Create "great" content and the search engines will reward your site with higher rankings and your audience will reward you with increased sales. Simple enough, right?
As "publishers" know, the gap between the amount of content created - however compelling it may be - and the monetary gains an enterprise demands is often wide. When data cannot back the promises of content marketing, teams are required to justify their budgets. From there, content marketers draw themselves into the "cost center" corner, a place most teams do not want to be.
| Read: Six Elements of Content Marketing & Blogging for Profit |
There are businesses, however, that serve as digital beacons of hope that content marketing can and does work. In fact, 2017 data from HubSpot indicates that a company's content goes just as far as a media article or an analyst report. When asked "What sources of information do you rely on when making a purchase decision for business?" an equal amount of respondents (39 percent) said media articles and vendor-authored materials, with analyst reports trailing at 33 percent.
What this finding can tell us is that vendors have established a high level of trust, fundamental to the success of any content marketing initiative.
Let's review some top examples of companies creating compelling content by gaining confidence, understanding their audiences and solving their pain points.
Subscription boxes are quickly outwearing their novelty status and those companies that can retain their customers are the ones whose doors will stay open (particularly as Amazon enters this arena). FabFitFun's content initiatives keep the company top of mind as a subscriber's advocate for health and partner in beauty versus simply being a recurring charge that someone could easily end.
Without relevant content, however, HubSpot's conversion efforts would fall in vain. The company wisely affords its content team the elbow room to provide helpful articles with the embedded calls-to-action doing the promotional work to pay for the efforts.
Zendesk seemingly allows Relate's staff the oversight to produce literature as it relates to relationships with very few conversion moments interrupting that vibe.
Perhaps other than AAA (with its "club" qualities), no other insurance and financial company has the level of connection with its customers than USAA. Since USAA is open to military members and their families, the business model relies on good products and services, of course, but also an understanding of the unique dynamics and intricacies of military life. Like many companies, USAA's entire existence depends on understanding its audience and content delivery is no exception.
USAA publishes a stand-alone website, usaastories.com, which includes articles and podcasts relating to military life. While the content is informational, USAA is not shy about including links to its products and services within the articles themselves and ending the pieces with strong calls-to-action often leading back to its main site usaa.com (where conversions can occur).
Companies looking to create content should approach their efforts in a way that provides true value first and creates conversion moments second, as the latter is a natural result of "great" content like seen so many times in the examples above.