How Content Marketing Enhances the Way You Do Business

An insider’s look at content strategy and why content marketing has become increasingly relevant.

It’s no secret: marketing your business with high-quality content has flipped the world of communications on its head. That isn’t to say that content marketing is a new concept; in fact, it’s been an integral part of marketing spend for decades. The difference? Today’s abundance of media channels to share and promote content means that you don’t have to publish a book to share your expertise with the world. And that means more businesses are taking the initiative to position themselves as thought leaders and drive more potential customers to their websites.

A 2010 study of business-to-business (B2B) content marketing showed that 9 out of 10 B2B marketers are using content marketing to grow their business. No single industry has reported below 78% adoption of content marketing tactics. Is your organization involved yet?

Okay, but what exactly is content marketing?

Glad you asked.

At Duo Consulting, we define the practice thusly:

“Content marketing is an active web strategy providing rich content to attract visitors to your website and convert those visitors into qualified opportunities.”

This strategy is at the heart of everything we do here at Duo — and as such, we wanted to share some knowledge and best practices. We’ll address some of the basics:

• Why does content marketing matter?
• What channels are successful businesses focusing on to get the word out?
• What are the components of content marketing?
• How do you get started with a content strategy?
• How do you measure success?

Why You Should Create Content

Internet marketing specialist Seth Godin once said, “Content marketing is the only marketing left” — and we tend to agree with him. Both customers and savvy marketers have begun to look at marketing as a two-way channel, completely obliterating outdated perspectives on business communications. Social media has done much to set the tone.

Think of it this way: the content you create should always start a dialogue between you and your client. Once you’ve engaged a prospect and earned his or her respect as a professional in the industry, the business relationship follows naturally behind it. The hardest part is finding the best venue to engage your prospect in that conversation; that’s why your content strategy has to take advantage of multiple channels.

Outbrain Study Sheds Light on How People Discover Content

Outbrain, a firm focused on online publishing, recently offered their insights on how people are discovering content online based on a new study. A couple of the most relevant key findings were the following.

• In terms of directing traffic to content pages, search referrals are still on top of the game, logging 41 percent of external referrals. Social referrals have increased to 11 percent. Duo’s Conclusion: The more channels you integrate into your content strategy, the better.
• Thirty-three percent of content sessions begin with an external site. Duo’s Conclusion: Drawing in leads (interacting with potential clients) relies on syndicating content outside of your website or blog.

To add another facet to the issue, smartphone capabilities have led to a revolution in mobile marketing. Potential clients can and will find you using their mobile devices, so it’s important to optimize your channels for the mobile web. A recent study found that only 33 percent of companies have a mobile marketing strategy in place. Without it, you might be missing out on a world of potential for your content. At Duo, we’ve made mobile marketing a big focus for our clients as part of a fully integrated content strategy.

Where Content Marketing Begins

Earlier this year, our good friends at the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) published a blog post that helps put content marketing in perspective using a decades-old theory. The “three-legged stool” strategy integrates online, print and in-person channels to share your content in every venue where your audience lives.

But online media has invented a new genesis for your content: the blog, a veritable Garden of Eden for online thought leadership and content marketing. According to CMI,

“Our belief is that the center of the online content marketing strategy can and should be the blog. Yes, a blog is just a tool, but it is a very powerful tool for sharing and spreading our content, and making sure we are found in search engines. Since May, we have published a blog post on every business day, which has led to a consistent 25% growth in monthly website traffic since day one.”

The blog is important, but don’t neglect other ways to share content. Here are a few examples of how other companies use content marketing to get ahead.

• Stout | Risius | Ross (SRR), a national financial advisory firm, publishes its own print journal (also available online) that comes in various specialized editions targeting different industry segments the firm serves.
• Networking leader Cisco uses microsites rich in content and loosely connected to the main website to drive more targeted traffic.
• American Express’ OPEN Forum acts as a network for connecting small businesses and small business experts by producing relevant content and starting a dialogue around the content.

Where Else Does Content Marketing Live?

We’ve seen how blogs can impact your content marketing initiatives — but where else does content marketing live? The simple answer? Anywhere knowledge can be shared. Let’s take a quick look at the media of content marketing.

• The Written Word
  Right then. Everyone knows about this one. Producing quality written content represents your brand, helps drive SEO, pulls in leads and closes the sale. You can use written content over channels like social media, publications, blogs, newsletters, case studies, whitepapers, advertisements, research papers, ebooks and more.
• Eye-Candy
  Visual content is an extremely engaging way to practice content marketing. Pictures are useful—but one of the easiest ways for many audiences to digest information is through video. In fact, Cisco predicts that video will be 90 percent of all online consumer traffic by 2013. That’s a powerful prediction from a powerful brand!
• Hear No Evil
  Ever think about creating your own industry podcast? As of last year, Edison Research says more than 70 million Americans (ages 12 and up) have watched or listened to a podcast. Gone are the limitations of traditional radio. The ability to load podcasts to an iPod or other device is making the practice a more popular option for the daily commute.
• Real-Time Engagement
  Combine every element mentioned above into a webinar and measuring how effectively you’re engaging your audience becomes a much simpler thing. But this isn’t just for online discussion; in-person discussion panels and speaking engagements at conferences are great ways to connect with your audience in real-time.

Pieces of the Puzzle: Content Marketing Components

First thing’s first: you have to define your content strategy before you can get started content marketing. According to Content Strategy for the Web by Kristina Halvorson:

“Content strategy is the practice of planning for the creation, delivery and governance of useful, usable content.”

You’ll have to define different touchpoints and elements of your brand before you find success in your content marketing.

9 Tips for Building a Successful Content Strategy

To make things easy, here is a list of crucial tips for planning your content strategy.

1. Clearly define your audience.
   If you don’t know who you’re producing content for, you can’t create useful content or distribute that content using the right channels.
2. Identify topics of interest for your audience.
   Make an exhaustive list of topics that your audience will take an active interest in. Don’t be afraid to research the competition or other businesses selling to the same market.
3. Choose channels to promote your content.
   Where does your audience live? Social networks, blogs, publications, distribution wires, conferences and newsletters are just a few examples of how to reach your audience. (More on that later.)
4. Define multiple touchpoints for each initiative.
   As with any good marketing plan, recycling content is a great idea — especially if you’re working with a small staff. Take a whitepaper as an example: you can dissect it into separate, simple blog posts; use the content for a presentation; put out a press release announcing the whitepaper’s availability; and post the announcement to your social media followers. Each channel will reach different audience members, producing a more integrated campaign.
5. Audit any existing content.
   At Duo, we always perform a content analysis during the “discovery” phase to identify what’s there and what’s missing. This is an essential part of the process to ensure that the content you’ll be using on your site is best suited for the project.
6. Recognize the time and financial investment.
   This is going to be hard work. Create schedules and budgets and take a realistic look at resource allocation to plan ahead.
7. Structure how you manage content.
   For internal channels like your blog and website, Drupal makes a great content management system. But you’ll want to put other dashboards and management systems in place to make sure you have a lasso on the content you create.
8. Figure out the role of social media.
   Social media can become one of your biggest promotional channels, and paying close attention to the conversation that starts over social media is an important part of managing content.
9. Set Goals.
   Measuring success requires matching goals against results. Aim high. And without further ado, let’s learn a little more about how you know you’re on the right track.

Measuring Success: Benchmarks of Content Marketing

As with any well-planned marketing campaign, we mustn’t forget the fun part: figuring out how well we did. Measuring content marketing success is a constantly evolving process; you won’t get everything right on the first try, and knowing where the weaknesses in your content strategy lie is an important part of achieving success.

A good first step and a huge part of how Duo sets our clients up for success is to implement Google Analytics across all of your content channels. This will give you the ability to track the response to your content strategy.

Below are seven focus areas for measuring the success of your content marketing initiatives. For a more in-depth look at each of these seven areas, please see what our friends at the Content Marketing Institute have to say once more.

• Content Creation
  Evaluating how much and what kind of content you need, timelines, the costs involved, the channels you’ll use and how it fits into your overall marketing plan are important parts of this category. Smashing Magazine has a great article on preparing for content creation and the most critical elements of putting together your content strategy.
• People
  These are the brass tacks. How many visitors are viewing your content? How many fans and followers do you have? Pure metrics are a part of any good marketing strategy. NPR, one of the biggest names in radio, has logged more than 1.4 million Facebook fans—a statistic that can be directly tied to the results: 70 percent of NPR’s Facebook fans tune into their local NPR station, averaging two hours of daily listening.
• Actions
  In the vein of pure metrics, measuring how readers are interacting with your content based on factors like views and where they go after viewing the content is an easy way to put a number on success. According to BusinessWeek online editor John Byrne, there’s a very simple way to perform this measurement: “In February [2009], we received from our community 28.2 perspectives and insights for every story or blog post we published. A year earlier, we received 23.7. So we know we’re moving in the right direction.”
• Content Created
  Is the content effective in terms of starting a dialogue? Are you getting comments? Retweets and repostings? Reviews?

  One area where some businesses go wrong, skewing the numbers on the dialogue and hurting their own reputations, is the deletion of negative feedback. As Social Media Explorer points out, there are enormous differences between spam or profanity and a comment on a form of social media you own that reflects negatively on your company or company’s position. When you delete opposing viewpoints, you stifle your chance to take part in an important conversation that could help build respect for your brand.

• Brand Impact
  How are readers responding across the web? Do they reflect well on your brand? Do they place you on a pedestal above the competition? As mentioned above, take criticism as a chance to improve your business and make strong new promises to customers and potential customers. After all, your content strategy can always use some improvement.
• Revenue
  The simplest and most critical metric: what direct impact has your content marketing had on sales? Start by measuring the leads you collect as a result of your content strategy and go from there. It isn’t very difficult to do; Hubspot, a leader in inbound marketing software and services, recently released a study on its own customer base, showing that companies that practice inbound marketing (rooted in content marketing) increase leads an average of 4.2 times within a few months. Now that is measured success.
• Expenses
  Finally, the cost of your content marketing should fall below the sum of your resulting revenues. When you’re able to measure all of the other factors, you’ll be able to line them up next to each other to determine the ROI.

Conclusion

Today, the success of your brand is intrinsically tied to the success of your content marketing initiatives — and the experts don’t see that trend changing anytime soon. Business is living in an online world where it’s much simpler for companies to connect with their target audience; it’s really only a matter of learning the right strategies to get the job done.

Keep your eyes open for the next entry in our series of Content Marketing whitepapers.