5 Truths About Content Marketing

You probably already know that content marketing is important. You probably also hear a lot about tracking, conversions, and assigning a proper value to content. But effective content marketing–especially in the context of brand building–isn’t that simple. Without a conversion to track, the effects of your content marketing efforts can be less tangible and more difficult to quantify.

Even so, content marketing can be incredibly effective in building brand authority and recognition. Nine out of ten marketers are involved in content marketing, yet only 32 percent consider themselves effective at it. These five truths about content marketing may surprise you; they’ll certainly help you improve your strategy:

1. A Very Small Portion of Your Content Will Generate Most of Your Traffic

It might seem really intimidating to consider doing content marketing at any sort of scale. It must be a lot of work, right? It is, but if you focus on one really great content project, there’s no need to stress yourself over creating something new every week.

On my website, just 4 percent of our articles generate almost half the traffic and 85 percent of our social shares. It really does pay off to focus on fewer high-quality content projects, rather than trying to bang something new out constantly.
FOR SOUND

2. Promotion Comes Before Content Creation, Not After

How are you going to promote your content? If you’re already looking at a finished piece and just deciding now, you’ve prepared to fail.

We use a reverse funnel approach to content planning and creation at WordStream. Before anyone puts pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard), we need to understand where we plan on promoting and which publications we’d like to pick up our story. We need to know what kinds of stories they love, to ensure we’re going at it from an angle more likely to get covered by media.

Read the publications and columnists you’d like to get your story in front of. What types of topics are they covering? What do they share in their social channels? This will help shape how your content will appeal to them.

3. TV & Radio Are Underutilized in the Age of Digital

I had the opportunity to appear on Fox Business TV during the Twitter IPO story, thanks to a content project we worked on in the IPO run-up.

For brand building, TV and radio can be a big plus. Online marketers have largely ignored traditional media and it does have its issues, don’t get me wrong. Online channels are so much easier to track and quantify sales. However, TV and radio can win your brand big exposure and when you’re appearing as a topic expert, it’s a win for your brand name.

4. SEO Doesn’t Work for Brand Building

This is a lesson I learned the hard way. We invested a good deal of time in optimizing our blog content for search, and it was working! Over six years, our blog traffic grew steadily by over 8 percent a month, until eventually we had over 600,000 readers a month. However, our time on site was low and engagement was abysmal–visitors stayed on site for about a minute and a half and 80 percent of them never came back. At the time, only 3 percent of our organic traffic came from branded searches, telling us our brand recall was really, really bad.

What is the point of attracting new people over and over and over if they check out and don’t care to visit you again? SEO was a great vehicle for winning new readers, but it did nothing for building our brand.

5. Remarketing Can Help

Remarketing was instrumental in helping us turn our low engagement and brand recognition trend around. It enabled us to get our content back in front of people who had, at one point, shown an interest.

In Conclusion

There are a ton of reasons someone might leave your website–they’re skimming or browsing around, they got distracted, their baby just tried to eat their mobile… who knows. Remarketing gives you a chance to reconnect with those visitors via ads that appear while they’re doing other things around the Web.