The Power of Trust: How Content Branding Can Differentiate Your Business

 To Create a Content Brand, Put Your Storytelling on Steroids

Push versus Pull Marketing in Content Branding

Introduction: The Problems with Traditional Marketing

Are you fed up with feeling like you're constantly being bombarded by spammy, pushy marketing messages that invade your privacy and disrupt your daily routine? We feel you. It's no secret that consumers are tired of being constantly marketed to and are seeking more control over how they engage with brands and their products. In today's digital age, social media and a plethora of digital content options give consumers more choices and control over what they consume. This has led to a shift away from traditional marketing tactics, such as push marketing, which try to force products and services down people's throats.

What Is Push Marketing?

Definition and Explanation of Push Marketing

Push marketing is a type of marketing that aggressively promotes products or services to consumers through various channels, such as email, direct mail, telemarketing, and advertising. It's called push marketing because the brand is pushing its products or services onto consumers, rather than letting the consumers pull the information they want. According to a survey by the Marketing Research Association, 69% of consumers find push marketing to be intrusive and annoying, while 63% say they feel overwhelmed by the amount of marketing they receive. For a more detailed discussion of push versus pull marketing, check out our post “What Is Content Marketing?”

“ 69% of consumers find push marketing to be intrusive and annoying, while 63% say they feel overwhelmed by the amount of marketing they receive”

As a result, consumers are seeking more control over how they engage with brands and their products. That's where content branding comes in. Content branding is all about providing valuable, relevant information to your audience and establishing yourself as a trusted source in your industry. It's like treating content as the product itself, rather than just promoting a specific product or service. A content brand acts like a publisher, creating and distributing valuable content for their audience and finding creative ways to monetize it.

What is Content Branding?

So, what exactly is content branding? Content branding is a way for businesses to provide valuable, relevant information to their audience, establishing themselves as a trusted source in their industry. Think of it as treating content as the product itself, rather than just promoting a specific product or service. A content brand functions like a publisher, producing and distributing useful content for their audience and finding unique ways to monetize it.

Contrast this with traditional branded content, which is all about promoting a specific product or company. Branded content can be effective, but it can also come across as self-serving or intrusive if it's not relevant to the audience. That's where content branding steps in, focusing on providing value to the audience rather than just promoting a brand.

According to the Content Marketing Institute, a content brand "takes an audience-first approach to business storytelling" in order to build reach and loyalty. This means creating valuable, relevant content for your audience, even if it's not directly related to your products or services. By providing valuable content, a content brand can establish itself as an authority in its industry and build trust and loyalty with its audience.

3 Benefits of Developing a Content Brand

But why should you care about content branding? While content marketing provides a significant return on investment, there are three primary reasons why you should care about content branding: 

1. A content brand can establish itself as a thought leader in its industry. By consistently producing high-quality, valuable content, a business can establish itself as an authority and trusted source of information in its field. This can lead to increased credibility and authority, which can translate into more business opportunities and customer loyalty.

2. A content brand can drive business results. By providing valuable content to its audience, a content brand can build trust and loyalty, which can lead to increased customer conversions and retention. This can result in a positive impact on the bottom line, as a loyal customer base is more likely to make repeat purchases and recommend the business to others.

3. A content brand can differentiate a business from its competitors giving it significant brand equity. In a crowded and competitive market, it can be challenging for businesses to stand out. By adopting a content brand approach, a business can differentiate itself from its competitors by providing valuable, relevant content to its audience. This can make a business more memorable and attractive to potential customers.

So, are you ready to ditch the old-school, pushy marketing tactics and embrace the world of content branding? Follow our step-by-step guide to learn how to transform your branded content into a content brand that engages and resonates with your audience. Trust us, your audience (and your bottom line) will thank you.

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Turn your Branded Content into a Content Brand

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Real World Examples of Successful Content Brands

One example of a company that has effectively established itself as a content brand is HubSpot, a marketing, sales, and customer service software company. One example of a world-class content brand that is a real business selling a SaaS (Software as a Service) product is HubSpot. HubSpot is a software company that provides marketing, sales, and customer service software to businesses.

In addition to its software products, HubSpot has also built a strong content brand through its inbound marketing and sales methodology. The company has a reputation for producing high-quality, informative content that helps businesses attract and retain customers.

 In addition to offering a range of products and services, HubSpot has also built a strong content brand through its blog, which covers a wide range of topics related to marketing, sales, and customer service. According to HubSpot's 2020 annual report, its blog received over 45 million visits in 2020, and its content marketing efforts contributed to over $1 billion in annual revenue for the company. 

In addition, HubSpot has a strong presence on social media, where it shares content about inbound marketing, sales, and customer service best practices. The company has over 1.3 million followers on Twitter and over 177,000 followers on LinkedIn, and its social media channels are frequently updated with new content, such as blog posts, infographics, and videos.

One of the ways that HubSpot monetizes its content is through its content library, which is a subscription-based service that provides access to a wide range of marketing and sales resources, including ebooks, courses, and templates. The company also offers a variety of paid software tools and services, such as its marketing automation platform, content marketing software, and customer service software.

One of the ways that HubSpot has used content marketing to gain significant website traffic is through its Website Grader tool, which is a content magnet that analyzes a website's performance and provides a report on its SEO, mobile readiness, and performance. The tool is free to use, and users simply need to enter their website's URL to receive a report on its performance.

HubSpot has used the Website Grader tool as a way to attract and engage website visitors, and it has proven to be an effective way to generate website traffic. According to HubSpot, the tool has generated over 4 million reports and has received over 1 million unique visitors per month. The tool has also been widely shared on social media and has been featured on numerous blogs and websites, which has helped to increase its reach and visibility.

In addition to attracting website traffic, the Website Grader tool has also helped HubSpot to generate leads and build its email list. When users receive their website performance report, they are also given the option to sign up for HubSpot's email newsletter, which provides updates on the company's products and services, as well as tips and strategies for improving website performance. By using the Website Grader tool as a way to generate leads, HubSpot has been able to build a large and engaged email list, which has helped to increase its brand awareness and customer loyalty.

Overall, the Website Grader tool has been an effective content magnet for HubSpot, and it has played a significant role in the company's success as a content brand. By providing a valuable and informative tool to its website visitors, HubSpot has been able to attract and engage a large audience, which has helped to increase its website traffic and generate leads.

HubSpot has also published a number of pieces of content that have gone viral and have helped the company gain massive website traffic. For example, The Ultimate Guide to Marketing Metrics and Analytics: This ebook, which was published in 2014, was a comprehensive guide to marketing metrics and analytics, and covered topics such as website analytics, social media analytics, and email analytics. The ebook was widely shared on social media, and according to HubSpot, it generated over 50,000 page views in its first week. The ebook was also featured on marketing blogs and websites, and was cited in numerous articles about marketing best practices.

This example, one of many,  demonstrates the success that HubSpot has had in producing content that goes viral and generates massive website traffic. By producing high-quality, informative content and promoting it effectively on social media and other platforms, HubSpot has been able to attract a large and engaged audience, which has helped the company establish itself as a thought leader in the marketing and sales industry.

According to a study by Content Marketing Institute, HubSpot was ranked as the top B2B content marketing vendor in terms of trust and authority. The company's inbound marketing methodology and comprehensive content library have helped it establish itself as a thought leader in the marketing and sales industry.

HubSpot is a prime example of a content brand that has effectively used content marketing to improve its trust and authority in the SaaS industry. The company's high-quality, informative content has helped it attract and retain customers, and its content marketing efforts have played a significant role in its success as a business.

Hubspot’s content brand has so established its authority that most marketing influencers agree the company is the “undisputed leader” in the field: 

"HubSpot has become the go-to source for inbound marketing thought leadership, and it has done so by consistently providing valuable, educational content to its audience." - Neil Patel, Founder of Neil Patel Digital

"HubSpot has built an entire ecosystem around inbound marketing, and its content is a key component of that ecosystem. Its blog is a great resource for anyone interested in inbound marketing, and it consistently produces high-quality content that is both informative and actionable." - Rand Fishkin, Co-founder of Moz

"HubSpot is the undisputed leader in inbound marketing, and it has built its brand and reputation on the back of its high-quality content. Its blog is a must-read for anyone interested in marketing, and it consistently produces content that is both informative and engaging." - Jay Baer, Founder of Convince & Convert

By providing valuable information and resources to its audience, HubSpot has established itself as a trusted source in the industry and turned its content into a key driver of revenue for the company.

Another example of a world-class content brand that is a real business selling a product is Patagonia. Patagonia is an outdoor clothing and gear company that is known for its commitment to sustainability and environmental conservation.In addition to selling high-quality products, Patagonia has also built a strong content brand through its commitment to storytelling and sharing its values and mission with its audience. The company's website features a variety of content, including articles about environmental issues, profiles of outdoor adventurers, and stories about the people and communities that make up the Patagonia brand.

Patagonia also has a strong presence on social media, where it shares content about its products, events, and causes it supports. The company frequently uses its social media channels to promote its initiatives, such as its Worn Wear program, which encourages customers to repair and reuse their clothing, and its 1% for the Planet program, which donates 1% of its sales to environmental organizations.

One of the ways that Patagonia monetizes its content is through its brand partnerships. The company has worked with a variety of organizations and brands to produce sponsored content and events, such as the Patagonia Action Works program, which partners with grassroots organizations to support environmental causes.

Overall, Patagonia is a prime example of a content brand that successfully marries its values, mission, and products to create a compelling and engaging brand experience for its audience. By sharing its expertise and passion for the environment, the company has built a loyal following and has found innovative ways to monetize its content while also staying true to its mission.

How to Transform Your Branded Content into a Content Brand

Developing a content brand is not a one-time effort, but rather a long-term process that requires consistent effort and commitment. Building a content brand requires a clear vision and content strategy, as well as the ability to adapt to changes in the industry and the needs of the audience. Here are some key considerations for businesses looking to establish themselves as content brands:

1. Identify your target audience: To identify your target audience, it can be helpful to conduct market research to gather information about the demographics, needs, and interests of your potential customers. This can involve surveying your existing customers, analyzing data on website traffic and social media followers, and conducting focus groups or interviews with potential customers. For example, if you are a content brand focused on home decor, you might survey your existing customers to understand their decorating style, budget, and home size, and use this information to create content that meets their needs and interests.

2. Develop a content marketing strategy: A content marketing strategy should outline the goals and tactics for creating and distributing content that meets the needs and interests of your target audience. This can include identifying the types of content that you will produce (such as blog posts, videos, podcasts, etc.), the channels through which you will distribute your content (such as your website, social media, email newsletters, etc.), and the metrics that you will use to measure the success of your efforts (such as website traffic, social media engagement, email open rates, etc.). For example, a content marketing strategy for a content brand focused on home decor might include creating a series of blog posts and videos featuring home decorating tips and ideas, distributing this content through a website, social media channels, and email newsletters, and measuring the success of these efforts through website traffic, social media engagement, and email open rates.

3. Produce high-quality, relevant content: To produce high-quality, relevant content, it is important to identify the needs and interests of your target audience and create content that meets those needs and interests. This can involve conducting research to gather information about your audience and your industry, creating a content calendar to plan out your content production, and using data and analytics to inform your content creation efforts. For example, a content brand focused on home decor might research popular decorating styles and trends, create a content calendar featuring blog posts, videos, and social media posts covering these topics, and use data on website traffic and social media engagement to determine which topics are

4. Establish a strong social media presence: Social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, provide an opportunity for a content brand to share its content and interact with its audience in real-time. To establish a strong social media presence, a content brand should regularly post high-quality, relevant content, engage with followers by commenting, liking, and sharing their posts, and respond to comments and questions in a timely and professional manner. For example, a content brand focused on home decor might post photos and videos featuring decorating tips and ideas, share links to relevant blog posts, and interact with followers by commenting on their photos and answering their questions about decorating.

5. Consider partnerships and collaborations: Partnerships and collaborations with other businesses or influencers can help a content brand to amplify its reach and credibility. For example, a content brand focused on home decor might partner with a furniture retailer to co-create content featuring decorating ideas using the retailer's products, or collaborate with an influencer in the home decor industry to promote the content brand's content to the influencer's followers.

6. Monetize your content: A content brand can monetize its content through a variety of methods, including advertising, sponsorships, subscriptions, and merchandise. For example, a content brand focused on home decor might sell advertising space on its website or social media channels to home decor retailers, offer sponsored content in exchange for a fee from home decor companies, sell a subscription to its email newsletter or exclusive content on its website, or create and sell merchandise featuring its brand. It is important to find the right balance between monetizing your content and providing value to your audience, as too much focus on revenue generation can undermine the trust and loyalty that you have built up with your audience.

In addition to the considerations outlined above, there are a few additional factors that can help a content brand to succeed:

1. Have a clear and unique brand voice: A content brand should have a clear and unique brand voice that reflects its values and personality. This can help to differentiate the brand from its competitors and establish a strong connection with its audience so that your brand develops significant equity in the marketplace.

2. Use data and analytics to inform your content strategy: Data and analytics can help a content brand to understand the needs and interests of its audience, as well as the effectiveness of its content. By analyzing data on things like website traffic, social media engagement, and email newsletter opens, a content brand can gain insights into what content is resonating with its audience and what is not.

3. Foster a sense of community: A content brand can foster a sense of community by engaging with its audience and encouraging them to participate in discussions and share their own content. This can help to build loyalty and create a sense of belonging among the brand's followers.

4. Be responsive and transparent: A content brand should be responsive to the needs and concerns of its audience and transparent about its operations and decision-making processes. By being responsive and transparent, a content brand can build trust and loyalty with its audience.

5. Experiment and be willing to take risks: Building a content brand involves trying new things and taking calculated risks. It is important for a content brand to be willing to experiment with different types of content, channels, and monetization strategies in order to find what works best for its audience.

Conclusion: The Future of Marketing is Content Branding

In conclusion, content branding is an effective way for businesses to provide valuable, relevant information to their audience and establish themselves as a trusted source in their industry. By focusing on providing value to their audience, rather than just promoting their products or services, a content brand can differentiate itself from traditional, pushy marketing tactics and build trust with its audience. In addition, a content brand can also help businesses tap into new markets and expand their reach by providing valuable content in languages other than their own. While building a content brand requires a significant investment of time and resources worthy of a content consultant, the potential rewards, such as increased customer loyalty and conversions, make it a worthwhile endeavor for businesses looking to differentiate themselves in a crowded and competitive market.

So, if you're ready to embrace the world of content branding, consider the needs and interests of your audience and consistently provide valuable, relevant content to establish yourself as a trusted source in your industry. We’ve developed a free kick-ass content brand ebook to help you get started on your own, “The Content Brand Bootcamp.”

If you don’t have the time to develop a content strategy and produce consistent high-quality content, Verge Marketing Agency can help. We’re experts at developing award-winning content brands for our clients. Check out our content marketing services.

Don't Set Up Your Brand's Social Media Profile Until You Read This

Know Who Your Brand is Trying to Reach Before Setting Up Social Media Profiles

More than three billion people across the globe use social media regularly, and one of their biggest motivations for using social is to follow their favorite brands. Hootsuite, a top social media management tool, reported in January 2021 that more than 80% of people with Instagram accounts follow at least one brand. 

Even a few years ago, it was common to hear marketers claiming that social media was not just unnecessary to grow your business, but could actually harm it. But those days are over. Social media is now an essential piece of any marketing strategy, no matter what business you’re in. In fact, if your business doesn’t have a social media presence, it’s missing a massive opportunity to reach an audience, acquire more customers, and convert strangers into advocates. For startups, this is especially true. Social media is essential when trying to generate and sustain traffic for your business’s blog.  And if you’re ramping up your PPC campaigns, you absolutely cannot be successful without social media. 

The fact that your business needs a social media presence is indisputable, but that doesn’t mean you should haphazardly throw together a social media profile. There is a science to creating a branded social media profile that delivers real results. 

Let’s dig in, shall we? 

Account Set-Up and Launch: How to Present a Professional Profile on Social Media Platforms

New marketers sometimes make the mistake of establishing a social media profile on all the major platforms before realizing they don’t have enough time to attend to them all and interact with followers. Since people followed the page to interact with brands, fans can soon lose interest and stop checking it. The challenge is to know which social media platforms to sign up for and how many your business actually needs to meet business goals.

Here at the Verge Marketing Agency, we recommend that small and mid-sized businesses (SMB) start out with no more than three platforms. Your startup could probably handle four social media profiles if it has enough dedicated resources. However, you want to limit social media platforms to four until you have gained an in-depth understanding of how each channel works and you start to see a significant return on investment (ROI).

The social media experts advise brands to consider the following when deciding where to set up a social media profile. First, you should spend time researching the demographics of each social media channel to determine if the site is a good match for what you know about your customers so far. Once you’ve completed your research you should answer the following questions:

• Is your business more focused on B2B or B2C? LinkedIn is a good option if you’re trying to reach other businesses while Facebook and Instagram speak more directly to consumers

• What considerations does your company have with time and resources?

• What goals are you hoping to accomplish by creating a social media profile?

Remember that starting small and managing your brand’s social media platforms well is always preferable to taking on too much and having to quickly scale back.

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Don’t have time to manage your social media marketing? VERGE is a full-service social media marketing agency that can help you deliver results. Learn more:

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How to Set Up Your Social Media Accounts Correctly

Once you’ve determined which social media channels to launch a business page, your next order of business is determining what to call your page/profile on each channel. The title of your social media business page/profile, often called a “handle,” should be as close to your brand name as possible and easy to remember. Don’t forget to research competitor pages to ensure that your brand’s page doesn’t sound too similar. You also want to include several ways for followers to contact your business on your page profile, such as telephone number, email address, website, and chat options.

Each social media platform asks brands to include additional information that it does not present to personal accounts. For example, Facebook provides an option to set up messaging or advertising preferences. You do not have to complete these sections, but doing so will give your brand more exposure. Establishing messaging preference is good customer service because it sets response expectations for your customers.

If you have only set up a personal social media profile in the past, you will quickly notice there is much more involved with creating accounts for your brand. Each social media platform has a help center for businesses that directs you on how to set administrator privileges, add multiple account users and editors, and set up advertiser permissions.

Short Cut:  Here is where you can find account set up information on the top four social media sites:

• Facebook

• Instagram

• LinkedIn

• Twitter

How to Ensure Each Social Media Profile Has Proper Branding

Consistency in social media branding is essential to building name recognition and attracting followers. Be sure that banners, logos, fonts, images, and colors match what people expect from your brand while still accounting for the unique micro-culture on each social media platform. If you don’t currently have your brand persona or even a logo developed, you’ll want to take the time to create those to ensure your brand is set up for success. It’s also important to include a section on social media in your company’s branding guidelines to ensure that all employees posting on social media publish a consistent message.

While your messaging should remain consistent across all brands, you don’t want it to become boring. One proven strategy is to mix things up by occasionally using curated content. Tailoring informational or humorous curated content to your own brand can help increase follower engagement. When using curated content, remember to link it to the overarching theme of your brand to inspire the most interaction.

Consider linking your brand’s presence across several social media platforms to help build its reputation and increase user convenience. Leveraging the power of review sites and linking them to your social media profiles is a great way to gain the trust of your followers.

How to Choose a Social Media Marketing and Management Platform

Ask any social media manager who has spent time in the trenches, and they will attest that social media marketing mistakes increase with each social media channel you add. Beyond mistakes, the more channels you add, the more time you have to spend managing those channels. Indeed, when small businesses or startups add more than three channels, daily social media management becomes incredibly time-consuming. 

For these reasons, it’s in your business’s best interest to integrate your social media channels into social media management platforms to reduce not only the time you spend managing your accounts but also the mistakes that inevitably result when you have bitten off more than you can chew. Here are just some of the functions you can complete from a single social media dashboard that helps you manage all of your unwieldy social media profile from one location:

• Schedule posts in advance

• Monitor ads

• Monitor follower engagement

• Store usernames and passwords

• Protect your brand’s reputation by seeing negative feedback instantly and responding to it

• Provide staff credentials to post on behalf of the brand

With this in mind, we’ve provided a quick roundup of the Top 5 social media marketing and management tools. That’s right--we’ve done all the research so you don’t have to ;) 

Top 5 Social Media Marketing and Management Tools

The following five social media management platforms below consistently receive high rankings from users in both startups and small businesses, who are short on time, resources and budget:

1. Agorapulse serves many well-known brands, including Shipt, Ogilvy, and West Virginia University. More than 31,000 brands use its platform each day. Agorapulse’s most prominent features include intuitive publishing, social listening, and insightful analytics. Brand managers can either request a demonstration or complete a free trial to determine if Agorapulse is right for them.

2. Eclincher advertises itself as a complete SMB social media solution. The company offers a free trial and has helped tens of thousands of SMBs achieve their social media marketing goals. Eclincher offers monitoring and listening feeds, a photo library, cloud storage, all the features listed above, and nearly a dozen others.

3. Hootsuite offers professional, team, and business plans ranging from $49 to $599 per month. The first two options come with a free trial. Hootsuite also caters to enterprise brands with a plan that allows unlimited users and social accounts. Brand managers interested in this option need to contact Hootsuite for a custom quote. The business and enterprise options come with priority support available 24 hours a day.

4. Sendible works with Facebook, Google My Business, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Twitter. Users can request a free 14-day trial with no credit card required. The Sendible dashboard includes all the usual tools plus the ability to monitor social media profiles with a mobile device. Sendible has the lowest-price options for beginners with a creator account at $29 per month and a traction account at $89. Additional options include scale at $199 and expansion at $399.

5. Sprout Social provides a 30-day free trial for all account options. Pricing starts at $99 per month for a standard account, $149 for a professional account, and $249 for an advanced account. Account managers can set their preferences according to whether they are working with customer care, data, and intelligence, employee advocacy, or social management. Sprout Social serves the computer and software, education, retail, and travel and hospitality industries.

Brief Introduction to the Major Social Media Channels for Business

Once you’ve established your social media goals and chosen your social media management platform, you’ll need to learn more about individual social media channels themselves to determine which ones are best for your unique business needs. The following social media channels not only have options to establish a business profile but have also developed dedicated business tools to help brands grow their business. What’s more, they have the most active monthly users, increasing the likelihood that the content you publish on them will reach your target audience:

• Facebook: Users should complete the business name and About Us section and then upload profile and cover photos. Photos should represent the business and can include a cover in its logo. Facebook recommends highlighting a product or marketing collateral for the photo. Let visitors know what actions you want them to take and follow the steps to create a call-to-action button.

  • Set-Up Instructions 

  • Monthly Active Users: 2.8 Billion

  • Largest Demographic: Male, 25-35 years old

  • Target Business Type: B2C

• Instagram: You will need to download the Instagram app from the App Store, Google Play, or the Windows Phone Store. You should then proceed with signup and click the option to switch to a professional account. Here you should add business information and a profile photo. Be sure to research popular hashtags before you start posting.

  • Set-Up Instructions

  • Monthly Active Users: 1.07 Billion

  • Largest Demographic: Female, 18-24 years old

  • Target Business Type: B2C

• LinkedIn: Personal users can create up to two company pages linked to their account. There is also the option to create Showcase pages to highlight products and services. To create a company page, click on Create Your Page from the business section. You will need to verify your existing email and password first.

  • Set-Up Instructions

  • Monthly Active Users: 260 Million

  • Largest Demographic: Male, 30-49 years old

  • Target Business Type: B2B

• Pinterest: You need to have a personal account first that you can connect to your new business account. Click on the Create Your Business Account option and follow the on-screen prompts.

  • Set-Up Instructions

  • Monthly Active Users: 416 Million

  • Largest Demographic: Female, 35-49 years old

  • Target Business Type: B2C

• Snapchat: You need to have a personal account to gain access to Ad Manager. You should follow instructions to set up a business account and choose a separate Snapchat name for it. After establishing the account, Snapchat prompts you to create your first campaign in the Ad Account.

  • Set-Up Instructions

  • Audience Demographics: 

  • Monthly Active Users: 265 Million

  • Largest Demographic: Female, 26-35 years old

  • Target Business Type: B2C

• TikTok: Start by downloading the TikTok app from the App Store or Google Play. Navigate to the top right and click Me, Manage My Account, and then Business Account. Choose the appropriate category for your business and create a profile.

  • Set-Up Instructions

  • Monthly Active Users: 689 Million

  • Largest Demographic: Male, 10-29 years old

  • Target Business Type: B2C

• Twitter: Users set up personal and business accounts the same way on Twitter. Be sure to select a relevant and representative profile and cover photo. Next, choose your display name and the @name you want people to use when responding or tagging your business. Once you complete the profile, Twitter recommends always having a pinned tweet to provide a focal point for your followers.

  • Set-Up Instructions

  • Monthly Active Users: 192 Million

  • Largest Demographic: Male, 25-34 years old

  • Target Business Type: B2B

• YouTube: If you don’t already have a Google account, you will need to set that up first. You use your Google login for YouTube as well. After signing in, click Switch Account and Your Channel. Google will autofill your personal name, but you can override that by clicking on Use a Business Name. This will prompt you to fill in the details for a brand profile.

  • Set-Up Instructions

  • Monthly Active Users: 2.3 Billion

  • Largest Demographic: Male, 15-25 years old

  • Target Business Type: B2B or B2C

How to Develop Realistic and Achievable Social Media Goals

We’ve stack-ranked the following goals every startup or small business should develop in order to gauge social media marketing performance relative to how effective social media marketing activity is for growing your business. 

We recommend that you track and measure progress in these five areas either weekly, monthly, and/or quarterly depending on how much time and energy you’re putting towards social :

1. Conversions--In the end, the most important metric for gauging success on social media is if your efforts have actually converted your audience into paying customers.  It’s costing you time and money to create and manage your social media marketing and your business needs that activity to result in tangible results. 

2. Engagement--The second most important gauge of your success on social media is engagement. It makes no difference if you have three followers or 300,000 if nobody and I mean nobody is responding to your content either because they can’t see it or they don’t find it relevant or inspiring. 

3. Referrals--You’ve sunk money, time, and resources into managing social media. But here’s the thing, if they never find your website, eCommerce site, or amazon shop they are unlikely to ever buy from you. Referrals then are a great metric to gauge whether your social media marketing efforts are compelling your audience to take action and potentially change their behavior.

4. Followers--I know. Sounds like something a newbie would include when discussing how awesome their social media marketing efforts are going right? Not necessarily. While follower or fan counts aren’t the most accurate measurement of social media marketing success, they are critical for measuring whether you have amassed the audience or eyes you need to actually start marketing. Again, common sense tells you that you can't market anything effectively if no one can see your marketing efforts. So, yes, followers are indeed necessary to start social media marketing. 

5. Reach or impressions--While I rarely recommend basing your progress on social media on reach or impressions, I will reluctantly recommend tracking these numbers to see how your brand is actually functioning on specific networks. For example, no one can smash the “follow” button if your brand’s social content never appears in their stream. Likewise, if your reach is low, it's likely caused by something happening in the platform algorithm, and you’ll want to deal with that issue so you can start marketing on social media. Many social media networks like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram commonly use algorithms to block content by brands and even the entire brand itself. 

It’s important to consider your company’s budget, time constraints, resources, and current social media reach when setting these goals. Remember that your goals must be realistic. You can’t expect to achieve 100,000 followers in the first month after launching new social media profiles. Look to achieve approximately 5-10 percent of each goal per quarter and then set more aggressive goals once you start meeting them consistently.

And if there were one golden rule we would say applies to every social media management situation, it would be this: underpromise and overdeliver. 

VERGE understands this is a lot of information to process all at once, and it’s just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what you need to know to jumpstart your business’s social media efforts. So we invite you to download our Social Media Buyer’s Guide or learn more about our social media marketing services today.

Need help running your social media marketing? Verge are experts. No really. Other agencies claim to be “award-winning,” but Verge actually has one a Marketo Revvie Award for excellence in delivering results for a social media campaign. Why not try us out? Leverage VERGE so you can start getting ROI from your social media marketing efforts, save time, and eliminate headaches. 

What Is Content Marketing?

Towards a Content Marketing Definition

What is content marketing? There are so many definitions of “content marketing” swirling now out in the marketing ethos that it’s almost dizzying, but very few of them are truly to able to define content marketing. In fact, so many of these definitions actually don’t define what content marketing is or why it’s useful to businesses, especially to startups and small businesses. The reason there are so many bad definitions is because content marketing cannot be encapsulated in one or two sentences. To provide a rigorous definition of such a complex topic, one needs ample time and space. So I thought I would take the time and space to finally provide a rigorous definition of the craft of content marketing. Here it goes. Bear with me, won’t you? I promise it’ll be worth your while.

So, I’ll ask the same question again, but this time more self-reflexively: what is content marketing?

I should begin by saying that when people ask me what I do and I say, “content marketing,” people in the business world almost always look at me confused. The confusion used to surprise me because I’ve been doing “content” for so long that I’ve forgotten that for many people it’s still a foreign concept. They usually say something like, “Oh you design websites or create web pages?” And my answer to that question is always yes and no. Of course I “do” websites and web pages, but content encompasses so much more than that. I’ll go into detail as to exactly what it encompasses a little later on in this post. So, if you’re generally confused about what this whole “content marketing” thing is, I hope it’s comforting to know that you’re not alone and that it’s actually a pretty simple concept.

Now, if people have heard of content marketing, they often think erroneously that it’s a synonym for inbound marketing or demand generation. But it’s not. Content marketing is just one of many inbound marketing methodologies. Content marketing is also different from demand generation in the sense that demand generation often relies on content created by content marketers, but it doesn’t have to. Like inbound marketing, demand generation uses “pull” techniques, as opposed to “push” techniques, to attract visitors to a site or digital asset—essentially generating “demand” for content that will bring a potential customer or a “lead” to the website where they can eventually buy or perform a desired action.  

What Is Content Marketing?

While the description above gets us closer to what content marketing actually is, I think it might be more helpful to formally define the concept. Content Marketing Definition: According to Joe Pulizzi, the CEO of Content Marketing Institute, who popularized or mainstreamed the concept, Content Marketing is “the marketing and business process for creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience–with the objective of driving profitable customer action.” Pulizzi goes on to suggest that it’s really about the difference between renting media and owning it. In the old days, for example, businesses had to rely on media gatekeepers and pay to rent advertising space. With the increasing digitization of marketing, the ability of companies to produce and publish their own media or content at scale, and the advances in media technology that allow audiences to download, play, and share content rapidly, companies began to rely less and less on traditional media and essentially became media companies in their own right. In other words, they stopped “buying” media and began to produce it. Or at least that’s how it worked in the early days of content marketing, you know, way back in 2010 before a gazillion content marketing agencies sprouted up trying to disembowel the content marketing revolution. Ironically companies are now paying agencies to create media so they can own it rather than rent it ;) This media is what we now refer to as “content.” In fact, I might argue that in today’s digital marketplace, every company must become a media company or become obsolete.  

What Is Content?

But before we can provide a rigorous definition of content marketing, we have to answer the question: “What is Content?” Again, if people look at me confused when I tell them I do content marketing, they are even more confused when I discuss content itself. I remember giving a company town-hall presentation about our content marketing initiative, and everyone in the audience had these horrified looks on their faces. So I took the opportunity to ask them, “Okay, who can tell me what content is?” Silence. I waited a minute or two, but no one felt confident enough to define it.

So I said, “Is a web page content?”

Everyone nodded vigorously.

“Is an ebook content?”

They mostly nodded.

“How about an app?”

Nobody nodded.

“What about movie or quiz?”

Again, no one replied. 

So I filled the silence: “Content is anything that provides value.”

After this Socratic dialogue, we spent some time discussing what value was and how you’d know “value” when you saw it. For me, this is probably the “art” of content marketing. Great content marketers just know how to bottle . . . package up value for their audience, and being able to identify value or create it isn’t something you can learn or do by formula. It's honestly a very rare talent. For me, at a bare minimum, I identify value as anything that is intrinsically useful or helpful for an audience. And I mean anything. The best content marketers have an uncanny ability to recognize value in the mundane and develop truly original ways to package utility for their audience.

However, if you want to go beyond good content and create amazing content that will truly “delight” your audience, your content needs to do more than provide value. As Benjamin Franklin, the original content marketer once claimed, it needs to be “useful and entertaining.” That's right, content needs to be both. And as I contend in my own content philosophy, I think it also needs to be “inspirational” to engage a buyer and compel a conversion. 

Push versus Pull

It is this "value" that shifts the entire dynamic between a marketer and their audience. Traditional marketing, what we often refer to as “interruption marketing,” pushed out advertisements to its audience without asking permission. These advertisements, what we call “push tactics,” provided little value to the audience, were overtly commercial, and benefited the marketer or business only. Similarly, push marketing as a method is about taking the product/solution to the customer. Some examples of push marketing include:

1. Door to door sales

2. Traditional advertising and PPC

3. Direct mail

4. Trade Shows

5. Point of sales displays or on-site demos

In contrast, pull technique aims to get the prospect or customer to come to you. It's all about attracting your audience. Some examples of pull tactics are:

1. Branding

2. Public relations

3. Word-of-mouth & referrals

4. Customer relationship management

The best example of the difference between push and pull marketing is the difference between traditional advertising and PR: Advertising is what you pay for; publicity is what you pray for. Marketing thought leader, Guy Kawasaki, further elaborates on this trope in his work:

 “Do you know what the difference is between PR and advertising? Advertising is when you say how great you are. PR is when other people say how great you are. PR is better.”

While Kawasaki provides a hint of the differences between advertising and PR, CMI co-founder, Robert Rose, has crafted one of the most compelling and user-friendly definitions of content marketing based upon the dichotomy between PR and Advertising, which he adapted from Henry James’s seminal work of literary criticism, The Art of the Novel -- the difference between showing versus telling:

 "Traditional marketing and advertising is telling the world you’re a rock star. Content marketing is showing the world you are one.”

But the most practical definition has been provided by James O'Brian of Contently: "The idea central to content marketing is that a brand must give something valuable to get something valuable in return. Instead of the commercial, be the show. Instead of the banner ad, be the feature story."

In other words, content marketing is just one more pull tactic in a larger “inbound” strategy marketers can use to get a prospect to come you, and it’s proven to be one of the most effective tactics of all time. 

Why Is Content Marketing Effective?

Just how effective is content marketing? Below are a few content marketing statistics that showcase the power of content marketing:

• 72% of marketers say branded content is more effective than advertising

• The average cost to generate a lead through inbound marketing ($143) is < half the average for outbound marketing ($373)

• SEO leads are eight times more likely to close into customers than outbound leads.

• B2B companies with blogs generate 67% more leads per month on average than non-blogging firms

• Interesting content is a top 3 reason people follow brands on social media

• Clicks from shared content are 5 times more likely to result in a purchase

FURTHER READING:

The ROI of Content Marketing

Why Is Content Marketing More Effective than Traditional Pull Techniques?

To truly grasp why content marketing is so effective, we need to understand that due to increasing digitization, buyers are more educated than they were 20 years ago or even 10 years ago. Before the internet, sales had all of the information a prospect needed to make a buying decision. Between the datasheet and the sales demo, it was sales who had control over information needed to make a purchase. We used to call this the “sales cycle.”

That all changed with the advent of Customer 2.0 or the “educated buyer.” Prospects are now empowered to conduct research about a product before they ever contact Sales. By the time they finally contact Sales, they have already made their decision. In fact, recent research indicates that 80% of purchase decisions are made without vendor contact at all and this percentage is only growing. According to Jerry Rackley, Chief Analyst at DemandMetric, “buyers are self-educating far deeper into the sales cycle than they once did.” So companies that are not developing and distributing information to help a prospect conduct product research—i.e., not doing content—are losing opportunities to influence their prospect in their buying decisions. In short, they are missing opportunities and losing revenue.

Marketing is now responsible for as much as 70% of the funnel, and by developing helpful content, content marketers are able to exert an unprecedented level of influence on the educated buyer. By developing useful content that will help guide a buyer toward a purchase decision, content marketers not only educate a buyer, but also help to establish the much-needed trust between a prospect and a business. It is this amazing ability to both educate a buyer and provide critical trust that makes content marketing arguably the most powerful marketing methodology currently in practice. 

My Definitions(s) of Content Marketing

So what is content marketing after all? Because there exists no single definition that fully encompasses content marketing, I think we need to stop trying to come up with a single definition and instead develop a definition “set” that will provide a more complete picture of content marketing. To that end, I’ve developed three definitions below that I think provide the best working definition "set" for people learning about this discipline. However, don’t be surprised if this definition set continues to evolve ;) 

Practical Definition: Content marketing is the persistent practice of attracting prospects by developing and distributing genuinely helpful, customer-centric content to educate and guide buyers to a purchase decision.

Theoretical Definition: Content Marketing is the art of telling a compelling story that converts your audience and inspires advocacy. 

Aspirational Definition: Content Marketing is a marketing revolution that empowers marketers to stop interrupting their audiences and start providing real value. 

If you believe content marketing can help your business, VERGE Marketing can help your team develop a strategy, create content, and also publish and distribute it.

Book free consultation to see how VERGE can help your business:

How would you define Content Marketing? Leave a comment below and tell me how you would define it. :)

Content Marketing Software Review

Top 5 Content Marketing Software for 2020

Everyone’s talking about content marketing, and you know how important it is. What you don’t know is how to get a handle on what your company is producing, who is doing it, when it’s going to be published, how you’re going to get it in front of your audience, and how you determine if it’s worth the time it takes to do all this. In addition, you’ve heard that organic reach is shrinking, and it’s more important than ever to create meaningful content.

Is it time to get content marketing software?

Maybe. The first thing to do is look at your content marketing cycle.

These are the seven basic steps, which we outline in our Content Marketing Strategy:

1. Goal Setting: Begin by defining your goals. For example, is your primary goal to get known in the marketplace? Or is it building relationships? Perhaps you want to generate sales? You might want all three, but which is your most important focus?

2. Strategy Planning: Strategy is simply how you are going to use your content to get this done. In order to come up with a workable strategy you need to think about your customer and what they want to know and where they go for information.

3. Scheduling: Your planning calendar is vital to good preparation and execution of your new strategy. Put your content ideas, channels, audience, objective and keywords to make it truly useful at a glance.

4. Creating: Now that you know what you want to accomplish, how you will do it and who your target audience is, it’s time to produce your content. Don’t be limited to just text, incorporate images, video and audio so you can reach a wider audience. Use your calendar to keep track if you have different people contributing, producing and approving your content. It’s also important to have brand guidelines, which I wrote about here, so everyone produces consistent material that maintains brand identity and equity.

5. Distributing: This great content needs to get in front of people. Where you publish depends on the kind of audience you have. Plan your social media channels and add your publishing schedule to your calendar for tracking purposes. Include any influencers with whom you might be working.

6. Engaging: When your audience consumes your content, you want them to do something. This could be a simple as a comment or as meaningful as a purchase. In any case, it’s important that you respond because each engagement is an opportunity to move the relationship forward. Not only can you convert interest into sales, you build a reputation as a company that cares about its customers and the word will spread.

7. Measuring: If you don’t measure your results, how will you know what is working and what isn’t? Being able to analyze the statistics is a benefit when you are creating your next content. You can see what people are attracted to, what they shared and what they acted on. If you have areas where there is little interest, you can eliminate those and concentrate on the stronger content. To tie things back into the first step, goals, measurement can tell you if you are achieving what you intended and provide ideas about how to get back on track if you’re not.

Are you consistently hitting all these steps? If you are but you are feeling a bit overwhelmed, hang on, because there’s good news and bad news.

The good news is that there are dozens of companies offering content marketing platforms to make this process easier, and more coming on board every week.

The bad news is that content marketing software is expensive.

If you are a startup or small organization with only a few campaigns, a small team and a limited budget, the investment is probably better spent elsewhere because until you are large enough to have the need for automating, the cost outweighs the benefits.

If you have a large company, need to manage content on many different channels, work with numerous internal and external content providers and market on a global scale in various countries, one of these companies I describe below (in alphabetical order) will likely have the solutions you need to become streamlined and efficient. As you read about them, you’ll see the similarities and the differences in what each emphasizes, summarized in their tagline. You’ll get a good overview of the tools you’ll want to look for when considering a content marketing software company. At the conclusion, I’ll list and link to a few others you can explore.

All of these companies make it possible for you to manage the creation of your content, handle the distribution and see meaningful analytics in order to improve the impact and success of your efforts.  

Further Reading: 4 Best CMS Platforms for Startups and Small Businesses

Contently

“ Content that works. Great content needs world-class creative talent, and effective marketing needs smart technology. We have both.”

Some of the companies that work with Contently are General Electric, Google, Marriot, Ameritrade, Walmart, ING, NBC UNIVERSAL and American Express.

The top features of Contently include:

• Content workflow that can accommodate hundreds of users and a multitude of approval steps.

• A talent network of more than 50,000 journalists, designers and photographers.

• Accounting management for freelancers, such as payments and taxes.

• Strategists who can help you create a personal content roadmap and connect you with the people who fit your plan.

• Ideas and pitches from writers who are in alignment with your vision and goals.

• Relationship-building tools to help you know your audience and provide the content they are looking for.

• WordPress, Tumblr and Hubspot integration using the publisher API, which will also integrate with other content management systems.

On the Contently website you can watch a demo and review case studies and work samples of existing clients. There is no pricing information on the site, you have to contact the company for information.

Curata  

“Scale your content marketing to grow leads and revenue. The software platform for a predictable content supply chain”

Businesses that use Curata include: Cisco, Zerox, Alcatel-Lucent, Lenovo, IronMountain, Barclaycard, University of Minnesota and Genpact.

With a name like Curata, you know that curation of content is going to be a major feature of the software, and they don’t disappoint. You can annotate and contextualize the curated content to customize it to your business. Here are some of the highlights of the Curata software:

• Discover content with the Content Curation Software, which learns your preferences and delivers content that best suits your needs.

• Organizes and pre-populates the curated post so all you have to do is publish and promote.

• Build a content supply pipeline to provide continual quality content.

• Analyze the marketing and sales results from your content.

• Streamline the production process with workflow management.

You can get a live demo, but to find out the cost you need to contact the company.

Kapost

“B2B marketing operating system powering world class content and driving business success.”

A few of the companies that work with Kapost are LInkedin, at&t, IBM, Rockwell Automation, Delphi and Lenovo. Kapost lists four main areas they address:

• Alignment. Facilitates collaboration with planning calendars so you know what stages the content development is at and who is working on what aspect to eliminate overlap and gaps.

• Execution. Create the content, manage deadlines and allow comments with visibility inside Kapost instead of scattered through various emails.

• Distribution. Organize information based on different fields and deliver it to sales in a timely manner and useful format. Integrates with 50 marketing tools such as Marketo and Salesforce. Social buttons within Kapost makes it easy to instantly share content. Custom content filters in the catalog allows you to organize by content type, persona and region, and displays a preview for quick selection. 

• Analyzation. Using revenue metrics and conversions, you can rank content and see what’s working at a glance. See what content is most valued by your buyers with data on reach and traffic. Planning tools allow you to see where the process is slowing down so you can become more efficient.

The full package is $3,500 a month, although Content Gallery and Content Planner services start at $800 each. 

NewsCred

“Create content people love. NewsCred powers content marketing for the world’s best brands.”

Organizations that use NewsCred include Pepsi, Visa, Jockey, ConAgra Foods, Sailthru and Capgemini. Some of NewsCred's features are: 

• The shared calendar can be organized by topic, event, audience or goal, and assets can be shared from a single repository.

• Licensed content is available from over 5,000 publications in five languages.  

• A freelance network of contributors can create blog posts, videos and content, with the details of contracting paperwork and payments handled by NewsCred.

• Partnerships for legally licensed stock images exist with over 30M suppliers and NewsCred provides editing tools to brand and customize images.  

• Workflows can be tailored to your company’s content marketing process needs.

• Project management tools track the content and helps you identify and correct bottlenecks and areas of concern.

• Social publishing tools are located on one platform which has a calendar and can be shared with the team, making it easy to schedule and publish content across a variety of channels.

• Analytics on social channels help you further fine-tune your content.

You can review the case studies and try a demo. Services start at $4,000 a month.

Percolate 

“The system of record for marketing. Manage all your marketing across every channel.”

      Percolate is used by more than 800 brands, some of which are Dove, Loews, MasterCard, Timberland, Chobani, Amtrack, Freshpet, Levi’s and Kind. Their features include:

• Marketing calendar coordinates marketing activities with people, locations, channels and topics.

• Brief templates to keep everyone on track and connected on campaigns, events and content.

• Workspace flows that allow you to manage and meet deadlines, make assignments, track tasks, follow up, locate and retrieve assets and share information.

•  Mobile-friendly access on devices to keep everyone in the loop while on the go.

•  Percolate Mobile allows for capturing photos and videos and sharing them in real time.

• Integration of your content with a variety of channels so you can publish from one location.

• Performance analytics that tell you how your marketing is doing with reports and data. With the Operational Analytics, you can review metrics on the entire process and identify what is working and what is not. There are also statistics on how your customers feel about your content, how often they share it and what the reach is, so you can adjust your content creation accordingly.

You can see case studies and get a demo, but there is no pricing information without filling out a contact form.

Here are a few other companies that provide content marketing software solutions:

• Act-On

• InnoBlogs

• PublishThis 

• RebelMouse

• Skyword

• Zerys

If you start with the six steps listed above and start growing to the point where you need large-scale support, you can feel confident that there are solutions out there with content marketing platforms that will fit your needs and help you be more productive.

You may also need to get a Content Management System (CMS) especially one that integrates with your Content Marketing Software. Please review our extensive guide on CMS Platforms for startups and small businesses to learn about the top content management systems and which one is right for you.

If you’re already there, pulling your hair out wondering how to make things more efficient, you have an excellent selection of companies from which to choose. However you may not have the time to learn new software and would like a team of expert content marketers to take the content marketing headache away from you. If so, Verge Marketing Agency could really help you get content marketing right so you start seeing results. Check out all of the content marketing services we provide.

The ROI of Content Marketing: How to Track and Measure the Value of Content

We’ve all been there. Yes, every content marketer has experienced that horrible moment—after spending hours creating a 10,000-words asset—when we suddenly realized the content we poured our blood sweat and tears into wasn’t doing what it was supposed to do. That it was driving neither traffic, engagement, nor leads. It was that moment when we intuitively knew that we weren’t getting anything back from the hours of time we’d spent investing in a piece of content. That feeling might have come from a deafening silence on social media after we shared it. Or the fact our website traffic plateaued or even decreased that month. Or the fact that sales in the company were down. No matter when it occurred, it was just a gut feeling that we had somehow failed to achieve the ROI of content marketing.

What is the ROI of content marketing? (To read our rigorous definition of content marketing check out this post.) While content marketers may not all be totally familiar with terms like ROI, we are all aware that at the most basic level, every piece of content we create exists not just to be consumed, but to provide some value beyond consumption to those who create it. The intrinsic value that content provides is different for each to marketer, small businesses and startup, but deriving value from content itself is a universal constant. This intrinsic value provides the basis for understanding the ROI of content marketing. And simply put, if you are not getting any value back from the content you are creating, you are truly not grasping the function of content marketing or how to do content marketing effectively.

In this post, we will help you learn how to achieve ROI from your content marketing efforts not only by helping you understand how to track and measure value relative to your business, but also by giving you practical steps to do the simple math for determining value for every asset.

Why the ROI of Content Marketing Is Rooted in Revenue

So where do we begin? Let’s start with the most obvious return you should receive from content: revenue. On a practical level, the concept behind the ROI of content marketing couldn't be more straightforward. ROI is simply the total amount of revenue that you gain from your content efforts when compared to the amount of money you spend on creating and distributing the unique content that forms the backbone of those efforts in the first place.

So if you spend $50 creating a high quality, visual piece of content and it ultimately generates $100 for your business by way of increased sales, you're looking at a return on investment of roughly $50. Multiply that average ROI by the total number of pieces you distribute and you begin to get a sense of just how quickly this can all add up. It also helps to underline why tracking this metric is so important in the first place.

But at the same time, no two businesses are created in quite the same way—and the same is true of their content marketing efforts. Revenue alone shouldn't be the only indicator determining if your larger campaign is a success or failure. When you initially set out to build your content campaign, you probably had a number of unique goals in mind. Maybe you wanted to increase page views to your website or drum up social media activity by earning more shares. Maybe you weren't focused on gaining new customers at all—you simply wanted to increase engagement with your existing ones.

All of these efforts will ultimately generate revenue when executed properly, but the amount of revenue you generate on its own won’t be enough to identify if you’ve met your goals.

Therefore, to truly measure the ROI of content marketing, you need to go much deeper than just tracking and measuring revenue gained from your content. You need to gain a better understanding not only of the metrics that matter as they relate to the goals you've set for yourself, but also how to measure them in the most effective way to really uncover the true narrative that is playing out in front of you. Tools like Google Analytics are tremendously helpful for determining the content metrics that matter most.

The good news is that getting to this point isn't exactly difficult—but it does require you to keep a few key things in mind along the way.

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Further Reading: Download our FREE and comprehensive Ebook to learn how to get a return on your investment in content marketing The ROI of Content Marketing.

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Laying the Foundation to Measure Content ROI

That said, to ensure you're measuring the ROI of content marketing in the right way, you need to have a solid foundation of accurate, actionable information from which to build. This means that "Step One" requires you to calculate how much you're spending to produce the content in the first place. You can’t know what you get out of something, if you don’t know what you put into it.

To determine how much you’re spending on content, you'll have to account for variables like:

• The amount of money you paid to license any images or video assets for the collateral

• The money that went into producing any audio elements like music or sound effects (in the event you're talking about a video)

• The costs tied to any outsourced work that was performed by other organizations

• Costs involved with any work done by other departments within your business

• The salary of the content creator

• The amount of time they spend on the content as it relates to the finished piece in question

Moreover, you'll also need to factor in the cost to distribute that content. Even the most objectively beautiful, high-quality marketing asset ultimately won't accomplish much if your target audience isn't able to find it.

This means you'll need to keep records of the costs involving things like:

• Paid promotional techniques like pay-per-click, social media promotions and paid opportunities on other channels

• The cost of the tools and software used for not only content creation, but content distribution as well

Once all of these variables are accounted for, you'll have a fairly solid indication of how much you're paying for a single content asset. At that point, you'll have something to compare all of your other metrics to moving forward.

Measuring the Metrics That Matter

Again, it's critical for you to understand that "return on investment" is actually a general term. Figuring out how many sales were generated by a piece of content is obviously important—but at the same time, it's still only one small part of a much larger story.

To speak to those sales, however, this is still an important metric to track to get a "bird's eye view" of how your campaign is really doing. Begin by adding up all the sales that resulted from the content in question—be it a white paper or a blog post or an Infographic or something else entirely. Only track those sales that you can directly attribute to the content you're focusing on at the moment.

Note that the best type of content is the kind that keeps "selling" for you over long periods of time, which is to say that you may not necessarily get a clear indication of the ROI of content marketing overnight. You might have to wait weeks or even months to see how a particular piece of content ended up performing, but that's perfectly okay.

How to Calculate ROI

Once you know what you're dealing with, subtract your initial investment from the total number of sales the content generated. Then, divide that figure by the initial investment. Multiply the result by 100, and you'll have the ROI of content marketing expressed as a percentage.

For a basic example, your calculation may end up looking something like this:

• You paid $500 to create a piece of video content, which ended up generating about $1,800 in sales over a three-month period.

• $1,800 - $500 = $1,300

• $1,300 divided by $500 = 2.6

• 2.6 x 100 = 260

Therefore, in the above example your return on investment would be roughly 260%—not too bad for a day's work.

The Other Essential Metrics That Matter

But don't forget that content marketing isn't only about increasing sales—at least, not in a literal sense. It's absolutely possible to have a campaign with a positive return on investment that’s also misguided because it isn't actually helping you accomplish all the smaller goals you've laid out for yourself.

To ensure you’re measuring more than just revenue, you’ll want to track and measure all of the following important metrics:

• Leads and Lead Quality: It’s all about the leads, baby. Anyone who tells you content isn’t about acquisition, sales or revenue is kidding themselves. As we all know, the chasm between a lead and a qualified lead is a deep one. But not all leads were created equal and just because a piece of content generates new visitors to your site doesn't mean those visitors are ready to buy or that that your product or service is relevant to those visitors. To see if your content is relevant and receiving high engagement, set up your individual campaign goals in Google Analytics and go to "Conversions," then "Goals," then "Funnel Visualization" to see which types of content are turning people into actual leads who are ready to do business with you. Once you figure out what’s working and what isn't, double down on the former and jettison the latter as much as possible.

• Cost Per Acquisition (CPA): CPA is exactly what it sounds like. The total amount of money you're spending on average by way of content marketing to acquire one new customer for your business. To measure this, divide the total amount of money you're spending in content marketing via a specific channel by the total number of new customers acquired via that same channel. The average CPA for paid advertising is around $60, but for some companies is can be hundreds of dollars. Again, the whole point of content marketing is to drastically drive down CPA so you’re paying less to acquire customers and are therefore receiving more overall revenue per paying customer. So you’ll know when your content marketing strategy is working when this number starts to go way down.

• Subscriptions: A critical metric for every content marketer to track and measure is the number of subscriptions either to a newsletter, blog digest or mailing list. In fact, I would be so bold as to claim that outside of pure revenue, your subscription rate is probably the best indicator of your content ROI as well as the health of your content marketing program in general. When you’re developing high-quality, relevant, and helpful content, your audience will subscribe to get more of it. It’s really just that simple. When your content fails to impress it becomes very difficult to get new visitors to subscribe or to keep them from unsubscribing. If your analysis shows that you’re now having trouble getting new subscribers or you’re hemorrhaging them, this is a big red flag that your content isn’t working.

• Unique, New and Returning Visitors: Tracking these 3 metrics is a great way to see how content marketing is helping your audience grow over time—something else that will ultimately lead to increased sales as well as how much your content is driving your audience to return, which is essential for nurturing leads. If your content is strong, your unique, new and returning visitors should be steadily growing over a period of months—indicating that your audience and pipeline is getting bigger. If these numbers have plateaued, you may have a loyal audience, but it's also a niche one. Or your content may be attracting visitors, but also failing to get them to stay or return.

• Organic vs Branded and Paid Traffic: Let’s try to remember that the whole point of developing a great content marketing strategy is to attract visitors to your content—website, blogs, ebooks, videos, infographics—without having to pay for that traffic. Again, this is the difference between paid traffic from advertising or PPC and organic traffic from search engines. The former is exponentially more expensive and less effective than the later. Content marketing began as a revolution against PPC and paid advertising—as for cost effective way to generate relevant, high-quality leads. For these reasons, it’s absolutely essential that you track and measure the percentage of organic versus paid traffic to your content assets every month. You’ll want to ensure that organic traffic is going up and a healthy range is for it to be above 40% of your website traffic. Moreover, as your content marketing efforts improve over time, you’ll start to increase brand awareness which will trigger an increase in “direct” or branded traffic to your properties. A direct search is when a visitor types your domain directly into search rather than typing a search query. The branded traffic you receive a month can be tracked in Google Analytics and other analytics tools like marketing automation. When you start to see a noticeable increase in branded traffic, your ROI from content marketing will start to soar.

• Average Time on Page and Page Depth: These are both metrics that a tool like Google Analytics will allow you to track. Just because someone is landing on a piece of content doesn't mean they're actually engaging with it and this is one metric that tell you if you have a problem on your hands. In fact, studies show that 80% of visitors to a blog only read 20% of a blog post. If you wrote a 2,000-word blog post and your average time on page is under 10 seconds, you can guarantee that the vast majority of your visitors aren't actually reading it to completion. Figuring out why is your key to creating better and more involved content moving forward.

• Social Media Engagement and Referrals: One of the critical ranking factors for Google’s algorithm is social sharing. The algorithm rightly assumes that if an article or piece of content is shared more on social then it is higher-quality. As Google is investing in directing its users to only the highest-quality, relevant content, you can bet that the more engagement your social media posts receive and the more click-thrus to your website from social media content, the higher that content will rank in SERPs. For these reasons every piece of content needs to be shared on social media not just once but many times and you need to actively track and measure engagement on social for content and how many website or landing page visits resulted from a referral from social media. Over time you want to see that social media referrals increase and the more they do, the better your return on investment will be.

By now, you should have a pretty clear idea of why sales or revenue alone doesn’t paint the full picture in terms of the ROI of content marketing. Sure, a single piece of content may have generated almost $2,000 in sales—but what does that really mean? If one of your goals was to expand the visibility and reach of your brand, those $2,000 in sales may have come from your existing, satisfied customers as opposed to new ones. Therefore, was it really a "success" in the way you wanted? Only a metric like "unique visitors" can help create additional insight into that fact.

Of course, all of this bleeds directly into what may be the most important benefit of all: you'll have all the actionable, analytical information you need to actually explain the ROI of content marketing to the right people, either increasing (or maintaining) buy-in from the people who are in charge of the budget.

Historically, content marketing is one of those areas that organizational leaders don't really understand the true value of unless you can explain it to them using cold, hard facts. If you go to an executive and say "I want to spend $2,000 to create this video," you're probably going to have a hard sell. But if you can also say "and based on similar content we've created in the past, I think it will increase social shares by X percent, which will increase lead quality by Y percent, which will ultimately generate Z number of new sales over a three-month period," you suddenly have a far stronger argument on your hands.

Therefore, understanding the ROI of content marketing accomplishes two pivotal tasks at the same time. First, you're able to explain what you're doing (and more importantly, why you're doing it) in a way that is persuasive, urgent and convincing. At that point, you're also able to confirm that your efforts are paying off in all the ways that matter - which is the key to building on that success and empowering your efforts across the board in the future.

Download our FREE ebook The ROI of Content Marketing to learn more.

If you'd like to find out more information about the ROI of content marketing, or if you have any additional questions that you'd like to discuss with an expert content marketing consultant, please don't delay—contact us today.

3 Reasons Why Your Content Marketing Team Will Fail Without Google Analytics

For years, when content marketers would ask me what I love about my job I used to say somewhat reluctantly: “analyzing data.” I would almost wince as I waited for the inevitable look of horror to come over their faces before saying, “ I can’t help it. I’m kind of a Google Analytics geek.”

You see, a misconception exists in marketing that marketers are essentially divided into one of two camps—the “data” team or the “creative” team. One team believes great marketing is “science” and the other team believes great marketing is an “art.” A veritable cold war exists between these two mythological factions. In fact, many content marketers are openly hostile to analytics, as if they fear that being analytical will somehow reduce or destroy their ability to do bleeding-edge creative work. It took me a while to understand that this hostility was actually due to the fact that most marketers don’t really know what Google Analytics is or how powerful a content marketing tool it can be.

So I decided to write this blog post to “come out” so to speak—to let content marketers everywhere know that not only are analytics essential to developing phenomenal content strategy, but that it’s absolutely “okay” to be a content marketer and admit you like to crunch numbers and dream of data. In fact, I would argue that every “creative” person on a marketing team—from content to design—can and should benefit from becoming fluent in Google Analytics. Here are three reasons why I believe your content team is doomed to fail if they don’t become familiar with Google Analytics and use it regularly.

1) Discover What Isn’t Working (And What Is)

Content marketers consistently undervalue Google Analytics from a content development perspective. They see it purely as a static reporting mechanism. A way to “see” what’s “happening” and merely report results on marketing activities. They see it, in other words, as a window into the immutable “past.” They don’t see it as a dynamic tool—a tool that can effectively help marketers to dynamically reshape their marketing future. Think about it. So many content marketers just keep ideating in a vacuum and just keep spinning out content without ever taking the time to (1) understand if their activities are actually having an impact or helping to achieve business objectives and (2) if there is anything they can do about it. In short, most of the time the average content marketer doesn’t even know if their asset (post, page, ebook) was a success or failure. They don’t even care. They just continue to spit out content, publish it, and move on to the next random content project. In this way, they just keep running in place, eating up budget and resources with very little to show for it.

These marketers are unaware that Google Analytics gives them the ability to see which content marketing activities are failing and which ones are succeeding. Knowing what isn’t working is as important as knowing what is working. As human beings, we learn from failure and the faster we fail, the faster we learn and grow. Think about it—simply not making the same content mistake again will save your company time and money and will bring you ever closer to developing a content asset or strategy that will succeed. At the bare minimum then, every content marketer should be leveraging Google Analytics and equivalent analytics tools weekly (or even daily) to learn before it’s too late if they are on the right or wrong track. Doing content in a vacuum doesn’t help content marketers make an impact or reach marketing goals. In fact, doing content in a vacuum is the single greatest reason most content marketers fail. Like this, analytics enable marketers to finally “see” so they can actually start marketing.

2) Communicate Mission Critical Information

Sure it’s good to use Google Analytics to prepare reports to marketing leadership on the “status” of your content marketing activities, but it’s even more important to “share” or communicate the insights you’ve gained from analytics to every member of your content team or broader inbound marketing team. Why? Well, obviously you can’t fix what’s broken if you don’t know it’s broken. Every member of these teams absolutely needs to know what is happening with the content that has been developed. Analytics can isolate a visitor’s journey on your site or blog and identifying exactly what page they entered/exited on and what aspects of the page they interacted with. Even a marketing team’s graphic designer needs to understand, for example, the reason a post is doing poorly is because that page is loading too slowly due to a large graphic that wasn’t properly optimized. Likewise, your team’s social media manager needs to know why her social media campaigns aren’t referring any traffic to the website. Your copywriter needs to know why most visitors to the blog abandon posts after reading only 20% of each post. Your SEM manager needs to know which Google Ads campaign is performing the best and how to optimize those campaigns for maximum impact on content.

All of this information is mission-critical to the success of your content marketing and digital marketing efforts, but this information cannot help if it is not shared and communicated to key stakeholders. Regularly sharing data from Google Analytics is a game-changing activity and should be an essential component of any content marketing team’s reporting regimen. I recommend and put into practice years ago a Google Analytics training session for every member of my team and also offer to provide training to other members of the digital team.

3) Enable Continuous Content Optimization

Unsophisticated content marketers labor under the delusion that each piece of content—each asset—is a sacred immutable object that once created is supposed to remain unchanged for the remainder of time. But a sophisticated content marketer knows that every piece of content is ever-changing, always in flux, and is in a continuous process of revision. For revision is essential not only for perfecting every asset but also updating it—keeping it accurate, current, and relevant to its target audience. How does Google Analytics help with content optimization? It enables marketers to know at critical phases in a content asset’s life span if that asset is “working”—on the day of publication, 6 months after publication, or even years after publication. We can safely say that a blog post, web page, or ebook is “working” when it not only drives traffic to your site but also compels your visitor to stay awhile and come back.

Google Analytics not only tells you what assets/pages are driving traffic but also how long those visitors “consumed” the content and if they came back. If the asset is driving a lot of traffic but is getting a low session time or a high bounce rate, this data tells you the asset isn’t a “failure” but is actually an opportunity for improvement and thus ripe for optimization. Once a content marketer is armed with insights such as these, they can immediately analyze the asset to pinpoint why the piece is attracting visitors but not keeping their attention or causing them to bounce. This analysis, insight, and revision will eventually result in a stronger asset that will drive more traffic and higher conversions. Moreover, you’ll be able to leverage this data to refine your content marketing strategy and plan.

As a marketer leverages analytics to continuously isolate opportunities for improvement, they are able to slowly fine-tune every asset for optimal impact. In this way, Google Analytics and other analytics tools are essential then for pinpointing key areas of opportunity in your content marketing arsenal so you can transform your content marketing into a high-performance machine.

Stop Worrying and Open Your Eyes

So if you’re a content marketer, stop worrying that becoming an analytics geek is going to dilute your “creative genius.” Stop playing into the false dichotomy that suggests you can’t be creative if you’re analytical and you can’t be analytical if you’re creative. There is nothing more natural in the world than wanting to know how your content was received and what happened to it once it left your content marketing “nest.” One of the greatest joys—thrills—I get as a content marketer is opening up analytics and discovering a blog post I thought had failed was actually spectacularly successful.

Start worrying about all the opportunities you’re missing to discover what isn’t working (and what is), communicate mission-critical data to your team, and optimize content for high performance. In short, it’s time to come out and test the waters of analytics. What are you waiting for? The water’s warm :)

How Paid Ads Can Boost the Success of Inbound Marketing Strategies

Although inbound marketing alone can optimize your search rankings and promote your brand presence, there are numerous benefits of advertising. Integrating paid advertising into your inbound strategy can quickly help you maximize your success. By utilizing paid ad campaigns alongside your inbound marketing techniques, you can successfully place your content in front of your target audience for improved visibility and engagement. Your target audience will have more opportunities to explore your website, blogs and other content types with the paid ads acting as key reminders.

To successfully pair your inbound marketing techniques with paid ad campaigns, you must take a smart approach to the management of your new dual digital marketing strategy. You can get started by utilizing this informative guide to learn how to use online paid ads to improve your inbound marketing success.

The Benefits of Advertising for Inbound Marketing

At its heart, paid advertising reaches your target audience to inform or remind them about your products and services. The reach and influence of paid ads directly supports the success of your inbound marketing campaigns by promoting your brand presence. With this multi-faceted digital marketing approach, your content and paid ads work together to advertise your products and services while boost brand loyalty and trust.

As you get started with inbound marketing, you may find that the process takes months before you start seeing any results. You can speed up this process by paying for the delivery of ads directly to your target audience. The ads can reach clients at any stage of the buyer’s funnel to support their journey from first contact with your company to closing the deal. As the ads drive visitors to your site, your content will support their buyer’s journey and help convert those leads into completed sales.

All About Inbound Marketing

Inbound content marketing strategies revolve around the creation of buyer personas to follow customers through every phase of the buyer’s journey. An effective inbound content marketing strategy helps position you as a thought leader in your industry, which in turn builds trust and loyalty. In addition, inbound marketing capitalizes on the utilization of search engine optimization, or SEO, techniques to increase organic traffic to your site and social media accounts.

With inbound marketing, you simply produce SEO content for your website, blog and other digital works to boost search rankings and engage your target audience. As your blog grows, and your content is shared across many platforms, your online brand presence will start to take a life of its own.

Until that happens, however, it is in your best interest to utilize all the digital marketing techniques you have at your disposal to achieve success in this realm. Paid ads are an amazing way to instantly drive traffic to your site to jumpstart your inbound content marketing success.

Advertising’s Role in Lead Generation

Paid ads have an incredible influence on the quality of all leads that come to the attention of your business. Approximately half of all potential customers who arrive at your site from paid ads are much more likely to complete their purchase, as compared to organic visitors.

Inbound content marketing casts a wider net that can bring in visitors who do not fit your target buyer personas. As a result, these individuals will usually visit the site before leaving without making a purchase. With paid ads, you can rest assured that your visitors match your target audience and are far enough down the sales pipeline to complete their purchase.

The sheer quality of the leads you receive from paid ads helps to optimize your expected return on investment, but only if you are using the right ads. Explore the different ad types and their purposes to choose the perfect paid ad platform for your business goals.

Types of Paid Ads That Work Best for Inbound Marketing

Although there are many different types of paid ads available, not all work optimally with inbound marketing techniques. Here are a few that do, so you can immediately start achieving your digital marketing goals.

Pay Per Click (PPC)

The pay per click, or PPC, ad model regularly positions your business in front of target audiences, but you only pay for click-throughs, not visibility alone. The PPC ads appear at the top of the search results when users input keywords that match the ones used for your ad campaigns. Research has shown that that these search engine advertisements have the power to increase brand awareness by a stunning 80 percent. These ads can help you cover more areas in a short period of time, as you work on creating SEO content that will have a similar effect. You can also use these ads to see how well specific long tail keywords help to promote site visitors and conversions.

Social Media

More than 2.5 billion people worldwide utilize social media daily, making this the perfect advertising venue for your business. The social media platforms offering paid advertisement opportunities include:

• Facebook

• YouTube

• LinkedIn

• Pinterest

• Twitter

• Instagram

• Snapchat

You can pay to sponsor or promote content that allow you to reach the widest audience possible with each post. In your posts, you can promote brand loyalty and engagement by choosing to share images, videos and blogs with your target audience. To have the greatest impact, your promoted or sponsored content must speak to the pain points of your buyer personas – and position your products and services as the ideal solutions. And, since this ad format has plenty of space, you should include a call to action on your posts to encourage high click-through rates.

Directory

Adding your business information to a free online directory can net you extra traffic, but it is possible to increase your success by going with paid local directories instead. These directories help customers find the best product and service solutions in their area by vetting the companies that sign up. To make the most of your paid directory listing, ensure that you optimize its content with the smart placement of relevant keywords. Prospective customers will utilize the directory search feature to complete market research without feeling overwhelmed by returned data. The directory will send interested leads to your website where your inbound content marketing techniques can lead the customer through each stage of the buyer’s journey.

How to Select the Best Paid Ad Platforms

You must weigh your marketing goals to determine which paid ad platforms will offer the biggest benefits. You do have the option of utilizing all three options, if your budget allows, but just one will likely have enough impact to make a positive difference.

Look at how you will need to interact and manage each ad model to see which options will best fit into your current marketing plan. If you have a strong social media presence, or want to establish one, then social media advertisements may support your goals the most. Select just one social media platform at first, starting with the one with the most users in your target demographic.

With 73 percent of adults across all age ranges using YouTube and 68 percent on Facebook, these two social media platforms are a sure bet for companies in almost every industry. With a deeper look, however, you can really home in one your target audience simply by using their age range. If your target audience is in the 18 to 24-year-old range, for example, then you can benefit most from building your brand presence on Twitter, Snapchat or Instagram.

PPC ads can help you drive traffic to your site as you work on creating and posting SEO content on your blog. As you cover your most relevant SEO keywords in your educational and entertaining content, you can move onto other promising keywords in your PPC ad campaigns. Paid directly listings simply provide additional traffic to your site to help you create a strong following of people in your target audience. With great sharable content, you can fully take advantage of the new traffic from paid directory listings, especially if your content ends up going viral.

Best Practices in Utilizing Paid Advertising for Inbound Marketing Campaigns

The approach you take in utilizing paid advertising campaigns will determine how well your efforts pay off. You can utilize the following best practices to use paid ads to boost the effectiveness of your inbound marketing campaigns.

Utilize Your Buyer Personas

Your buyer personas will help you craft your content and paid ads to assist your target audience with their buyer’s journey. In addition, by using these personas, you can discuss the pain points of your target audience and introduce your products and services as the leading solutions. To achieve this feat, simply take the demographic information and input it into the paid advertising targeting system.

While using Facebook’s paid advertising system, you can direct your ads using key demographics, including location, gender, relationship, age, education, employment and financial information. Furthermore, you can select to send your ads to people with particular interests, behaviors and connections to boost the quality and quantity of your leads.

Integrate a Visual Element

Although the written word alone can act as a powerful motivator, visual elements capture attention fast and keep the audience engaged through the advertisement. Ads with visual elements tend to sway the audience’s perception of the content in a positive direction.

In addition, the visual elements can convey vital information that propels your customers through the buyer’s journey faster than any other medium. You can create custom videos and promote them on social media or create image ads for your PPC campaigns.

Long Tail Keywords are Key

Although short and long tail keywords likely grace your inbound content marketing campaigns on a regular basis, paid ads benefit most from long tail keywords alone. The highly-specific nature of these keywords attracts customers who are further into their buyer’s journey and practically ready to make a purchase.

These keywords also reduce your competition in attracting and engaging your target audience, which helps keep your costs to a minimum. You should regularly try to build your longtail keywords around your most promising organic search terms. Utilize location optimization techniques as well to create long tail keywords that will attend to the needs of your local customer base.

One Ad Group Per Keyword

Although it might seem tedious, creating one ad group per keyword could help you learn about your most effective paid advertising strategies. The single keyword ad groups allow you to customize your paid advertisement content to that specific product or service. With one keyword per group, your ads only land in front of the people who are searching for information on that subject, in particular.

Furthermore, the people who click through those highly-specific advertisements are usually ready to commit to their purchase during their visit to your site. By watching how each single keyword ad group performs, you can determine which ads provide the greatest return on investment to better focus your marketing efforts.

Optimize, Not Rotate

With PPC ads, you have the choice to rotate your ads indefinitely or optimize them to show the best performing ads most often. Although you likely want to give all your paid ad campaigns a fair chance at performing well, the reality is that some will never help you boost traffic and conversions. Therefore, you should take advantage of the paid ad platform’s ability to optimize the ads with the best performance metrics.

With this option, you can actively monitor the performance of your ads to help guide the future creation of paid advertisements for your products and services. Furthermore, as machine learning weighs ad performance and makes optimization changes, you can divert your attention to creating exceptional SEO content for your website, blog and social media channels.

Prepare Your Landing Pages

Your paid advertisements will undoubtedly fall flat if your landing pages do not fulfill the needs of your target audience. Craft beautiful and functional landing pages with excellent copy to engage, educate and even entertain your site visitors. All your content should be informative and supportive to help foster a sense of trust and boost brand loyalty. Verify that all navigation buttons and links connect to the correct routes to support prospective buyers in making their purchase.

Every page on your site should have a strong call to action listed within the copy and navigation buttons to encourage visitors to move through the buyer’s journey. The call to action should help streamline the purchase process or help visitors get into direct contact with your company. Always aim to optimize the load speed of your landing pages to ensure your site instantly engages visitors and help boost your ad ranking.

Measuring the Return on Investment

Most paid ad platforms make it really easy to measure your overall return on investment by providing key performance indicators within the system interface. You can review the frequency, relevance and reach data to verify that your ads arrive on your target audiences’ screens an optimal number of times.

The total leads and conversions data helps you see the direct connection between your paid ads and the leads collected and sales achieved during that time period. Finally, these platforms tend to outright provide cost per lead data. You can compare this data to your prior advertising costs to verify that you are receiving a positive return on your investment.

Watch your website analytics as well to determine how the paid ad traffic impacts your most important metrics, including new and repeat visitors, bounce rate and time on site. When you are on the right track with your paid ads and inbound marketing content, you should notice a marked increase in all your key performance metrics.

Boost Your Inbound Content Marketing Success with Paid Ads

When you decide to integrate effective paid ads into your inbound marketing strategy, the sky is the limit in the traffic you can drive to your site. With this dual digital marketing approach, you can position yourself as a thought leader in your industry with your content while utilizing all the tools available to drive traffic to your site. In short, you’ll start receiving the benefits of advertising.

Although it is possible to maximize site visits and conversions on your own, partnering with your leading digital marketing experts can accelerate your success. The services and solutions from Verge are designed to help you elevate your website performance, boost your brand presence and optimize your inbound marketing strategy. You can fill out our online form to request a consultation for immediate assistance from skilled digital marketing experts.

Content Strategy: An Overview

Creating an effective content strategy for your business is one of the most critical steps on your way to developing a solid marketing strategy. In fact, content marketing is by far the most effective method of inbound marketing. The ROI of content marketing is so phenomenal that it produces, on average, 3 times the leads as paid advertising.

Content strategy simply refers to the planning, development, and management of content. Many people confuse content strategy with content marketing. What is content marketing? Well, the term is difficult to unpack. In fact, we’ve received so many questions about what content marketing actually is that we decided to dedicate an entire post to defining it.

For our purposes here, content marketing refers to the actual creation of marketing content that put your strategy into motion. Content marketing is the actual tactical execution of your marketing and might include:

• Actual writing or ‘creation’ of content

• Editing content

• Curating content

• Promoting content

• Content planning and scheduling

Marketing content for this can include things like blog posts, web site pages, ebooks, email campaigns, membership sign up, and more.

However content strategy refers to the overall direction or ‘vision’ of your marketing efforts i.e., “the plan”. It might include:

• Creating your vision & goals

• Performing audience research

• Identifying demographics

• Metrics & analytics

• Establishing voice, tone & style

• Governance or how your content will be updated, maintained & archived

A solid content strategy will ask who or what is your business currently? and then help you to carve out who you want to be. It will ask. . . “What does the current situation and competitive landscape look like?” and “What is your central desire or future business goals?” And then it will outline how to get you there.

Most importantly, a strategy document will emerge from your marketing strategy! This is the go-to reference to keep your content frequent, consistent, and in-line with your pre-defined brand, style & voice.

Define and know your audience

The first step in developing your content strategy is to figure out

            Who you’re talking to now  vs. who you want to be talking to.

You want to have strong knowledge about who likes you or your company and products or services. The more you know your audience the better you can serve them. You may want to start by stalking your current audience or customers. Yes, that’s right… we want you to actually do some Internet stalking! (It’s okay… nobody will ever know.) For more info about how stalk your audience like a pro see this article: “6 steps to Stalking your Audience.”

You want to research and learn as much about your audience as you can about the following:

Demographics:

• Age

• Gender

• Family (single, married, mother/father)

• Location

• Salary/Income bracket

• Education

• Interests & likes

Where they go online:

• What are their favorite websites to visit?

• Where do they shop?

• What blogs and news sites do they read

• Who influences them or who do they FOLLOW?

• What do they re-share

• How do they ‘talk’ online?

communication platforms of choice:

• Instagram?

• Pinterest

• Twitter?

• Snapchat?

• Facebook?

Brand:

• How do they want to be perceived?

• What are their goals… what are they trying to achieve?

• What drives them?

And most importantly…

• What problems do they need solved?

• What keeps them up at night?

• What are they scared of?

• What are their challenges?

• What do they need help with?

Establish Market Segments and Create Personas

Once you have researched your current audience or buyers you should then utilize that data to build your target market and create ‘sketches’ or profiles of key segments of that market. These artifacts are called personas.

For example, personas help one in understanding existing customers as well as identifying future and potential customers. They also help you to better understand your ‘ideal customer’ and even help you to avoid your ‘negative’ customer (you didn’t know you had those did you?).  Most importantly they help you to tailor or personalize your content and messaging to different groups.

When you create personas you give them a name and you provide key details about who they are and their buying and online behavior. You can create a typical customer persona named Jessica --a 30 something marketing professional who enjoys fashion blogging and likes to post or re-share fashion online-- all the way to an ideal persona named Jennifer -- a working mom of 2 who shops for herself and kids mostly online to save time.

Perform a Content Audit

The next step is to perform a content AUDIT. Yeah, it sounds really terrible but the basic steps are actually fairly easy to start. Here are the high levels of beginning a content audit (You can learn more by visiting another article on content audits):

1. Inventory existing content --- yes this means catalog all of the actual site URLS.

2. Organize and describe your pages of content. This includes, subject (i.e, selling, education, how to, technical), length and the tone of the piece(s). Also include relevance, ‘freshness’ and what if any it ‘features’ the content included –images, infographic, video...

3. Measure—learn how well each post or piece of content did. Identify goal metrics to monitor traffic, engagement, shares, conversions & more of this content.

4. Analyze the metrics for patterns and omissions.

Competitive Analysis

Once you have completed all this research and analysis for your own business you should then undertake that same endeavor for several of your key competitors. (Read more here about doing a thorough analysis on your competitors. For now start with the following:

• Identify 3-5 key competitors in your space

• Stalk you competitors – visits their Web site, sign up for their memberships and newsletters, study their communications, track their sales, and even BUY their products.

• Discover who their target market is and create buyer personas for them.

• Perform a gap analysis on their current content strategy vs. your current content strategy. What are they doing that is working that your not. What holes do you need to fill in your own plan. Conversely, how are you beating your competition? What are you excelling at.

Close the Gap

Finally, with your content audit and competitive analysis in-hand, it’s time to take action:

1. Compare your starting ‘vision’ of your business to the data that emerged from your content audit. Note ways to close the gap.

2. Compare your current situation to where your competitors are as well. Note the ways to close that gap too.

3. Set new content goals that you can measure and reasonably accomplish. Examples might be:

• Write more original content.

• Write the most in depth guide to _____(fill in the blank i.e, planning a wedding or starting your own business).

• Start a new account on another social media platform.

• Increase back links.

• Increase content posting.

Once you have done these 5 major steps it’s then time to commit it to paper and create some form of guideline or working reference for your business and employees to refer to – your strategy document.

Content strategy formats can be anything from a simple one page cheat sheet for a smaller micro business to a full 25 page report or an entire presentation/PowerPoint for a larger company.

Don’t worry about what it should be or how it should look or what it should include. And don’t feel intimidated by this process. There are also templates out there that you can use as a starting point to help you.

To use a cliché, the journey to 10k more followers begins with one tiny little post!

Discover how a content marketing consultant can help make content marketing look easy for you. Let VERGE guide you in your content marketing journey: