hear more from you. Spoon feed them the content you’ve worked so hard on by sending it out in your newsletter.

By maximizing the reach of every piece of content you reach an exponentially higher number of prospects. Don’t forget that leads don’t convert after their first click. You often need 7 or more touch points to make an impression.

Maintain and Change as Necessary

Every industry is different. Don’t just guess at what works best for your company, use your analytics to determine how successful your efforts are. How many people are seeing your content? What about clicks? How many are converting? These kinds of questions are what will show you the results (good and bad) of your inbound marketing strategy.

But how do you know if the customers you’re converting have been acquired through your inbound marketing strategy?

You can ask – Using surveys through your email marketing efforts can help you figure out just who has been using your product or service over a longer period of time. You can also find out how or why they converted. Having an open dialogue with customers also builds brand trust. People want to feel like your business cares about them.

Analytics – The backend of your website and content promotion tools can tell you a lot. You can see what part of your email newsletter viewers are clicking on. If you’re selling a tangible product, analytic tools can help pinpoint your repeat customers. Google Analytics shows you what content is performing best. Seek out the information that can better help direct your marketing efforts.

Test, test, test – The best way to know if something is working — run tests. Automation tools are the future of testing. You can run A/B tests on any variable you’d like. You can change the CTA in your newsletter, move the layout of your services page, and test different copy for your signup window. Then study the results to optimize your inbound strategy.

Wrap Up

Knowing where to focus your efforts to create an effective inbound marketing strategy isn’t always easy, but this outline is a great place to start! Now it’s time to create your own unique practical inbound marketing strategy. Get to it!

If the content creation aspect of this strategy looms over your head like a dark cloud, it might be time to consider outsourcing your content marketing. Lucky for you, you’re in the right place. (;

Check out our SEO blog writing service or schedule a free consultation today!

The post A Practical Inbound Marketing Strategy for B2B Companies appeared first on Marketing Insider Group.

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How to Build a Content Management Workflow That Works

Content marketing is an organic way for marketers to create owned assets and increase views through quality publishing and composition. Not to mention, less of the budget burned on traditional marketing efforts.

But executing a content marketing strategy can be overwhelming. A content management workflow is a game changer to perfecting your content marketing strategy.

Imagine the ideal outcome from your content marketing efforts. Then map out the steps to get there! This is your content management workflow. This involves every step from the planning phase to the distribution phase.

By creating an efficient content management workflow, you can maximize the efficiency of your marketing efforts, saving overall time, money, and resources.

Here’s a quick rundown of a good content management workflow from Megan Minns to get you started –

Quick Takeaways:

  • Good planning leads to consistency
  • Every strategy is unique and should fit to your business’ needs and goals
  • Content management is crucial to staying organized and up to date with your content publishing

So what does a content management workflow look like? It’s a pretty straightforward plan of attack:

  1. Deciding what content fits your brand and strategy
  2. Assigning and distributing workload
  3. Creating quality content
  4. Using a software / calendar to map out publishing
  5. Distributing across different platforms
  6. Maintaining and adapting

Let’s dive into it:

Deciding what content fits your brand and strategy

Content marketing in 2022 looks a little different for every business. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all strategy for everyone (wouldn’t that be nice). This means that you have to be particular about the content you’re focusing on.

What’s done well for you in the past? What are your competitors doing that seems to be going well? What kind of content do you like to read? These are all important questions to ask yourself when considering a content marketing strategy.

What’s done well for you in the past? What are your competitors doing that seems to be going well? What kind of content do you like to read? These are all important questions to ask yourself when considering a content marketing strategy as a whole.

What specifics should you consider? Well, there’s two big things to give you a “North Star” so to speak:

Buyer Personas

Buyer personas are what your ideal customer looks like, their interests, their hobbies, generally speaking who you think you should be marketing to.

Your buyer personas should be your main reference point in deciding what content to produce, assuming that you have identified who or what they are based on market research and customer data.

SEO / Keywords

Having a healthy content marketing strategy depends on knowing how your organic search rankings perform. Be honest, when was the last time you clicked the seventh link down?

You need to talk about the stuff that matters to your target audience. Look to others in your industry for guidance on what to focus on. Your enemy is your best friend in this case. You should be covering all the topics they are, but better.

So now that you have an idea of what you want to write about, you must consider what methods of writing or creating will reach your audience the best.

Content Types

Blog Posts

Blog posts are one of the biggest methods of content marketing. Blog writing brings customers onto your site that might not even know they need your service or product yet.

It’s like door-to-door selling but your prospects are the ones knocking, not the other way around! Use blogs to entertain and inform your audience about information relevant to them.

They aren’t quick to write but are a great long-term marketing investment. In fact, CoSchedule.com says

Further research from content marketing software specialists estimates that the average blog post takes around 6-7 hours to write, edit and publish; promoting a piece of content on social media will take around 2 hours; this includes writing the promotional posts for your social channels.

Don’t be alarmed though! This is a case of time and effort = yield, trust us!

Video Packages

Videos can showcase your product or employees in a way text cannot. Things like testimonials or introductory videos of your staff builds credibility with site visitors.

Creating good video will come at an expense. Ideally, you’ll want to:

  • Hire a professional company to shoot the videos. You might think any video is better than no video at all, but a poorly made video could actually hurt your credibility
  • Show the product from every angle and make sure to highlight its best features if you’re in a product industry
  • Employ someone to actually be in the video and talk the customer through the product or use an employee that your clients would be working with

Case Studies

Researching out case studies is an easy way to build credibility and inform your audience about relevant topics. Oftentimes you can accomplish one in house, or you can hire an expert to conduct one and write it out for you.

Social Media Posts and Graphics

Graphics and platform-specific posting is tricky, but not impossible. Make sure whomever is creating this content is familiar with basic design principles as well as the product or service you are selling.

A good social media team and campaign goes a long way in 2022!

Assigning and distributing workload

A good plan won’t accomplish much without people to execute it. Take it from communications and marketing experts, making sure your people and you are on the same page is super important.

Think about what you have to work with in terms of your writers or content creators. Who has an eloquent tone? Who looks most confident in front of a camera? Who is ALWAYS on social media? Wielding your marketing talent is important and knowing who is strongest with different forms of content can save you some headaches down the line.

Writing quality content and doing it consistently can be challenging. If you find yourself burning to midnight oil all to often to get blogs out week after week, it might be time to hire some help. You might look into hiring experienced content writers or a content marketing agency to do the research, writing, and publishing.

Creating quality content

Above all else you need to focus on the quality of your content. The more you publish quality content, the more your readers will want to come back to see what else you have to offer.

The key to creating quality content is to focus on relevant information that your prospective customers really care about. An easy way to do this is to write about their problems and how to solve them.

Say you sell couches. You’d write articles like How to Pick the Perfect Couch for Your Space or 10 Ways to Know It’s Time for a New Couch. These topics are a great way to reel in a sales qualified lead that you might not have with just paid advertising. This lead is much more likely to convert than someone who stumbled upon one of your ads a week after they bought a new couch.

When maintaining your blog, it’s important to follow these rules to give you the best shot at SEO rankings. Playing this one by the book is important as browsers are picky about what gets put at the top of search results and what goes on page 4.

Check out some of our insider trick to writing the perfect blog post:

Plus, a summary of the must do’s:

  1. Aim for longer articles

Google likes articles with some substance to them. Too little words might keep your hard work from topping the search page! An ideal range is 1,000 to 1,800 words.

  1. Stay focused on keywords

By understanding the terms most relevant to your topic and audience, you can successfully optimize for search. If your company sells couches, words like couch, living room and interior design, are what you want to focus on.

  1. Have a compelling meta description

Source: Kinsta

Hook, line and sinker! Having a succinct, direct and eye-catching description under your article will help reel in clicks.

  1. Internal Links

Internal links are hyperlinks in your blog content that link to other pages within your domain. You should include 1-2 internal links in every blog post.

  1. Call to Action (CTA)

The CTAs is where you direct your readers to their next step. A good CTA can increase conversion rates by 121%! Optimize your CTA to increase interaction with your brand and promote sales.

The internet is a distracting place, so you really have to lay out the next step for your viewer plainly before they move on. Imagine someone reading your blog about couches and totally missing the fact that you sell them! Then they leave your page and Google “couches near me” and click on the first sponsored ad from Raymour and Flannigan… The horror!

Create a distribution plan

Content isn’t worth much sitting in your drafts folder all day. Once the content is created, it’s time to schedule it out using a program or calendar.

How often should you be sharing your articles?

The more often you publish blog posts the better they perform, so the short answer is as often as possible.

There are a few other factors to consider as well when it comes to publishing places other than your website.

Twitter timelines move a mile a minute, so you can easily share multiple times a day without dominating someone’s timeline. If you’re creating videos to push out on YouTube, you might be uploading less frequently because of the time it takes from ideation to creation.

On slightly longer-form platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn, once a day is plenty. Remember: when you spend the time creating an online community of people interested in your product or industry, you’ll reap the benefits in views and engagement.

Use services like MailChimp and Constant Contact to create subscriber lists out of customers and prospects that visit your site. Then you can share your content directly to their email as often as you see fit. Read more on email marketing to find the best method for your business.

Distributing across different platforms

Creating a great video or case study can take a decent amount of time. To capitalize on the time and money spent creating content, you should be sharing it everywhere you can! Way more people will see your case study if you publish it on your website, LinkedIn and promote it on Twitter.

The first thing you might try is a social media audit. Where does your company have a voice or a community?

By maintaining your social media presence, you are creating an avenue to get your content in front of more prospects. Social media is the land of sharing! Say a handful of your followers repost your content. You just contacted hundreds of more people without having to lift a finger.

Social media also offers interactivity online. A comment section is the modern-day coffee house. It’s an ideal online space for your community to discuss ideas and connect with each other.

Some metrics to measure the success of your social media: how many followers you are gaining and how often posts are being engaged with.

Engagement is any comment, like, or share of your posts. The more engagement your posts get, the more likely it is that social media platforms will promote your content. It all always comes down to understanding and mastering the algorithms.

Maintaining and Adapting Your Strategy:

When creating your content marketing process, you have to define your key performance indicators (KPIs)  and be sure to measure them at every turn!

Examples of KPIs include:

  • Sales team productivity
  • Customers generated from content marketing vs. traditional marketing routes
  • Time and money spent content marketing vs. paid advertising

KPIs are driven by things like traffic, conversions, and your overall SEO rankings. KPIs keep your content management workflow on track to crush your marketing goals.

By taking a step back and analyzing how your content workflow and production efficiency is doing in relation to your KPIs, you can gain insight into your successes (and failures!).

With insight, you are better equipped to see what things are working, and what strategies should be reconsidered or tweaked so that your content marketing is thriving.

Wrap Up

Content management workflow really comes down to quality planning and understanding of your goals. The content itself is the hard part, and keeping it moving and efficiently through your process will keep things running smoothly for your marketing team.

Now that you have the knowhow, it’s time to go build your content management workflow strategy!

Do you want to use some of the marketing strategies seen here on MIG’s site but need some help or advice? Marketing Insider Group has a team of 35+ experienced writers ready to produce content for YOUR business. Check out our weekly blog content service or schedule a free consultation.

The post How to Build a Content Management Workflow That Works appeared first on Marketing Insider Group.

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How to Foster Employee Creativity to Keep Your Marketing Strategy Innovating

How to Foster Employee Creativity to Keep Your Marketing Strategy Innovating

Digital marketing is hard to organize, but it is even harder to innovate.

Once a business discovers a tactic that really works well, it becomes too easy to just focus on that one method and pour all your resources into it.

I’ve seen this happen again and again for a good reason: It is profitable. It is too easy to keep doing what works well, so ultimately your team has no time to invest into learning anything new.

And yet, don’t put all your eggs in one basket, even though it sounds cliche. Yet, it’s still the truth, moreso with digital marketing which keeps evolving and changing at an unprecedented pace. 

We’ve seen multiple well-explored marketing channels cease to exist (remember, Myspace, StumbleUpone and Digg?) And even search engine optimization that traditionally is the focus of most online businesses has long become too unpredictable. We’ve seen too many businesses perform lay-offs once their websites lost organic visibility over yet another update.

Finding Innovation within Your Business

This is why investing into marketing innovation is investing into the future.

The only way to keep your business afloat when your main marketing channel fails is to explore various newer options. Thiswill allow you to discover alternative sources of traffic and conversions.

Generating fresh marketing ideas is not something a single person can master on a continuous basis. Actually, from personal experience, agreat marketer is likely to find a single great marketing idea throughout their whole career. Yes, normally, it’s one idea per a successful career.

This is why picking someone else’s brains is such a good idea. Even experienced marketers should be willing to learn!

Your own team is the first place to look. They already know your business and your product, and many of them likely know your customers as well. They are likely to have lots of marketing ideas, or they may find them if they are given an opportunity. Here’s how:

Let them start independent mini-projects

My first job was in customer service. Less than a year into the job, my boss suggested that I start an SEO blog and learn SEO. This is how my career in SEO started, and this is why I am a big believer in letting employees own projects.

The well-known Google’s 20% policy comes to mind here: Google allowed its employees to spend 20% of their work time working on independent mini projects. Lots of notable projects were born thanks to that policy, including Gmail, AdSense and Google News.

Obviously, only a small percentage of those projects will really benefit your company’s bottom line but if you encourage your team members to align those projects with what your business is doing, that will also be a learning curve that will enrich your marketing strategy with new tools and experiments. 

For example, in my old days as a customer support rep, I set up a free blogspot site to upload our customers’ product demonstration pictures they were sharing with me in exchange for a coupon. I was responsible for designing, updating, promoting, etc. that blog and it became an impressive collection of visual and video reviews for the company I worked for. And it cost my employees nothing apart from my time which I was happy to spend. 

The Cost of Fostering Employee Creativity

Side projects don’t have to be a huge investment. 

  • Your employees can set up mini-sites for free;
  • There are lots of actionable and free resources they can use to educate themselves on marketing projects online: Here’s a pretty comprehensive one on SEO, here’s another one on link building, here’s one on building a social media strategy;
  • New tools often come with free trials or freemium versions they can use until those tools are proved really beneficial to your marketing strategy;
  • Custom domains can be as affordable as $2 per month: Namify can help you find one.
  • Even technical tasks can be handled independently. One can set up a website with no technical skills whatsoever these days. There are lots of free plugins and free tools that can replace paid software. 

To keep these mini-projects organized, consider using some kind of SEO productivity platform that is able to consolidate data for many sites. SE Ranking is a great and affordable option that offers everything from position tracking to traffic monitoring for multiple websites within the same dashboard:

SE Ranking for employee experience

Encourage idea sharing and collaborative brainstorming

Digital marketing is only effective if it is integrated into each and every department of your business. 

  • Employees working in customer service and sales can offer lots of insight into your customers, what they are struggling with, which questions they have and which problems they are solving. All of these insights can make your content strategy better focused on what your target audience is really searching.
  • Teams that are involved in product development can contribute to your marketing strategy by informing everyone of product updates, advantages of your product and unique features they are working on. This will help marketers position your product in the most beneficial way.
  • Dev teams can help you understand your website better, how users interact with it and how to assist them in having a more positive experience with your brand.

In many organizations there’s a disconnect between a marketing team and the rest of the company, even if each team consists of 1-2 employees. In other words, organizational silos are a big problem for any business, big or small.

Hosting regular brainstorming meetings to allow employees to share ideas and insights is a solid first step in fostering collaboration. Cross-company chats will be helpful as well, especially for identifying those quiet talents that don’t speak in public but have lots of ideas to share. Solutions like Slack require no technical set-up and are easy to integrate into any business communication.

Slack for employee engagement

Give ideas spotlight

Not all employee initiatives will turn successful. Lots of marketing tactics provide non-tangible benefits (e.g. branding), many of them become obviously beneficial after some (or a lot of) time (e.g. customer satisfaction). Not everything can be measured.

In fact, there are very few marketing tactics that provide obvious measurable results in a short period of time (the only one that comes to mind is PPC). When it comes to digital marketing, it is often about contributing time and effort for months before one can actually see any results at all.

Therefore I don’t believe in rewarding marketing initiatives, especially when it comes to innovation and experiments.

Instead of rewarding, consider praising.

If your employee discovered a new idea and started implementing it, announce that to the company. Make it clear that you value your employees’ time and effort. Ask them how you can help and which resources or tools they need access to. Feeling valued is often more rewarding than a bonus.

Conclusion

Fostering employee creativity to spark Innovation is definitely an investment that not many businesses think they can afford. But considering the pace at which digital marketing is changing it is also a necessity.

Letting your employees help your marketing strategy innovate is the most affordable and effective way to prevent your business from going stagnant. 

As an additional bonus, through encouraging initiative and collaboration, you are likely to find your team much more motivated and inspired which will inevitably result in better productivity and employee advocacy.

The post How to Foster Employee Creativity to Keep Your Marketing Strategy Innovating appeared first on Convince & Convert.

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The Super-Smart Guide to Content Optimization

Your content marketing efforts are one of the most important facets of your digital marketing strategy. Because you follow a distribution plan, your content is plastered everywhere.

This is great news! After all, the more platforms your content is shared on, the more chances it has to fall in front of prospective clients’ eyes. But believe it or not – not all content is created equal.

GrowthBadger.com defines content optimization as “the process of improving your content to get better results, like driving more traffic, users, leads or revenue.”

Basically, you have to optimize the content you are putting out so that it ranks higher on search engines.

Here’s a quick video from Teach Me Money Methods on the ins and outs of content optimization.

Quick Takeaways

  • If you aren’t using content marketing, it’s time to get with it
  • Maintaining a consistent and quality content marketing schedule with social media is crucial to your bottom line
  • Content optimization determines how well you’re ranking in SEO

Why content optimization in the first place?

Content optimization can make or break the content you’ve worked so hard to make excellent. Without following the many rules of SEO, your content can get lost into the search engine void without a trace.

Obviously, this isn’t an acceptable outcome for your digital marketing efforts. By creating content that keeps what the search engines like to see in mind, you can give yourself (and your content) the best shot at hitting the top of the search results page.

How to optimize your content for SEO

Writing better content

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?

Source: FinancesOnline

So what does better content look like? Well if you’re looking for blogging advice, we’ve got you covered with our guide to the perfect blog post. But for good measure, here’s some quick pointers for publishing content on your website.

Keep your word count between 1000 – 1800 words

Google likes articles within this range. Too little or too many might keep your hard work from ranking where it should!

Know your keywords

SEO/SEM is most successful when you know what words are the most important to what you talk about. Back to our tech example, words like tech, wearable, watch, would likely contribute best to a higher ranking among similar articles.

Have a compelling meta description

The hook is everything, right? Having a good description under your article title will be the blurb prospects read. If it’s boring or irrelevant to them, why would they click on your article?

Internal Links

Internal links are hyperlinks in your blog content that link to other pages within your domain. You should include 1-2 internal links in every blog post.

Call to Action (CTA)

CTAs tell readers what their next step is for interacting with your brand, and they can increase conversion rates by 121%. CTAs are the get up and do this part of your article, and are crucial to getting shares and engagement from your readers.

Include calls to action like starting a free trial, subscribing to an email list, or scheduling a free consultation. Don’t leave your readers hanging and give them something to do next.

Repurpose your content that performs well

Don’t forget about all that hard work you’ve already put into past content! Your best performing articles don’t need to sit on your website rotting to the webpages of time.

Articles that once brought in great traffic eventually fall out of touch with the ever changing world of search engine optimization. Not to mention, the actual content can become irrelevant to today’s world. This happens all the time in the ever-changing world of financial technology.

SocialMediaToday.com says:

Marketers can turn an article into a video, or an infographic – or the opposite in each case as well. They can reuse tips in an article by breaking them down into a series of posts or Stories frames, or they might post soundbites from a podcast directly to their social channels.

Having your writers restructure your content into different forms can be the gift that keeps on giving. Even a quick freshening up of an old article from a few years ago with modern information can be the makeover your content needs to be back on top of the page!

Optimize For Mobile

This seems like an obvious one, but when was the last time you opened your website on your phone? Mobile viewability is not only necessary but a must have when publishing content. More than half of all content is viewed on a phone.

If your website isn’t optimized for it, you’re only making yourself look bad! This is one of those things that is perfectly acceptable to hire contractors or consultancies for.

Paid content marketing

When all else fails, you can always cut the line! Google something. Anything. Chances are that the top 2 or 3 sites are promoted, or paid to be ranked that high. Companies in every industry often commit funds to put their sites above the competition.

Google ads sponsors their own form of an auction that you can bid on. Typically you’d bid on keywords that are relevant to your topic or business’ product or service.

The point? People like seeing their favorite social media stars showcasing products and their favorite companies. Lately companies like Hello Fresh and BetterHelp have seen record sign-up numbers with targeting paid advertising on successful podcast channels of diverse genres.

Paid social media promotion

How’s your social media presence? If your answer is we have none or not great, chances are your visibility is low. Being plugged into your target communities builds brand recognition and trust with prospects.

If your answer is pretty good, actually, paid social media promotion might be one of your best options when considering your paid content marketing strategy.

These companies have their own algorithms and targeting practices so that you know your advertisements are reaching your target audience and buyer personas. By paying your way in with your social media content you can gain followers and engagements on your posts to attract new customers.

Keep the content coming

Consistency is one of the most important things when considering your content marketing plan. You can follow all of the rules and still fall flat on your face if you aren’t building something your readers will come back to.

If your operation is expanding or you’re running out of time to properly handle your content marketing efforts, it might be time to hire some help!

There’s two options for this that yield similar results. You can either hire experienced content writers that have experience in SEO writing, or – hire a content marketing agency to do the research, writing, and publishing.

There’s benefits to both, but with a consultancy you often gain access to resources and experience you can’t always get with individual writers. Doing your research on both is important to finding what’s best for your business.

Don’t forget a distribution plan

Creating content is all well and good, but in the end 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 and don’t you have a voice?

While targeted ads are good for short term engagement, online presence builds organic interaction on your content. With the open forum nature of social media, your customer base can leave comments on your articles and posts, boosting overall engagement.

Not to mention with the advent of viral content being timely by capitalizing on social media trends has never been more important. With an adaptable social media team that understands what’s in and what’s out, you can use whatever today’s trend is to promote your product.

How often should you be sharing your content?

Well, there’s a few factors to consider – like how frequently you’re publishing to your site and which platforms you’re posting on. We’re going to assume you’re pushing out articles daily.

With Twitter, you can share several times a day. Twitter timelines burn through much quicker than other platforms, so oversharing isn’t as easy to do as say, Instagram or Facebook.

Source: Marketing Charts

On more formal platforms like Facebook and Pinterest, once a day works just fine. Remember: the more time you put into cultivating an online community among your customers, the more views you will get on your articles.

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.

CruxFinder.com has a really awesome post about building a content calendar before a product launch that can help you out too.

How to measure your efforts from content optimization

Identifying KPIs:

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

KPIs are your benchmarks for success, and every other metric is what defines your KPIs.

Follower and engagement growth

An easy metric to check out the success of your social media is how many followers you are gaining and how many times your posts are being engaged with.

You can check out what posts lead directly to a prospect or customer clicking through to your profile and clicking the follow button to stay up-to-date with your company.

Followers aren’t everything though, engagement is! Engagement is any comment, like, or share that happens to one of your posts. Driving up engagement leads to social media platforms suggesting your content to their users.

Being on the front page of someone’s social media timeline is the golden goose of digital marketing. This is done through quality content appropriate to each platform and consistent monitoring of what is successful and what isn’t.

Conversion rate

Source: Disruptive Advertising

Views are great, but what happens after the initial click? Is the reader just leafing through your website? Are they sharing it? Are they actually purchasing your product and scheduling your services, or are they just browsing?

Conversion rate shows how many prospects are becoming customers. This metric is the real shining gem of your content marketing efforts! Converting prospects should be your number one goal with content marketing.

Oftentimes the places where you are producing and publishing media give you excellent analytics tools to help assess what ads or content is producing the best conversion rate.

By figuring out what content does the best across what platforms, you can make better, more informed decisions on what media to spend the most time on.

Value comparison between efforts

Deciding the best formula of what media to use and how much is the point of analyzing your digital marketing campaign. If your demographics tend to stay on LinkedIn over Twitter and the numbers prove it, put more time into your Twitter account.

This applies to the content you create as well. If your blogging efforts garner three times the attention as, say, your video testimonials, you need to focus your time and resources on your blog.

You can use A/B testing too to see which types of content are performing well on the platforms you distribute on.

Wrap up

Optimizing your content can be tricky even when you’re following the rules. SEO is changing all of the time and it’s important to stay up to date on your knowhow. By being on top of the current best practices, you can keep your content optimized to drive your site to the top of the results page.

Do you want to use some of the marketing strategies seen here on MIG’s site but need some help or advice? Marketing Insider Group has a team of 35+ experienced writers ready to produce content for YOUR business. Check out our weekly blog content service or schedule a free consultation. 

The post The Super-Smart Guide to Content Optimization appeared first on Marketing Insider Group.

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4 Types of Content Creation (and How to Decide Which is For You)

Content creation is a core part of every brand’s marketing strategy in 2022 (or at least it should be). But its actual execution can take many forms. There are several types of content creation, and brands definitely don’t have to go it alone when it comes to developing content to engage their audiences and attract new customers.

In fact, the overwhelming majority — 86% — of businesses currently outsource their content creation in some way.

86% of companies outsource content creation.

Image Source: Reverb

But that doesn’t mean in-house content creation is dead (far from it) or that outsourcing has to be an all-or-nothing approach. In the sections that follow, we’ll walk through what content creation entails, why it’s so critical for brands today, the various approaches for executing it on an ongoing basis, and how to know which approach is right for your business.

Quick Takeaways

  • Content marketing earns more leads and conversions than traditional marketing methods at a fraction of the cost.
  • In-house content creation gives you total control but comes with heavy ongoing expenses.
  • Content agencies offer comprehensive content services (including content creation).
  • Freelancer outsourcing is a flexible option but requires close management.
  • Many companies employ a combination of the three types of content creation to meet their unique needs.
  • To determine the best approach for your business, you need to evaluate factors like the maturity of your current strategy, makeup of your internal team, and current content marketing budget.

What is content creation and why should you be doing it?

Content creation is the development of high-value assets that power your content marketing strategy and other lead generation and sales efforts. It encompasses many types of content, including but not limited to:

  • Blog articles
  • Videos
  • Ebooks/whitepapers
  • Emails
  • Social media posts
  • Infographics
  • Guides/checklists

Every company needs to be creating content. Today, both B2B and B2C buyers are doing the majority of their brand discovery and research online. Content is what represents your brand and builds an initial connection with potential customers during this time.

When created with SEO in mind, content is also what captures the attention of Google’s web crawlers and gets your website ranked on Google SERPs, significantly increasing your company’s online visibility and brand awareness.

Content marketing has now far and away proven to be the most effective marketing method for brands. It earns 3X the leads and 6X the conversions at a fraction of the cost compared to other types of traditional marketing.

Content marketing earns 3X as many leads and 6X the conversions while costing 62% less than traditional marketing methods.

Image Source: Sectorlink

By 2022, almost all brands know the importance of incorporating content creation and content marketing into their strategies. Executing it, however, is a bit more complicated.

For starters, content creation is time consuming. Writing a single blog article takes 3-4 hours, and the best performing companies publish 16+ articles per month. That’s more than 60 hours of content creation related to blogging alone.

Content creation also requires a wide range of skill sets. SEO expertise is needed to get content ranking on Google SERPs. Certain types of assets require graphic design skills or even video production experience. The writing itself also requires specialized experience depending on the type of content asset being created. And in many cases, the people with the most knowledge (like C-level execs or technical experts) are usually not the best people to do the actual writing.

Companies take varied approaches to getting content created at the frequency, volume, and quality needed to execute an effective content marketing strategy. Some handle it totally in-house while others outsource completely. In many cases, companies use a hybrid approach for more flexibility.

In the next section, we’ll explore the 4 main types of content creation methods.

4 Types of Content Creation

In-house

In-house content creation means all content is created by your own internal marketing team. The obvious advantage to this approach is that you have total control of and visibility into the content creation process. The writers, designers, and marketing strategists working on your content are all intimately familiar with your brand. In-house content creation can also save you money in that it doesn’t require paying external contributors.

But it also comes with some potential pitfalls. If you don’t have the right expertise on your internal team, you risk spending a lot of time, effort, and resources on content that doesn’t earn the ROI you expect.

Hiring and maintaining an in-house team can also get expensive. Full-time employees come with salary, benefits, and equipment expenses. If you don’t already have a team in place to create content, building one will likely be more expensive than outsourcing to an agency or freelance writers, which we’ll cover in the next sections.

Agency outsourcing

Hiring a content marketing agency is the most comprehensive approach to outsourcing and is a great option for businesses that recognize the importance of content creation but don’t have the resources to do it in-house. Content marketing agencies typically offer a managed services model that means they handle content creation as well as things like SEO strategy, site audits, competitive research, and performance reporting (these are just a few examples).

The perceived drawback of working with a content marketing agency is that it’s expensive. And it is true, outsourcing to an agency comes with a significant expense.

But it’s important to look at agency outsourcing with a 360 degree view. In short, you get out of your content strategy what you’re willing to put in. If you don’t have the resources to effectively execute content creation and strategy in-house, you’ll earn higher ROI by investing in an agency to help you do it.

Freelancer outsourcing

Another way to outsource is to hire freelancers to execute projects for you. Today, platforms like Upwork and Fiverr make it easier than ever to find and hire freelancers with the right skills and experience for your projects. You can hire writers, designers, editors, video producers and more with flexible terms and rates.

If you have the right team to set and manage your content strategy but need support on execution, freelancing might be the approach for you. That said, it’s important to consider the management requirements that come along with hiring freelancers. It requires active management to help freelancers achieve the right voice, tone, or design aesthetic for your brand (not to mention keeping everyone on deadline).

If you’re going to hire freelancers to help execute content creation and strategy, make sure you have someone (or multiple someones) dedicated to keeping things running smoothly.

Hybrid

Last but not least is a hybrid approach to content creation. This method is just how it sounds: it combines in-house content creation, agency outsourcing, and freelancer outsourcing depending on the business’s current needs.

For example, perhaps blogs are written and published in-house, but ebooks, infographics and other designed assets are handled by an agency. Maybe you hire an agency to help you develop and outline your strategy, then hire freelance writers to handle the actual content creation.

The takeaway is that businesses use hybrid approaches to remain flexible and meet changing needs related to content. The drawback to this method is that it can get a bit messy and hard to manage. It’s also more difficult to track performance metrics and determine content ROI when there are so many separate moving parts.

Which types of content creation are right for you?

There are clear advantages and potential drawbacks to each of the types of content creation. There is no one-size-fits-all approach, and the biggest determiner of success is typically how well the approach aligns with the resources and needs of the company.

So how do you know which one is best for your business? There are a few key factors to consider:

  • Internal resources – What is the current makeup of your content team? What is the reasonable bandwidth for content creation? Do they have the right knowledge and experience to create content that will perform?
  • Content marketing maturity – Do you already have a content strategy in place? If so, is it working? Do you need support with strategy development or strictly content creation?
  • Strategy – What types of content are included in your current content strategy (i.e. do you mainly publish blogs and social content? Do you create a high volume of downloadable assets like ebooks? Do you plan to publish video content? etc.)
  • Budget – What is your budget for spending on content creation?

When you know where you stand with your current strategy, your future plans and needs, and your spending ability, you’re best able to pursue the type of content creation that will earn you the most ROI.

Over to You

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The post 4 Types of Content Creation (and How to Decide Which is For You) appeared first on Marketing Insider Group.

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