Category Archives: Content Marketing

Make customer success stories a big part of your content marketing

Customer success stories are rapidly becoming a part and parcel of content marketing on the Internet and advertising in the conventional media.

When people read about your product or service, they not just looking for descriptions or a list of features or a list of problems they can solve (although it is important to know what problems they can solve). They are also looking for real-world examples of how your product or service has solved people’s problems. When you draw real-life examples they become customer success stories.

In terms of content marketing, what’s the difference between customer success stories and testimonials?

Every website has had testimonials. These small paragraphs – mostly a couple of sentences – in which people tell how great your product or service is and why they would recommend the same to others. Testimonials are good. They are quite reassuring. Every website should have them. Testimonials are also an integral part of your content marketing strategy. So gather as many as possible.

Customer success stories on the other hand are more like your case studies. I will give you my example – how my content writing services transformed someone’s business (not using real names and products, but an actual parallel story exists).

There is this customer, John who, no matter how hard he tried, couldn’t sell designer napkins from his website. He had good search engine rankings and he had lots of content, but somehow, people weren’t buying from him. He had spent lots of money on advertising and promotion. He had also spent lots of money on building the inventory of designer napkins. He was almost on the verge of financial ruin. He would soon have to shut down his website (or abandon it) and seek employment.

Then one day he came across Credible Content. While going through different webpages and blog posts, he realized that the main problem with his website was his content. What he had written on his own wasn’t very convincing. He thought that he was a good writer and he could communicate the benefits of using designer napkins easily, but since he had assumed that he could write well and he had assumed that he was able to communicate sufficiently, he never thought about that aspect. He couldn’t figure out why people were not buying, but he never thought that it was a content that was the problem, especially when he had gotten good search engine rankings. He didn’t realise that rankings don’t matter unless the traffic converts, unless people buy. If they are not buying, something is missing.

Since he considered himself to be a good writer, it was difficult for him to approach another content writer to write for his website. Nonetheless, he didn’t want to miss this last chance. So he wrote to me.

I did an audit of his existing content and sent him a report. He immediately hired me to revamp his content and also to add new content on an ongoing basis. He is running a profitable business these days.

OK, this is not a full-blown story, but here my intention is not to lay down exactly how I solved his problem. My intention is to present a real problem and then the real solution. This should be done through successive customer success stories.

This Hootsuite blog post elaborately explains how to gather customer success stories that you can publish on your blog or website.

Know your audience before writing content and starting your content marketing campaign

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Know your audience before content marketing

As I often say on my blog and website, most of the people plunge into the depths of content marketing without knowing what they are doing, and without knowing what their audience wants. They just know that they need to publish content and then they start publishing it. They hire a couple of cheap content writers, give them 20-30 odd keywords and then leave them to their devices. Since this content is cheap, they don’t take it seriously, without realising that they are paying money to harm their own business.

It’s very important that you know your audience before writing content and starting your content marketing campaign. Whom are you writing for? Have you ever thought of what your target audience wants?

You know what? I learned this at a personal cost, although it was a blessing in disguise because after learning from that mistake I started my content writing and content marketing services. In fact, it wasn’t as bad as I often make it out to be, but inadvertently, around 10 years ago I committed a content marketing mistake that I shouldn’t have, considering I advise clients what sort of content they should publish and market.

I used to publish lots of web design articles. I must had invested more than a year creating around 2000 articles writing on various topics, publishing some on my own website and submitting some to other websites (those days we didn’t have blogs). What happened? The traffic that I attracted was of those people who wanted to learn web design rather than those who wanted to hire a web designer. I should have tried to understand what sort of content those people who were looking for a web designer, were looking for.

Anyway, in this Whiteboard Friday blog post Rand Fishkin has explained in detail why it is important to know what your core audience wants before investing time and money in writing your content and content marketing. The video is embedded below.

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The importance of knowing your content marketing KPI

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Content marketing is more effective if you know your KPIs – key performance indicators. What exactly do you want your content marketing to achieve for your business?

Engage your visitors
Improve your search engine rankings
Increase your revenue (this is something broad, actually)
Get more visitors from social networking and social media websites
Improve your conversion rate

These are the basic KPIs that you need to keep in perspective while working on your content marketing strategy. This way you know exactly what you are trying to achieve. Remember that the narrower your KPIs are, the better you will perform. This will also help you optimize your resources.

Why is it important to know your content marketing KPIs?

The problem with content marketing is most of the people don’t know exactly what they are trying to achieve. They know that it works. They know that it is working for other businesses. But all they know is, people are publishing one blog post after another, one article after another, and taking social media and social networking websites by storm with their “killer” content. Somehow they cannot figure out how to add method in the content marketing madness. Exactly what is happening? What sort of content gets you what? How does it actually get you more business?

As I mentioned in the above bullet, having a KPI like “Increase your revenue” is quite broad because by the end of the day, even if you have performed 1000 activities, you want to increase your revenue. Every for-profit business wants to get more revenue. This is an existential truth nobody can escape. So you can take “Increase your revenue” out of the bulleted list.

When you have figured out the KPIs of content marketing in your case, you don’t worry about other aspects of your business.

Suppose the most important KPI for you is, getting more newsletter subscribers. It doesn’t matter how your search engine rankings are. It doesn’t matter the level of engagement you can manifest on social media and social networking websites. Heck, it doesn’t even matter what sort of conversion rate your website enjoys. What matters is, if you were getting 5 newsletter subscribers per month previously, after you have set your content marketing ball rolling, and after it has been awhile since you set your content marketing ball rolling (for, it needs some time to show results) you should be getting 50 newsletter subscribers or 500 newsletter subscribers every month. If you set this as your KPI – getting more newsletter subscribers – then your content marketing is working for you. Once you have figured out that your content marketing is working for this particular KPI, if you want, you can put in more resources to get even better results. This is why it’s important to know the KPIs of your content marketing.

Some good examples of content marketing KPIs that you can set for your own business

People begin spending more time on your pages and blog posts: It means they’re finding what they’re looking for. It also means that they’re not being distracted by other things while they’re visiting your website. The more they stay on your website, the better will be the prospects of them turning into your customers and clients. If this is the KPI you have set for your content marketing, it can be good indicator of its success.
You’re getting more unique visitors to your website: Of course repeat visitors are good, but they will become repeat visitors if they come to your website for the first time, right? So the more unique visitors you have, the more repeat visitors you will get and repeat visitors are the ones who normally do business with you, the most. If you’re getting more unique visitors and if this is a KPI that you have set for your content marketing, you’re going in the right direction.
More people download your e-book, case study or report: Suppose the growth of your business depends on the number of people downloading your e-book, your case study or the report that you have prepared so that you are known as an expert in your field. If you have set this as your KPI, you will be publishing content accordingly.
You are getting more subscribers for your newsletter: Building your mailing list is a timeless piece of wisdom. The more people hear from you (without feeling annoyed) the more eager they will be to do business with you. This is why many businesses solely focus on building their mailing list and getting more subscribers for their newsletters. This sort of content marketing KPI would be perfect for those who are looking for long-term business development goals. They want to establish relationships and communication channels so that eventually these relationships and channels metamorphose into business partnerships.
You are getting more inbound links: There was a time when inbound links were extremely important for your search engine rankings. Although this no longer is the case, why solely depend on search engine traffic if you can get traffic from other websites? In fact there are many businesses that completely ignore search engines – something that I don’t advise – and completely focus on getting inbound links from high-traffic websites. Having this as your content marketing KPI will keep you focused on publishing highly useful and high-quality content so that people voluntarily link to it from their own websites and blogs.
Your search engine rankings are improving: Which business doesn’t want better search engine rankings? By the way having better search engine rankings as your primary content marketing KPI doesn’t always help because eventually it is the conversion rate on your website that matters. So, yes, aim at improving your search engine rankings but not at the cost of quality, meaningful content.
More people are engaging with you on social media and social networking websites: 82% people in the USA are engaging with their preferred brands on websites like Facebook and Twitter. I’m getting decent amount of work from LinkedIn. Some businesses are targeting Google+. No matter what social media or social networking channel you plan to target, eventually it is engagement that matters. If you’re simply posting content to fill your profile with information, it doesn’t help your business. People need to regularly interact with you, and this is a worth pursuing content marketing KPI.

Again, why haven’t I included things like “Increased revenue”, “more leads”, “more sales” and such terms as your KPIs? Because, no matter how important they are – in fact, the most important for any business – they are a by-product of the KPI attributes mentioned above. If your content marketing takes care of those KPI attributes, you naturally begin to get more revenue, more leads and more sales.

The importance of maintaining a content marketing calendar

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In my previous blog post titled How to Add Method to The Content Marketing Madness I briefly touched upon the point of maintaining a content marketing calendar so that you always know what you’re doing, how you are doing it and at what time you are doing it. Most people call it “Content Marketing Editorial Calendar” but here I’m not just talking about writing content and hence, organising topics and assigning them to various days; I’m talking about scheduling everything that you need to do in order to implement a result-oriented content marketing strategy.

Content marketing calendar helps you define a vision

The biggest problem with content marketing is when the enthusiasm wears off people are often at a loss, especially when you are a small business. What to do? And even if we do it, is it worth it? Aren’t we wasting time needlessly publishing blog posts that nobody reads? Why post links to various social networking websites?

You don’t come across such doubts when you are just launching your content marketing campaign because then you’re full of enthusiasm and confidence. Then, after maybe a month or so, you don’t experience much improvement. The search engine traffic doesn’t improve. You don’t see many people coming to your website. Your sales haven’t increased. You aren’t getting more leads. Your developing doubts – are you making a big mistake investing so much in content marketing?

But you know content marketing works. It is working for other businesses. Then why isn’t it working for you?

It is working for other businesses because they have already gone through the phase that you are going through right now and passed through it unscathed. They had prepared. They had a calendar and they simply stuck to it.

Once you have developed a content marketing calendar and written down the sort of effort that would be required, the sort of budget that will need to be allocated, and a long list of pros and cons that may come your way after a few weeks or a few months, you are already prepared for the phase of discouragement. Even if you are not experienced enough to anticipate lean periods, at least you know what you’re going to do for the next 2 months – yes, don’t create a content marketing calendar just for a few weeks. At least focus on the next 2 months.

A content marketing calendar will also help you formulate a strategy according to the resources you have or you may have in the coming days so that you don’t stretch yourself or go over budget. For instance, if you know that in order to publish new content for the next 2 months you will be requiring at least $ 3000, you must have that much money with you.

Doesn’t it all sound like a “plan” rather than a “calendar”? Yes, it does sound like a plan, but with dates allocated. I’m calling it a calendar because then you know that if today is January 20, 2015, exactly what blog post you will be publishing on February 15, 2015, what exact steps you will be taking to promote either your latest content or some existing piece of content and how you will handle or incorporate some sudden developments – having to write a blog post on a sudden political development or a natural catastrophe or scientific breakthrough.

Do you need a dedicated calendar application to maintain a content marketing calendar? Besides, how do you create such a calendar?

Rather than a calendar application I would recommend a spreadsheet application. You can use Google Docs (because then the documents can be accessed remotely by everybody) or you can use Microsoft Excel.

Open a new spreadsheet and rename the first worksheet as something like “Publishing Calendar”. You can insert another worksheet and rename it as “Marketing Calendar”. Why have separate worksheets? It is easier to maintain different activities.

Anyway, go back to the “Publishing Calendar” and in the top row, create the following columns:

ID: A unique ID can be assigned to every piece of content so that you can enter related information in different worksheets.
Date: On which date that particular piece of content will be published?
Format: What sort of content are you going to create? Blog post? Webpage? Video? Info graphic? PDF? Slide? Stop Motion Animation?
New or Existing: Are you revising/streamlining existing content for creating new content from scratch?
Topic or Headline: The topic on which the webpage or the blog post will be created.
Where: Whether you’ll be publishing the piece of content on your own website or blog or somewhere else.
Author: Who will be creating/writing that particular piece of content?
Responsible: If yours is a bigger organisation and you have a dedicated content marketing team, exactly who will be responsible for the timely publication of that particular piece of content?
Current Status: What is the current status of that content? Is it being written? Is it being edited and proofread? Is it being reviewed?
Visuals: What sort of images or videos will be used with this content?
Topic Categories: Under what categories this content will be published?
Keywords and meta data: What keywords should be targeted while creating this piece of content?
Call to action: Every piece of content must have a call to action. What is going to be for this piece of content?
Related URLs: Is related content already existing? Are there some existing URLs you would like to be linked to from this piece of content?

After you have created these columns you can start filling in the details and building your publishing calendar.

Simultaneous you can also move onto the marketing calendar and create the following columns:

Content ID: This unique ID was created in the “Content Publishing” worksheet.
Date: The date on which this particular marketing activity will be carried out.
Channels: What channels you are going to use to promote your content – Facebook, other websites, email broadcast, Twitter, LinkedIn, et cetera.
Format Conversion: Can this content be converted to another format? For example, can you create a slideshow or video presentation with the help of this content and then submit it to the appropriate social media website?

Actually, this can go on and on and it depends on how comprehensive your content marketing is going to be. Somewhere you can also include analytics and the changes carried out due to the data derived from those analytic tools.

How to add method to the content marketing madness

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Adding method to content writing madness

There is so much talk about content marketing on the Internet that it has become a panacea for all Internet marketing and search engine optimization problems. Interestingly, the hype is not misplaced. Content marketing is actually powerful. Still, it works for a selected few. Why?

People often forget that you need to have a marketing bent of mind in order to be a successful marketer. What makes you a successful marketer?

You understand the inherent strength of the product or service
You understand the inherent desires and problems of your target audience
You create a compelling message (or get it created by someone who can) that can convince people that the product or service you are trying to market can actually solve their problems
Use the most appropriate channels to spread your message
Analyze people’s reactions
Tweak the message and reconsider the broadcasting channels based on the conclusions you draw out of the analysis
Repeat steps 3-6 until you feel that you have optimized your marketing strategy

Sounds simple, right? Businesses are ready to pay millions of dollars to individuals who can carry out these activities. So no, it is not as simple as it sounds.

What I’m getting at?

What does it have to do with adding method to the content marketing madness?

The problem with content marketing is everybody who can write and publish blog posts and social media updates (mostly on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn) starts calling himself or herself a “content marketer”. An ability to write content is a different thing and marketing content is a totally different thing. Since many people think that, since they can write, they can also market, they start providing content marketing services, and this is where madness manifests. There are hundreds of thousands of content marketing companies on the Internet adding little value.

I have been providing content writing services for almost a decade now and even till now I don’t market my services as content marketing services although I offer it truncated version of these services because of the experience that I have gained over the years.

Anyway, how do you add method to the content marketing madness, within your organization, and while you’re hiring someone who seems to know his or her job? Here are a few things to keep in mind:

Find out what sort of content your target market prefers – text, videos, images, slideshows, ebooks, case studies, PDFs, social media updates or a mix of different formats
Carry out an audit of your existing content – You must have some content on your website, right?
- How does it sound?
- Is it well-written?
- Does it address the issues it was meant to address?
- Does it solve its purpose?
- Can you remove some pages?
- Can you alter them?
- What about the titles? Are they appropriate?
- Is your content full of distractions?
- Can lengthy paragraphs be rearranged in bulleted points?
- Do you have lots of junk content that is harming your search engine rankings?
- Have you been creating content simply to improve your search engine rankings (nothing wrong in that unless you are preparing nonsensical content)?
- Do you feel that there are some pages or some topics that are missing on your website?
This may take a few weeks or a few months to sort out so don’t hurry and certainly don’t be impatient. Content marketing is not something that you can do like a small project. It’s an ongoing process and no matter how much hurry you are in, if it is going to perform, it is going to take its own good time.
Do you send email updates? Have you been building a mailing list? Do you have a subscription form on your website where people can subscribe to your regular updates?
If not, start building your mailing list NOW.
Do you have a blog? Can people in your organization create content for your blog? Do you have a budget to hire a professional content writer? Setup a blog and then start adding valuable high-quality content to it.
Start building your social media presence. You can curate content from other websites and routinely post under your profiles so that people gradually begin to follow you for your particular topic. This will help you when you start promoting your own content.
Start diversifying in terms of formatting. I provide content writing services but it doesn’t mean I advise my clients to only have written content. It depends on your audience. As I have already mentioned above, explore different channels and use the ones that give you maximum output and exposure.
Use tools like Google Analytics to study what sort of content you create gets maximum attention on the Internet. Create more of that content without losing your core focus.
Setup a content marketing calendar so that content writing, publishing, production and dissemination happens on an ongoing basis.

This is how you add method to the content marketing madness. You take care of all the aspects of content marketing and not just routinely publishing a blog or posting “SEO articles” on various websites.