Tag Archives: Content Marketing Strategy

15 Content Marketing Stats Essential for Every Business

15 content marketing statistics

Saying that developing a content marketing strategy can be hard is an understatement.

With so many angles to consider, you want to make sure the strategy you are pursuing is effective – both in terms of time and money.

Read on for 15 statistics that confirm exactly why content marketing should be at the top of your marketing arsenal.

1) 60% of marketers publish at least one piece of content every day

Unsurprisingly, prolific publishers have an easier time generating leads than those who are fickle with their content creation.

The key point here? Consistency. It doesn’t matter whether the content is an article, a podcast, a video, or an infographic – regular posting reaps rewards.

2) Compared to content marketing followers, year-on-year growth in unique site traffic is 7.8x higher for content marketing leaders

Innovative content that sets you apart from the pack will boost your website’s views, so take the time to create useful, interesting content that presents you as a leader, not a follower, for an increase in unique site traffic.

3) Content marketing generates about 3 times as many leads as traditional marketing while costing 62% less

More than double the leads and less than half the price. What’s not to like?

Switching from traditional marketing should slash your costs while generating more leads. This could be due to content marketing nurturing your leads and relationships with potential customers in a way native marketing cannot.

4) Compared to non-adopters, conversion rates are nearly 6x higher for content marketing adopters

Work smart, not hard.

Why waste time on traditional marketing when content marketing conversion rates are significantly more effective?

5) The most effective B2B marketers spend 39% of the marketing budget on content marketing

Follow in the footsteps of those who do it best and designate a portion of your budget to content marketing.

It’s a winning strategy.

6) “Original written content” is the most important type of content for 58% of marketers

This is good news for those on a tight budget.

You can still deliver an effective marketing campaign by focusing on written content, which is usually cheaper while packing a bigger punch.

7) Content marketing is used by 93% of B2B marketers

Working with a company requires trust, and the overwhelming majority of B2B marketers know that content marketing is key for this.

8) A positive ROI is seen by 82% of marketers who blog

Blogging can help grow your business, and the statistic above shows that time spent blogging pays dividends.

9) The demand for infographics has increased 800% in recent years

That’s huge.

While professional infographics can be pricey, the data is clear: they’re hugely effective.

10) 68.1% of content reading is done on mobile devices

Smart phones have transformed how people use the internet.

With over half of people browsing the internet on a mobile device, it’s essential that your content is optimized for mobile viewing – or all your hard work won’t be seen.

11) Emails from brands appeal to 57% of 45 – 54-year-olds, but only 22% of millennials

The age-old marketing adage still applies: know your audience.

Content marketing is highly effective, but you have to combine it with reaching consumers via the right channels.

12) 71% of B2B consumers review a blog when making a purchase

When it comes to business consumers, blogs are the key.

For the best results, keep your blog updated with high-quality, engaging content.

13) Almost 1/3 of consumers check out a brand’s social media presence before their website

This echoes Point 11.

To get the most out of your marketing strategy, it is imperative that you publish your content in the right places.

Having a good social media presence is essential and can make or break your efforts.

14) Instagram is the fastest-growing platform for selling via video

Speaking of social media, Instagram is your go-to for content marketing via video.

Keep an eye on TikTok too.

15) Content marketing costs 41% less than paid search

Do you need another reason to put more effort into content marketing?

This is it.

As demonstrated by the statistics above, content marketing is an essential strategy in your marketing repertoire.

Consistent, interesting content is a sure way to boost engagement, site traffic, and ultimately, sales – so bear these statistics in mind next time you tweak your marketing strategy.

An All-Inclusive Guide To Creating A Content Calendar

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Guide to creating a content calendar.

Bill Gates, Diane Hendricks, Warren Buffet, and Oprah Winfrey.

Apart from being billionaires, what is a common thread among these highly successful individuals?

The power of ‘organization’ is an enviable characteristic.

All content creators have felt the need to be a little more organized and disciplined about their schedule at some point or the other.

A content calendar does just that!

Have a schedule to prepare and plan your content posting.

Hope you’re on onboard because we’re going to find just how to do so:

Meaning & Definition

Think of it as an editorial calendar.

Like your mom plans grocery shopping, cooking, arranging, taking care of your (unnecessary) needs, and working!

You too can plan when to post your next piece on great white sharks, status updates about your upcoming music, announcing a partnership with your favorite content creator (you’ve been waiting for this but it needs some build-up!)

Other updates regarding your content and promotional activity!

Where Can I Do It

While the medium is only a means to an end, it is necessary to pick one that you’re comfortable and quick in.

Your options are Microsoft Excel, Google calendar, Google sheets, Looming, Co-schedule, editorial calendar plugin for WordPress, to name a few.

The selection of a content calendar tool depends on your team, your content, and familiarity.

Don’t be afraid to try a few to pick the one that’s best suited to your line of work.

How To Do It?

Step One – repurpose & start with what you have

Remember that old pitch you made to a brand you wanted to work with?

You can break it down into articles, personal blog posts, or videos for your website / social media handle.

Step Two – the best content will come from your friends, family, and coworkers

Setting up a workstation and traveling to look for interesting interviewees can take up too much time.

The best intimate, personal, and spontaneous moments are discovered with the people who know you the best!

Especially for vloggers and influencers, this allows you to be more productive when it comes to scheduling, marketing, and blogging, all at the same time.

While your followers get a peek into your life, you also save time chasing other people for interviews!

Step Three – creating your kind of content – find your usp

Depending on what your forte is, you should create more effective and impactful videos on your preferred medium.

Improve your social media presence by creating relevant content that strikes a chord with your audience.

You can do this in the following ways:

This involves two types of content –

Regular Content –

All types of podcasts, webinars, reports, a series of videos, etc that fall under the same theme and structure.

Your content could be entertaining, informative, or both.

Know who your audience is and keep reaching out to them by updating your content.

Regular posting – Posting every once in a week is a good lesson on how to properly update your content for SEO.

Plus, this means you can reach out to newer subscribers or followers on Instagram or YouTube.

Special Content –

Campaigns, research papers, and contests are less regular and don’t need as much posting but require more attention to detail.

Since your audience knows your stance and voice, these types of posts need more research and must be carefully planned out for release.

An example of this would be a collaboration with an NGO or an informative show.

Step Four – editorial meetings

While planning and creating content, you are likely to miss out on sitting down with your team and discussing your evolving strategies.

It is also a great opportunity to discuss pending timelines, newer product collaborations, ideas, social media activity, and feedback.

This is a good place to change and tweak your content for last-minute changes to increase customer satisfaction and improve response time before publishing.

Statistics regarding your revenue model and engagement can be discussed and brainstormed.

Step Five – have a content repository

Does your content calendar seem full of things to do and ideas to execute? That’s okay.

You will always want to take inspiration from previous experiences and moments.

A content repository is a storage, like your journal – with your ideas, thoughts, and your work – complete and incomplete.

It’s like a safe space for your work that you can come back to whenever you want to.

Step Six – make it shareable

You can edit your content calendar from time to time but let it be accessed and viewed by your team as much as possible.

Since content is never created alone, it is ideal to have the people working with you to be aware of your expectations, timelines, and deadlines.

This way, everyone works together in making sure that the best work is completed.

You can even share it with your mentors and peers, people whose feedback is important to you.

Step Seven – change is the only constant

Lastly, make sure that you update your content calendar as much as you can.

Regular updates will allow you to evolve and change your process according to the situation to target your potential customers granularly.

This way, you can also allow time for creative discussions and set aside time for ideation whenever required.

Conclusion

If there was one thing I had to leave you with, it would be this – there’s no right or wrong way to create a content calendar.

Start with a template and then commit to the realistic deadlines you set yourself for better productivity and an overall better work ethic.

This is why your content marketing is not working

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Why your content marketing is not working

ReadWrite has published 6 reasons why your content marketing might not be working.

You know what? Content marketing is like any other undertaking in your life – it is replete with unpredictable outcomes. Hence, if you have been publishing blog post after blog post and have been keeping yourself busy (or one of your representatives) on social media and still haven’t experienced any significant improvement in your targeted traffic, some signs of disappointment and disenchantment are understandable.

The above post rightly says that “in the majority of the cases, it is not the content that is to be blamed. It is rather the content strategy.”

What exactly is content strategy?

It is

What content you need to publish.
Whom you should target.
Which format of content gives you the biggest leverage.
What platforms you should nurture to promote your content.

The author also says that most people wanting to use content marketing to promote their businesses do the bare minimum. They will just write 300 words because this is what Google recommends (minimum). They will use keywords to “optimize” their content writing rather than writing something meaningful and then using the keywords contextually.

Should you always publish long content? The Post says that you should write at least 1890 words. This number was discovered by Backlinko after analysing 11.8 million Google search results.

How many words you write depends on how much competition your face. About 1 ½ years ago I was working with a client who had hired an SEO company in the UK and this company was using SEMRush to figure out what must be the titles of the web pages and how many words individual web page must have according to the competition faced by that particular keyword or title.

Due to some communication gap, for many webpages I ended up writing more than required. They were upset because they thought that the time was wasted because if those many words were not needed, I shouldn’t have spent time writing them. Whereas, I was focusing on the necessity of the information rather than the word limit.

Why I’m writing this here is because I want to say that how many words you use when writing content for your web pages and blog posts depends on many, and often, weird factors.

When writing for my own blog, I don’t get bogged down by the number of words I must write. Hence, sometimes my blog posts have more than 2000 words, and sometimes they have merely 500 words. It depends on what I want to say at that time.

Bigger content marketing companies come up with surveys, statistics and numbers to aim for because they make big bucks flaunting these numbers.

Personally, what I have experienced is that it is the regularity that matters, coupled with quality and relevance.

Your audience doesn’t respond if your content is not relevant to what they are expecting. I provide content writing services. Sometimes I get obsessed with SEO-related topics but if I write too much on SEO, I will end up attracting the wrong audience because I’m not offering search engine optimization services. For me, SEO is intertwined with quality and relevant content writing.

Regularity is very important because even if you provide great content people need to come across your content on an ongoing basis. Thousands of businesses are continuously publishing content. Even if it is not great content, this content manages to occupy space in people’s minds as well as on the web. Hence you need to remain visible.

Here is my personal advice:

Don’t worry much about words and instead, focus on providing as much “useful” information as possible.
Maintain quality and relevance and give it precedence over regularity.
Be regular.

I know, explaining this to clients who want to pay according to the number of words their blog posts and web pages must have, can be difficult. Although most of them except that it is the quality that matters, they all aim for a certain number of words.

I can understand their worry. If they don’t give their content writer a “word-target” the writer may not spend much time on each topic.

Something to ponder on for me in the coming weeks.

Content marketing strategies that always work

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Content marketing strategies that always work

In this blog post you will read about content marketing strategies that always work and bring you success.

Want to ensure that your content marketing does not fail and always succeeds?

Here is a nice blog post published in Entrepreneur that lists a few strategic approaches that you can follow when carrying out your content marketing strategy.

Before proceeding, you may like to read 11 things that make your content marketing successful.

The above listed Entrepreneur blog post talks about the following strategic approaches when writing and publishing content:

Write authoritative content: I have written a lot on my blog what authoritative content is and how it benefits your business. Writing and publishing authoritative content means conveying to people that you have full knowledge of your business or your stream and you are the right person to do business with.
Write and publish evergreen content: This type of content lasts. Of course, you should also write on topical trends but write high-quality content that can be used by people for many months, many years. This way, your content is always relevant. You can also keep it relevant and evergreen by constantly updating it.
Write in an easy-to-understand language: Write in a manner that freely flows. When you’re writing for a business website, you’re not writing a literary novel. Keep your sentences short and simple. Focus on the benefits. Be conversational. Stay to the point.
Give your readers something significant: Give them something that really solves their problem like no one else does. As the above blog post says, “focus on one big idea”, which means, give them something that is irresistible.
Connect with influencers in your field: Influencers are those who have already built an audience for themselves, who have built a platform. They can influence people. People listen to them. If they promote your content or one of your links, you can get lots of attention.

How to analyze your content marketing performance in 2018?

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Analyzing your content marketing performance in 2018

As we are on the verge of entering 2019 it’s the right time to analyze how your content marketing effort performed in 2018. Were you able to meet your goals?

There must have been many hits and misses. You achieved some things, and some things were left less than satisfactory.

Evaluation can only be done if you have data to compare. If you want to know how your content marketing performed in 2018, then you need to know how it performed in 2017 so that you can make out if there was a difference.

Though, even if you don’t have the 2017 data about your content marketing campaigns, if there has been a marked improvement in your leads and sales because you did content marketing or you also started investing in content marketing along with traditional marketing, even then you can see if there was some noticeable improvement.

This Skyword blog post lays down some guidelines that you can use to analyze and audit your content marketing effort in 2018.

The blog post suggests that before you begin to analyze your content marketing performance, you need to know if you are measuring the correct metrics.

In the beginning of 2018, what did you have in your mind?

What did you want to improve?

Did you want to get more subscribers for your newsletter?

Did you want to raise your engagement levels on your social media profiles?

Did you want to educate your audience about the product or service you are offering?

Did you want to expand your brand presence? Did you want to improve your search engine rankings for particular search terms and keywords?

Do you observe improvements in these metrics?

Was there an increase in the number of subscribers in 2018?

Did your search engine rankings improve for your selected search terms and keywords?

If you don’t notice these improvements, what do you think was lacking?

It is very important to know what was lacking because unless you know that, you cannot know what you need to do in the coming year.

Read the blog post. Nothing much extraordinary, but it is good to revisit actions and things that you need to perform to get better results from your content marketing.