On a crowded Web, brands are finding innovative ways to differentiate their online experience. One of the most popular ways to achieve that goal these days is through the strategic use of content marketing.
Content marketing is the Web's soup du jour, because of its SEO, engagement and branding benefits - not to mention that it's typically a low-cost alternative to paid media. Everyday brands are not only using content marketing to drive traffic to their digital properties and grow their client base, but the savviest ones are also diving deep into the analytics and social listening tools available to maximize this marketing channel.
Let's learn from these experts' successes using content marketing.
Content is a critical part of SEO (probably the most critical), and many of our clients simply did not have the resources in-house to produce the content needed to make our SEO efforts for them successful. This is where we began offering it as a service to help them create this much-needed content. Everything we do, though, is very data-driven, so we created a set of metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the success of our content marketing efforts for both our clients and ourselves. These metrics include traffic, social media and lead generation.
As an example of how we use and measure content marketing for ourselves, we produce bi-weekly webinars, which is our biggest lead generator of all our tactics and content pieces. For each specific webinar, we look at how successful it was in driving registrations, traffic to different areas of the website and other content pieces, attendance to the live webinar, social media engagement and on-demand views. As a whole, we look at how webinars perform in terms of overall lead generation and how they fit into the sales funnel for helping to nurture leads into sales.
Our marketing automation platform really helps us to put all the pieces together in terms of how well different pieces and types of content perform as far as generating leads and, ultimately, sales. But, we use Google Analytics to fill in the blanks for how people are finding and engaging with our content.
Say It Visually creates content that helps our clients be understood by their markets through video, graphics, presentations and more. Video, properly managed, provides terrific engagement and metrics/analytics.
Case in point - we created an explanation of the world's most boring subject - the IT Infrastructure Library ("ITIL"). To date it's racked up over 200,000 views for our client. (By contrast, the talking-head corporate videos they produced get viewed by 100 or fewer people.)
Our best content-marketing-for-ourselves example was the video "Skype Explained Visually." We created and released it. Six months later, it lead to a call from the country's biggest wireless company and multiple repeat engagements to develop content for them, including internal, employee-facing content. It's at more than 300K views last time I looked.
As to "social listening," we get exact heat-map metrics about viewer engagement for every video. And we use a real-time Web analytics system (Woopra) to observe visitors on our site as they're using it.
Good content takes on a life of its own. It's fascinating to watch.
In addition to traditional marketing tactics, we rely heavily on content to promote our brand. Content marketing entails everything from blog posts to pictures to engaging social media projects.
Currently, we spend a lot of time on our blog establishing our unique voice and personality and finding ways to maximize audience engagement. For example, check out this post we crafted on The Single Speed Bike Advantage. In addition to providing useful information for the first-time bike buyer, the article speaks about sustainability - a topic likely to be on the minds of our customers.
We also synched our Instagram feed with our site to provide fun customer pictures. This way, we're getting great and engaging content that we don't even have to create ourselves.
Bikes target a young market and young audiences seek out brands that speak to their style and offer more than just a product - a community and an image.
Recently I have had amazing success with content marketing for my business. I have been writing a lot of content for my own site and writing guest blogs on social media. And while I usually can increase revenue from guest blogging by getting people to download paid apps. Recently I had this article picked up by gigantic publications, including Yahoo and Business Insider, so that got me tremendous attention.
CareerFuel is a content business and, as such, we pay close attention to all of our analytics, particularly with respect to SEO. In addition to
analyzing Google Analytics, YouTube analytics and what limited information we can glean from Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest, we have begun using SERPS.com with great success. It has allowed us to further refine our keywords and track the success of those words on a daily basis.
We have seen a lift in our search traffic since working with SERPS.com and that feedback has been great for our staff.
What are your content marketing success stories?