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content marketing challenges

Brands face multiple obstacles when organizing the content function. They must grapple with content proliferation; inconsistent and uncoordinated content creation; the lack of strategic direction in the content insights process; and the difficulty for consumers, customers and prospects to find content that is relevant and timely.

Startups and B2B SaaS Founders often are’t even sure where to begin with marketing, let alone how to address the lack of content on their websites to drive leads and growth.

Add in a tough economic environment and it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. But we need to focus on growth. That’s why measuring ROI is always the biggest content marketing challenge.

Content marketing is a journey, and it’s not easy. In fact, it’s freaking hard. Too many of the marketing professionals we know are miserable. They try to fight every day to do work they can be proud of. Marketing that works!

So we asked our clients to tell us what are the biggest content marketing challenges we help them overcome. And how we help them solve for those challenges.

The insights below represent what we hear from our clients, the content marketing community, and our unique perspective. our goal is that you too can see a way past these challenges. Whether you work with us or not.

The major themes that emerge include tying content marketing efforts to business value, limited resources and internal tensions that hinder the content production process. Let’s take a closer look at some of the biggest challenges that are keeping marketers up at night.

1. Determining Content Marketing ROI

Many marketers are struggling to show the ROI of their content marketing efforts. Marketers from the agency side, for example, shared that some of their clients are wanting to know how many conversions can be attributed to a specific piece of content or channel. Often times these are brands whose digital conversion paths cannot be tracked or analyzed.

To combat this, marketers use a purchase intent model that assigns different weights to customer interactions with a piece of content, but they admit that this model isn’t perfect.

For other marketers, their biggest challenge is tying content to conversions and defining relevant, appropriate metrics to measure and evaluate the impact their content marketing programs make on the business’ bottom line.

Content ROI is subjective and driven by the business mission or objectives of the content marketing program. An integrated approach to measurement yields a value story as opposed to simply tracking activity metrics

Defining your value story requires a methodical approach.

  1. Clearly identify KPIs aligned with business mission.
  2. Identify the metrics that will work as a unit to tell a value story.
  3. Identify the sources of those metrics and pull into a dashboard using connectors.
  4. Create an algorithm that weights each metric in relation to their importance to the “story.”
  5. Analyze performing and non-performing metrics for each KPI on a periodic basis and use to calibrate approach.

Check out this video from a recent marketing keynote speech where I explain this dilemma:

For More Check Out:  10 Examples To Prove Content Marketing ROI To Your CEO

2. Video Content Marketing Virality

As my friend Todd Wheatland once said, the only answer to the question on how to make a viral video is STFU! He’s Australian so please forgive his potty mouth. But you gotta admit it’s somewhat true. You can’t just “create” a viral video. But anyone can create quality videos that reach, engage and convert.

But how do we guarantee that these great videos are seen by our target audience? How do we guarantee that the message of the video was viewed? The cost of guaranteeing that messages are seen is becoming increasingly more expensive, and the industry needs to be prepared for the increased cost.

Other marketers are facing time and resource constraints to produce quality videos. Some marketers also struggle with building out a sustainable video content strategy that can product videos which can live and scale across multiple markets.

Read More: How to Grow Your Audience with Video Content Marketing

3. Figuring Out How to Feed the Content Beast

Many brands spend too much of their time worried about creating the perfect piece of content. Or they worry about creating only the kind of content their boss or sales, or product people want (see point #1). The real goal is to create content consistently mapped to the buyer journey.

Buyers are searching online every day. And their search patterns reflect the need for basic education. Exactly the kind of content you are too afraid of publishing because you think your target audience already knows the basics. Or because you don’t realize how many people your target audience has to convince to buy your stuff.

Your content needs to be published frequently, based on your buyer’s journey, and mapped to keywords that relate to your business. That’s why our clients outsource content creation to us: because we provide foundational content that meets buyer needs, and delivers business results.

There are always obstacles to consistent publishing in content marketing. This can be due to a lack of resources, ideas, organization, and more.

The number one goal of content marketing for organizations is to generate more quality leads. They also said this was their biggest challenge.

It’s easy to create a lot of content. It’s very hard to do this at scale and to maintain high quality. Even if you have a good number of resources, keep in mind that without high throughput, you’re always lagging.

Research on blog frequency tells us 11 per month is the “magic” number—can you produce that amount of content on your own? That’s not the only content you’ll be creating—video, social posts, infographics, eBooks, etc. Do you have a “machine” to accomplish this? And how confident are you in its quality?

These are two big questions that content leaders need to ponder. Even the biggest organizations would have trouble with consistency and frequency. But we have a framework that allows us to deliver.

When you engage with us, we’ve already done the topic and keyword research. The content strategy informs voice and tone and considers audience profiles. Then we execute on it by using our own subject matter expert (SME) writers, SEO optimization best practices, and buyer’s journey funnel goals.

Sure, you could go on platforms and hire a freelancer here or there, but fair warning, you’ll likely be disappointed. In most scenarios, the quality won’t be up to your standards, nor will it be relatable to your audience.

For example, we write for a lot of software as a service (SaaS) companies. To write about SaaS subjects requires experience in the industry, a healthy technical aptitude, and the ability to understand how and why customers use the platform. Sorry, you’re not going to find this for $10/hour.

Here’s an approach for making your content resonate deeply at the point of discovery:

  1. Start with an insights process that provides deep understanding, fresh perspective and a honed vision of what will resonate and fulfill a specific need. In our experience, there is no dearth of available background information to inform story ideation and road map development, but typically information is scattered throughout the organization with no systematic way to capture, analyze and apply it
  2. Model the insights process for a specific need and use the results to create a COE methodology for content insights. This involves overlaying inputs from multiple points such as SEO reports, listening scans, CMS & CRM data, conference reports, sales insights, customer insights and research reports, etc. Overlay inputs and create a topic “Venn diagram” to determine topics best suited for brand differentiation and marketplace resonance.
  3. Use results to create a content roadmap. Audit existing content to identify holes and get new content needs into the content production cycle.

Read More: The Ultimate List of Blog Post Ideas for Content Marketers

4. Proving Credibility And Authority

For many marketers, they struggle with finding and establishing a credible and authoritative voice for their brands, and cutting through the noise to capture their target audience’s attention. The financial space, for example, is filled with “experts” offering advice and insights to consumers, which makes it extremely difficult for brands to stand out with their content.

Marketers are thus looking to develop an effective content strategy that will allow them to maintain the brand’s identity and boost marketing ROI, while improving their brand’s authority and thought leadership in the space.

This is where effective thought leadership comes in. You use your people and their passions and expertise to share what they know with your target audience. The result? Credibility and trust.

Read More:

How to Increase Your Authority with Evergreen Content

What Is Authority And How Can You Build It?

5. Set Your Content Marketing Budgeting

Budget remains one of the top challenges marketers face when it comes to justifying the cost and investment in their content marketing programs.

Many senior leaders want immediate results. Content marketing takes time to show ROI. Finding the budget for content marketing doesn’t need to be as challenging as it sounds: look at the ROI of your marketing campaigns. Chances are most of them don’t have any.

What are you spending on paid search because you don’t rank organically? Shift that budget in to content marketing.

Yes, investment in content is rising with more organizations realizing the value of it. According to HubSpot, 70% of marketers are doing so.

While they understand the importance of content marketing and want to invest, companies often face challenges here. They may have budget limitations that prohibit them from adding to their team.

These limitations may have become more of an issue during the pandemic. Or, they may have the majority of the budget allocated to paid channels to boost content but not focused on actually producing it.

Even when faced with COVID-19, B2B organizations still shifted dollars to content marketing from their advertising spend.

Looking ahead, companies said they would invest the most in content creation. Figuring out how to allocate this well isn’t an easy endeavor, especially if you’re trying to put resources into lots of buckets—writers, SEO strategists, etc.

The Solution: Spend Less, Get More

We’ve got it down to a number: $8,000 a month is all the budget you need to achieve your content marketing objectives. What do you get for that amount of money? A lot, including:

  • Content marketing strategy
  • One year of content ideas
  • SEO: An audit, keyword strategy, and external link building
  • Conversion funnel development
  • Paid promotion

For that investment, we see a 7x return for every dollar spent, which equates to $56K in revenue each month. These results won’t occur overnight or even after 30 or 60 days. Content marketing is a long game, and you must keep doing it.

Brands that invest in us to guide their content marketing will see returns. The returns are tangible metrics such as increased traffic, conversions, and revenue. Content becomes an important tool to attract, engage, nurture, and retain customers. Its value far exceeds filtering these dollars to paid ads only. Those ads only return when they are running. Content returns for as long as it’s live.

Read More: How Much Budget Do You Need for Content Marketing?

6. Approval Processes

Marketers on the agency side shared the same sentiment when it comes to their client approval process being too long. Some stakeholders are wanting to provide input at every step of the content creation process, which creates bottlenecks and delays in production timeline.

At the same time, different teams and organizations within a company all produce content to support various programs and channels they own, and this creates content quality and consistency issues. Marketers are looking to manage and govern their content creation process more efficiently to ensure all content produced is compelling, consistent and effective for their target audience.

For both agency and non-agency marketers, staying timely and relevant with the long, clunky approval processes they need to go through with content creation is one of the biggest challenges that’s keeping them up at night.

Read More: 5 Ways to Provide Better Feedback and Improve the Review & Approval Process

7. Branding

Marketers face various branding challenges when it comes to content marketing. Some struggle with maintaining their brand voice as brands expand their in-house teams and outsource content creation to external agencies and partners.

Others struggle with maintaining their individual brand identities while working under a bigger umbrella brand. The real goal with content marketing and branding is to think of content marketing as the platform to tell your brand story.

Read More: The Best Example of The Value of Storytelling You Will Ever Find

8. Maintaining Volume, Quality, Speed

One of the biggest challenges many marketers share is figuring out how to deliver engaging, compelling content with speed, without compromising on quality and volume. Trying to stay nimble and agile within a large corporate structure also proves to be a big pain point for many marketers.

For marketing a startup, the challenge is mainly time and resources. Regular content publishing is recognized by many startup founders as important, but they don’t have the time.

We always start by looking at the company blog. How often are you publishing? Sre you getting more traffic? Are your keyword rankings improving over time? How often is the competition publishing? Is their content long enough? Good enough?

Then we follow this process:

  1. Start by looking at keywords your audience is using in the buying process and keywords where you can win vs the competition.
  2. Create a list of the content headlines our amazing writing team thinks will resonate with this audience. We also ask them to create a list of things they are interested in writing about. This aligns writers with clients and audiences.
  3. Finally, we ask our clients for feedback and actual ratings of what they want to see published.

From there, we create a calendar of weekly content planned out for the entire year!

Read More: How Weekly Blog Content Solves the Top Challenges

9. Content Management

An Accenture study of over 1,000 marketing executives from 17 countries and 14 industries found that 73% of respondents are spending more than $50 million on content every year.

While 100% of marketing leaders surveyed all agreed that content is vital to the success of their businesses, content overload has become a top challenge for many organizations.

  • 92% said the volume of the content their organizations are producing is higher than it was two years ago, and 83% expect the volume to continue to increase in the next two years.
  • 50% said they currently have more content than they can effectively manage. Individual teams often create messaging and coordinate distribution of content on their own, which leads to organizational silos and program inefficiencies internally.
  • Less than 50% respondents felt they are fully prepared to manage the content they have today. The top three reasons marketing leaders attribute to their unpreparedness are a lack of skilled talent, technologies and clarity in content management and production processes.

The content calendar is the forcing function of every good marketing plan.

10. Strategic Business Alignment

For many brands, there is a lack of alignment in digital strategy and messaging across different platforms, which can hurt the customer experience and content marketing success. Cross-team collaboration becomes a big challenge for marketers when individuals and teams are working in silos and towards different visions and goals.

78% of leaders surveyed by Accenture felt they need better alignment between Marketing and IT teams to improve content marketing success. Marketing is more about digital now and requires technology more than ever before. New technologies are also available for marketers to experiment and innovate their practices in new ways. Another reason why marketers need better marketing and IT alignment is because technology today plays a central role in helping marketers deliver a seamless, compelling customer experience to reach, convert and retain customers.

Organizations create content in a dispersed structure, often resulting in multiple pieces of content being created by multiple areas of the company with little awareness that other content objects existed or were in production. In addition, often no master editorial calendar drives the content creation or amplification process. The lack of a chief content officer or well defined governance process results in no central authority to lead and direct the content creation process.

Only 19% of marketing leaders in the Accenture survey felt they have clear objectives established when creating new content assets. Nearly half of respondents say they do not feel their organizations have an effective content strategy that meets their current and future needs. 53% said they spend more time on the operational details of managing content than on strategically aligning their daily marketing efforts to a bigger picture. This goes to show that many brands have yet developed effective content marketing strategies or invested in the right resources to fully realize content marketing’s potential.

A Semrush study revealed that while 77 percent of organizations have a content strategy, only 9 percent say it’s excellent. The average rating in the survey was 3.5 out of 5. Just having a strategy isn’t good enough. You have to have an effective content marketing strategy. You must consistently execute on it and adjust it when necessary.

Why is that so hard? Many reasons come to mind—stakeholder interference (and not in a good way), there’s no time to be strategic because you’re always in the logistics, and you don’t have expertise in the area.

The data and the reality of what we see every day in the field are true. It comes down to budget, consistency/frequency, and strategy. We’ve developed a proven recipe that resolves these challenges for our clients.

That’s why the content marketing strategies that we create for clients are full of details. It’s not a document full of fluff; it’s one of action. It defines:

  • What content marketing means for your brand
  • The tactics you’ll employ to develop and promote content
  • Content production frequency and workflows
  • Your audience: demographics, motivations, challenges, objections, and more
  • Content clusters, which are the themes all the topics will roll up to
  • Distribution methods
  • What to measure and why

Without an actionable and well-defined strategy, you simply can’t achieve content marketing ROI. The strategy is the guiding light. Without one, you’re in the dark; with an ineffectual one, your light is very dim. The strategy tells you and delivers the path to success.

Further, here are five things that brands should do before beginning to create their content organization, in order to organize their content creation and distribution process:

  1. Map the current nodes of the content eco-system across the entire enterprise. This requires the authority to create a cross-functional view of how content gets produced.
  2. Analyze the map to determine if there is a logical flow and uncover interdependencies between groups that can impact efficiencies and approvals.
  3. Study the delta between current and future state and create a step strategy for breaking down siloes and working cross functionally.
  4. Create a content governance structure that aligns with future state.
  5. Adopt a center of Excellence approach that is both dynamic and inclusive.

Read More: How to Create and Align Your Content with the Buyer Journey

11. Continuous Learning

The ever-changing marketing landscape means marketers need to dedicate themselves to lifelong learning and innovation to reinvent themselves, or risk extinction. Training their teams on the latest marketing practices is another top challenge for many marketers as they are also trying to navigate the learning curve themselves.

12. Content Marketing Promotion

Identifying influencers to help amplify content is another marketing challenge many marketers face with their content marketing efforts.

Creating great content is not enough anymore, you need an effective content promotion strategy to help customers find and see your content.

Read More: 18 Content Promotion Tools for Every Strategy

13. The Biggest Challenge in Content Marketing: Developing a Customer-Centric Mindset

This may sound surprising to some, but convincing brands to put customers first is still a challenge many marketers face when creating content. They need to help brands change their mindset about the value of content and understand that content marketing isn’t the same as advertising. Content marketing is about being helpful and providing real value to customers, by giving them what they want and need at each stage of the customer journey.

If you go to most company websites or read their marketing content, you’ll notice that they do an excellent job of telling you all about the company and telling you all about their products. But they don’t answer the biggest questions their customers might have. In other words, they make the biggest marketing mistake and make it all about themselves and not about the customer.

Almost a decade ago, C.C. Chapman (@cc_chapman) predicted that companies will become better at this when he begged to see “more brands interacting in real time with their customers.”

Barbra Gago (@BarbraGago) also suggests marketers stop trying to “re-invent the wheel with every piece of content” and should instead focus on helping prospective buyers find “the right information–the content that is going to help them move through their purchase process.”

In an article on CMI, Alison Bolen (@alisonbolen) explained that the greatest challenge in content marketing is “understanding your customers well enough to develop content that is useful and relevant for them.”

And Marcus Sheridan (@TheSalesLion) gets to this same point when he asks content marketers to “write and communicate in a way that is completely and utterly on the level of their audience, not the level of the industry professional.”

So how do we help address this challenge?

Ardath Albee (@ardath421) suggests we need to “Take a Customer Field Trip” and try to look at our marketing and our content as a customer might see it.

I also answered one of the biggest marketing challenges for small businesses, How To Create Killer Content: Speak To A Customer where I tell very simply how you can use your customer stories to tell your story. But most importantly, to tell it using their words and by showing how you are solving real customer problems.

25 Signs Your Business Is Not Ready for Content Marketing

One question I get asked a lot is, “How is content marketing right for our business?” Well, the right question business owners should be asking is, “How do we know our business is ready for content marketing?”

I try to answer that question regularly on this blog. We talk about culture and brand publishing and I try to point to examples of great content whenever I can.

But sometimes, it’s better to define the signs that show you are not ready to change your direction.

And that’s what I’m doing here, with these 25 signs your business is not ready for content marketing. I’m sure there are plenty more. But these are the ones that just flew right off the top of my head.

  1. You don’t have a corporate blog.
  2. You have a corporate blog but only publish company news on it.
  3. Social listening and share of (search) voice does not drive your marketing strategy.
  4. Your social channels are only used to promote and push your webinars, white papers and events.
  5. Your content talks more about your products.
  6. You ask “How can we create a viral video?”
  7. You haven’t mapped your existing or future content to buyer stages.
  8. You don’t have any early-stage or thought leadership content.
  9. You haven’t defined an appropriate next step or “call to action” for your content.
  10. You think content marketing is expensive.
  11. You think hiring a bunch of journalists can help you.
  12. You constantly try to re-create your own viral Tiktok moments.
  13. You don’t track how much of your content gets used and which does best.
  14. You don’t monitor the content your competitors are creating.
  15. You don’t know what keywords your customers are using.
  16. You think content marketing is a campaign.
  17. You don’t have resources to publish on a regular basis.
  18. You don’t have dedicated testing resources for your content development and landing pages.
  19. You haven’t defined any kind of editorial workflow.
  20. Your business doesn’t train your employees on effective storytelling.
  21. You’re resistant to “giving away” content for free (without registration).
  22. You don’t think about the”shareability” of your content. Your website gets less than 5% of traffic from social networks.
  23. You don’t create visual content (videos, slide decks, infographics).
  24. You create content without thinking about how to distribute and amplify it.
  25. You do content marketing because someone told you to.

Over to You

Is your organization or agency currently facing any of these content marketing challenges? If so, how are you solving them? I’d love to hear your ideas, please share them below!

Are you interested in engaging and converting new customers via content? Contact me and let’s talk about how we can help.

Check out the photo of the full challenge board below:

We’re content marketing challenge solvers. Let’s talk about how we can get you out of reactive mode and into a proactive approach to content. If you’re ready to get more traffic to your site with quality content published consistently, check out our Content Builder Service.

The post 13 Biggest Content Marketing Challenges appeared first on Marketing Insider Group.

account-based marketing

Account-based marketing (ABM) is a strategy that is especially beneficial for B2B companies. ABM involves identifying, obtaining, and marketing to targeted, high-value accounts and communicating directly with executives and business leaders who have authority in large purchasing or contractual decisions.

This suits the B2B space by targeting specific decision-makers right from the start, filtering out unqualified prospects, and aligning marketing and sales on strategy, content, and engagement for each account. Also, ABM results in a faster turnaround of more qualified sales leads, allows for highly personalized and targeted campaigns, builds trust with B2B decision-makers, and offers additional support for the sales process.

With ABM, your money only goes towards the most qualified leads, which means shorter sales cycles, more personalized approaches to lead nurturing, and goal alignment between sales and marketing. The industries that benefit the most from ABM are:

  • Healthcare & Life Sciences
  • Software & Technology
  • Commercial Business Services
  • Manufacturing
  • Industrial Services

Here are some of the key indicators that your business should experiment with account-based marketing.

Your products or services are suited toward a specific, narrow target.

ABM is a great strategy to put into play if you have or can create a list of companies you’d like to do business with; the narrower your ideal target, the better for utilizing ABM. When you know exactly what companies you want to go after, targeting them—and developing a personalized and successful campaign—will be that much easier.

Finding your ideal target starts with looking at your current customers and analyzing data about their spending with you. Look at where your customers are spending, what they’re spending most on, and what your retention rate is. This information will help you paint an accurate picture of your ideal customers and strengths and weaknesses, which will not only help you narrow your target but also help you bolster your business.

Make sure your data is accurate and updated, then connect with the people who are looking for your products and services so you can hopefully add them to your customer roster.

Your revenue mostly comes from the top 20% of your customers.

If the top 20% of your customers provide most of your company’s revenue, then you’ll have a higher return on investment (ROI) by utilizing ABM. The reason for this is simple: if your campaign goes deep into cross-selling and upselling to your existing customers, you’ll save big on your marketing budget. Rather than wasting your resources attempting to sell to prospects and smaller customers, by expanding the accounts of your top clients, you’ll earn more with less work.

In B2B companies, we see this type of account expansion in new product launches, cross-sales after an acquisition, company-wide expansions, updated branding, and renewing existing contracts and sales agreements. The revenue is coming from an existing customer, but you’re making more by offering them newer and bigger products and services.

Keep in mind that you’ll have the greatest ABM success by targeting and selling to fewer, bigger clients as opposed to many smaller clients. Finding and keeping those top, high-value customers is the way to solidify your ABM efforts.

Your product or services requires a long sales cycle.

ABM is best suited to companies with a longer sales cycle. Many B2B products or services have long sales cycles—ranging from several months to a year—because of the complex, long-term nature of the purchases. However, using ABM can help you shorten your sales cycle by not wasting time on leads that won’t convert.

When your product or service has a long sales cycle, utilizing ABM can ensure you’re working as efficiently as possible. You don’t want any guesswork involved as you wait for your marketing leads to pay off, you want to ensure that you’re targeting customers with real potential.

You can reach key decision-makers within your target accounts.

Knowing who you want to target is one thing—being able to actually reach key decision-makers is another. This can be a challenge but partnering with an agency that has the tools to help can be your solution. At Sagefrog for example, we leverage RollWorks, among other ABM tools, to bring our B2B customers an ABM platform that works for their needs.

Your company has the resources to support your ABM efforts.

Before you jump in, make sure you’re prepared to invest in both expert resources and third-party marketing spending. To get the most out of ABM, you’ll want to invest in the experts—their efficiency and expertise will optimize your chance of success. An agency will be able to provide you with digital ABM strategy, content, creative, and project management to ensure your ABM efforts result in results and ROI.

Your marketing and sales teams are aligned on your ABM goals.

To succeed using ABM, your marketing and sales teams need to be on the same page. While marketing is responsible for defining targets and developing messaging and content, your sales team should focus on outreach, executing tactics, and obtaining feedback. If both teams aren’t tightly aligned and working towards the same goals, account-based marketing isn’t going to work.

If you’re launching an account-based marketing program, Sagefrog can help. Read our “6 Ws of Account-Based Marketing Infographic” and contact Sagefrog today.

The post Is Account-Based Marketing Right for You? appeared first on Marketing Insider Group.

Your website is a mission-critical marketing and engagement tool for your organization, whether you’re a large nonprofit seeking support for cancer research or a small retail business. This is where you create content that is useful to your target audience, house important tools that your customers or supporters can leverage, and more. And as you’ve likely invested a lot of time, effort, and money into the creation of your website, you want to make sure you’re getting the most mileage possible out of it.

But how do you know if your website is doing its job? How can you tell that it’s capturing people’s interest and converting visitors to your brand? You might be able to count individual sales or add up donations made on your online giving page, but what if you want to dig deeper?

Enter: web engagement data. Web engagement data can tell your organization how your target audience is interacting with your website and engaging with the information and resources on it. You can measure and track web engagement data using a tool like Google Analytics, or your website platform may offer built-in analytics.

But more important than how you measure your engagement on your website is how well you interpret your data and use it to your organization’s advantage. To help you get started, we’ll walk through three key web engagement metrics and how to interpret them to elevate your website’s performance:

  1. Traffic Sources
  2. Bounce Rate
  3. Conversion Rates

Once you know what you’re looking at when reviewing your website engagement data, you can make a game plan for how to better optimize your website. These tips can help whether you’re fine-tuning your website for search engine performance or tinkering with your eCommerce store to improve the user experience.

Ready to tap into the power of engagement data? Let’s go!

1. Traffic Sources

What are traffic sources?

This web engagement metric tells you where people are coming from to get to your website. There are six typical sources of web traffic:

  • Direct traffic, which refers to the site visitors who type your website URL directly into their browser or click a bookmark.
  • Organic search traffic, which is the visitors that click into your site from search engines like Google, but not through paid ads.
  • Paid search traffic, which is the visitors that click on a paid-for ad placed on a search engine for a specific search term.
  • Referral traffic, which refers to the visitors who arrive on your site through a link on another website.
  • Email traffic, which is the visitors who click on a link to your website in an email.
  • Social traffic, which refers to visitors who arrive on your website after clicking a link in a social media post or bio.

Research shows that most website traffic comes from organic search, meaning that the majority of people who visit your site will type something into Google and click on your website link because it looks like it might match what they’re looking for.

How do I interpret traffic sources?

Once you start collecting information about how your website visitors are getting to your site, you can think more strategically about the best ways to increase traffic from those sources. Check out these potential examples of using this information to your advantage:

  • You observe that most visitors to your nonprofit’s donation page are coming from Instagram. Knowing this, you decide to include more donation appeals in your Instagram posts and stories.
  • If you notice that most of your website’s traffic is coming from organic search, you might make the flow of traffic more airtight by optimizing your most important pages for specific keywords relevant to your organization and its offerings.
  • Perhaps paid search traffic is your nonprofit’s most prominent website traffic source. Knowing this, you might apply for the Google Ad Grant, which, according to Cornershop Creative, can help you connect with the people who want to be a part of your work but wouldn’t otherwise ever know that your organization is out there.

Of course, just because you’re working to increase traffic from one source doesn’t mean you should give up on other sources! That would be like putting all of your eggs in one basket. Instead, spread out your efforts so that you’re still generating traffic from a variety of sources, even if you’re focusing more heavily on one main channel for a time.

2. Bounce Rate

What is bounce rate?

Bounce rate is a pretty simple website engagement metric. It tells you the percentage of site visitors who land on one of your web pages and then leave, or “bounce.” In other words, bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who don’t take a deeper dive into your website, instead only looking at one page.

Semrush provides the following information about what constitutes a good bounce rate: “A bounce rate of 56% to 70% is on the high side, although there could be a good reason for this, and 41% to 55% would be considered an average bounce rate. An optimal bounce rate would be in the 26% to 40% range.”

How do I interpret bounce rate?

If you notice your bounce rate is in the higher range noted above, you should work to decrease it. After all, a high bounce rate means people aren’t fully engaging with your site. Here are a few tips to catch your audience’s attention and keep them looking through your site:

  • Create high-quality content. Your web content should make people want more. With written content especially, you should work to create content that is easy and entertaining to read. Tap into the humanizing element of content creation by leveraging your brand voice and always having empathy for your audience.
  • Make sure your website provides a great user experience on mobile devices. Have you ever had to “pinch-and-zoom” to look at a website on your phone or tablet? It can be a frustrating experience, especially when it’s difficult to tap buttons or exit out of improperly-sized pop-ups. Ensure your website is ready for visitors using any device so that they can explore your content even when they’re on-the-go.
  • Optimize for accessibility. To make sure that your website is meeting web accessibility standards, ensure that all of your written content has clear heading hierarchy that can help visitors who are navigating using screen readers. You should also include alt text on images and captioning or transcripts for multimedia elements. You can even add an accessibility widget to your website, empowering visitors to take actions like changing site coloring to grayscale or adjusting fonts to be more readable.

One last note on bounce rate: If your bounce rate on a particular page seems a little high, don’t panic! Do a little digging to understand the context first. If your nonprofit’s blog has a high bounce rate, it might be because you haven’t posted in a while. Or, if your “Events” page has a high bounce rate, it might be because people are only looking for last-minute information ahead of the day of a big event. The context for high bounce rates will show you how concerned you should be about reducing the rate for individual pages.

3. Conversion Rate

What is conversion rate?

Conversion rate tells you what percentage of website visitors have completed a desired action. You can think of conversion rate as the percentage of website visitors that turn into customers or supporters of your brand or mission.

The desired action that your visitors complete could take a variety of forms. Here are a few examples:

  • Downloading a whitepaper
  • Making a donation
  • Purchasing a product or service
  • Filling out a contact form or demo request
  • Signing up for an email newsletter
  • Sharing a blog post to social media

Of course, you want your conversion rates to be as high as possible, but this is where it gets a little subjective. Conversion rate will differ based on everything from visitors’ location and the year to what specific action you’re looking at. However, general site-wide conversion rates will land between 2% and 5%, whereas action pages like donation pages usually have a conversion rate around 21%.

How do I interpret conversion rate?

Your conversion rate tells you if your action pages or even basic calls-to-action (CTAs) are accomplishing what you want them to. Once you’ve been tracking conversions for your highest-priority action pages for a while, you’ll have a good sense of your page’s typical performance, which can give you a starting point as you try to improve it.

To improve conversion rate on your action pages, make sure your written content is strong. For example, if you have written out CTAs, are they engaging? Do they actually make people feel compelled to act?

You should also optimize any forms that you’re using to complete conversions. Make them easy to use, with minimal steps for the user and a cohesive, secure experience that will provide them peace of mind (especially if they’re making a purchase or donation).

Here’s an example of a nonprofit donation form that has a strong design:

The Water For People donation form is an example of a well-designed donation form that is set up to have a high conversion rate. 

Water for People’s donation form has a sleek visual design that’s easy for donors to navigate. It’s also user-friendly with easily-clickable buttons, making the donation process simple and convenient. Both of these characteristics make this form ideal for helping increase this organization’s donation page conversion rate!

If you have a new version of an action page that you want to try out but aren’t sure if it’s ready yet for your website’s audience, consider doing an informal A/B test. Have one group of employees at your organization use the old version of the page and another group of employees use the new version. Then, ask both groups to report back on their experience. You can then use their suggestions to strengthen your new action pages before pushing them live, giving you a better chance of raising your conversion rate right off the bat.

Understanding and being able to interpret web engagement data is the key to milking all the value you can out of your organization’s website. As you continue to familiarize yourself with the three metrics we’ve covered here (and measure and improve them on your own website), don’t be afraid to learn about and measure others, like pageviews or session duration.

The more information you’re gathering about your website’s performance, the better! Remember to always dig deeper to understand the context for the numbers you’re seeing. Then, make intentional improvements to your website that will more fully engage your target audience when they find you online. You’ve got this!

Sarah Fargusson – Director of Digital Strategy at Cornershop Creative

Self-described as a “non-profit junkie,” Sarah has dedicated her career to serving the needs of the non-profit sector. Her project management experience spans a variety of non-profit management disciplines including strategic planning, community engagement, capacity building, fundraising and research. She has worked both in and for the non-profit sector at the Feminist Majority Foundation, the Sadie Nash Leadership Project, and the consulting firms The Lee Institute and The Curtis Group. With her ever expanding non-profit tool belt, Sarah joined Cornershop Creative to tap into her techie, creative side, while developing meaningful partnerships with her clients to help them more effectively achieve their goals.

The post How to Interpret Web Engagement Data to Elevate Your Website appeared first on Marketing Insider Group.

stop selling in your content marketing

We often get asked by our customers to create content that is more promotional, or that has a direct product tie-in. Which is exactly the kind of content no one wants.

Over the course of my career, I’ve heard more than a few executives huff: “we are in the business of selling stuff ya’ know.”

At this point, I always love to share the fact that over 90% of buyer journeys start with a “basic” search like “what is content marketing.” Guess what? We only rank for that keyword because we wrote other basic posts like what is marketing, what is thought leadership, and what is brand storytelling. These people aren’t ready to buy from us right now. But they will someday.

Ands we’ll know because they’ll read why content marketing is important, how to build your SEO rankings, and how to measure content marketing ROI.

And then we’ll see conversions from our articles on why your business needs a blog writing service, and the truth about content marketing agencies.

As my friend Jay Baer says, there are only 2 letters different from “selling” and “helping.” I’ve tried selling. I’ve obeyed as executives asked me to create content to sell people. I watched that content fail. So stop selling in your content marketing. And start helping. Here’s how.

Stop promoting products in your content marketing for these reasons:

  1. Content marketing must help the buyer. And in doing so, you help the business.
  2. Brands need to think and act like publishers. This means creating content people actually want. Then promote your brand and product “on the edges” of that content.
  3. Promotional content simply doesn’t work. Buyers ignore it as we all have become amazing filters of any content that is trying to sell us something.
  4. Customer-focused content attracts readers who read and share the content providing increased reach, conversion and ROI.

What is content marketing?

I have often said that content marketing is the overlap between what brands know and what buyers ask.

There’s a large amount of content that brands create that no one actually wants. This is the “I am awesome.” “I am smart.” “Buy from us” content. Don’t be that guy or gal.

There is a large amount of content that your buyers are reading and sharing that comes from respected industry publishers. Be more like them.

Today, brands pump out a ton of promotional material. And yet, when we are ready to buy, we seek out the information we need or we love. This consumer-directed search means brands have to work harder to create more effective consumer-focused content.

Content today must compete with pictures of babies and kittens and puppies. If you want your content to be seen, read and shared, it has to be helpful, educational, or entertaining content.

The biggest mistake in content marketing is making the content all about you. We love to quote one of the earliest leaders in content marketing, Ann Handley, who said that in content marketing you need to take your brand (or product) out of the story and “make your customers the hero of your stories.

Effective content marketing seeks to help the buyer. In doing so, you gain their attention, their respect, and ultimately their trust. This trust is what leads to sales.

But try to add a product pitch or promotional tie-in directly to your content, and the readers start to run for the door.

Don’t Believe Me? Test It!

Back in 2007, I joined SAP to run an online lead generation program. The aim was to get more high-quality leads for sales. The natural instinct of the business was to push product brochures, thinking this would provide a smaller number of more highly-qualified leads.

My instinct was to get new leads through thought leadership content, research reports and white papers focused on the buyers in our space.

So we tested this approach through publisher pay-per-lead programs. We gave publishers the content. They gave us the names and contact information of those who downloaded it. At one point we were testing more than 200 pieces of content across a dozen or so publishers. And the results were clear.

Product-based, promotional content drove almost zero response and no qualified leads. While customer-focused content drove, not just a higher volume, but also higher quality leads.

The responders of non-promotional content converted at a higher rate to new business that we could count as closed deals and cash revenue.

We also found out something else that was interesting: targeted content didn’t deliver more leads in the targeted audience.

What does this mean?

When we wanted leads in the retail industry, and pushed content specifically “for retailers,” even helpful thought leadership content, we received just as many leads in the retail industry as more generic, topic-based content such as “how to deliver amazing customer experiences.”

But these topics also drove high-converting leads in other industries as well.

The lesson? You must understand the topics that are interesting for your buyers. Then publish content that seeks to help them answer their biggest questions, challenges and concerns. You topic will likely be broader than you might initially think. And your content will be much more basic than you might think.

The bottom line: if you want content that works – that truly drives leads and sales – create helpful, non-promotional content.

If you want content that gets ignored, try to promote your business or sell your products.

The promise of content marketing is to attract an audience vs. buying it. 

This is why leading brands like Kraft, GE and Red Bull have said that content marketing delivers a significantly higher ROI than their traditional, promotional marketing efforts.

This is how we rank #1 and get a million visitors and nearly all our new clients from our own content marketing. This is how Televerde saw a double-digit increase in leads in 6 months. This is how B2B SaaS companies can 4-5x their traffic and trials.

Because when you earn your audience through effective content, you earn their trust. And when they are ready to buy and looking for information about the products you sell, they will come to you before they go to the competition.

So How Do We Promote Our Products?

The best way to promote your products is on your website.

We help more than 30 businesses to create content marketing experiences that attract early-stage buyers.

We advise our customers to create consistent, high-quality, helpful content that their audience wants to read and share.

Then we work with you on driving leads, trials, or sales conversions in a couple of ways:

  1. Your website’s main navigation. Do you invite people to explore your helpful content? I know a CMO who hates the word “Resources” on websites. TBH, it doesn’t really matter what you call it. Just let people know where they can get educated on the trends and important topics in your industry. Maybe even profile some of your articles on the homepage for those who aren’t ready to but. When your content marketing is part of your website’s main navigation, you will bring in visitors to your site that never came before. Some of them may read a helpful article and decide to check out the products you sell in the main navigation of your website.
  2. Middle-stage offers. Promote a “middle-stage” offer on the right hand side of your content, or at the bottom of the article like we do here. See that content offer after the 3rd paragraph of this page, the one on the right, and the one on the bottom of the page? They are all powered by a wordpress plug-in called AdRotate. Check it out. Create e-books and whitepapers to capture leads. (Or ask us to do this for you!) This is called “promoting on the edges” and constitutes the main way publishers make money today. If you look at our site, you’ll see we like e-books, webinars, free book PDFs, templates and “Ultimate Guides.” These are longer and deeper resources that middle-stage buyers are interested in. They require a name and email address, but are still customer-focused.
  3. Subscribers. If the goal of content marketing is to attract an audience, then the most important measure of success is the number of readers who subscribe to your content. But the added benefit here is you are building a database of names to nurture and convert deeper into the funnel.

At SAP, we had just one rule for our content marketing efforts: no promotional content or product tie-ins allowed.

We put this in place because 99.9% of our website traffic came from branded searches. This means only late-stage prospects who entered our company or product name into a web browser were visiting our site. Most of them had already completed their buyer journey and were just looking to validate the information they had already gathered themselves.

But the audience of people searching for unbranded terms in our product categories was 1,000 to 3,000 times bigger than this. And we weren’t reaching any of them.

By creating a content marketing resource center that sought to help our buyers and not promote the business, we attracted early-stage prospects. We measured our success based on the number of subscribers who opted-in to our content. And we converted a ton of leads that we would have never seen.

We ranked in the top position for the kind of web searches we knew our prospects were conducting. And in doing so, we delivered new leads and new paying customers for the business. We also elevated our internal experts and began what became a passion for me to help activate employees.

So stop trying to promote your product in your content marketing. It doesn’t work. That’s what your website is for.

Helpful content attracts an audience of prospects you would have never seen.

Ready to start helping and stop selling but gain more leads in the process? Learn more about our weekly blog writing services and get in touch with us to learn how we can help!

The post Why You Should Stop Selling In Your Content Marketing appeared first on Marketing Insider Group.