The ABC’s of Content Marketing
By Barbara Pfeiffer, The Partner Marketing Group
This week, I want to talk about content marketing as last week, we talked about writing for humans, trying out infographics, taking a journalistic approach to writing, and developing your list of keywords. This week, we’ll take a closer look into landing pages, metrics, and the newsroom…oh my!
Content Marketing
Landing Pages. I could write a whole blog on this one (and will) but I also couldn’t leave it out of the ABC’s. Most likely, some of your content is being developed as ‘calls to action’ for a campaign. If you are not including landing pages as part of those campaigns, you’re hurting your results. You also may not be alone. According to MarketingSherpa’s Landing Page Handbook (2nd edition), 44% of clicks for B2B companies are directed to the business’ homepage, not a special landing page. Why? One reason may be the difficulty for marketing teams to create their own landing pages. If your webmaster is not able to help you create great landing pages quickly – and for all your campaigns – consider a service like Unbounce which has GREAT landing pages that are easy to create and customize and a lot of resources to help you get the best results.
Metrics. Like any other form of marketing, you need metrics to help guide your content marketing initiatives. What you measure depends on your goals but simple content marketing metrics can include:
- Content usage (views and downloads), shares and whether content leads to additional actions (i.e. did people sign up for a newsletter, social site, or take another action after reviewing your content?)
- You can add calls to action within your content and measure clicks on those links.
- Revenue. Yes, you can measure it. How many people downloaded your content, then ultimately purchased your product or service?
There are also, of course, ‘reach’ metrics – such as followers, likes and visitors to your sites. Although many content marketers dismiss these as “vanity metrics”, we don’t agree. There IS value in these metrics. Doug Kessler makes a great case for how vanity metrics can still be part of your Content Marketing KPI’s
Newsroom. Last week I suggested using journalistic tactics to keep content flowing. Let’s take it a step further and create a “newsroom” within your company, asking a few key employees to write about what’s happening in your target markets. Sell cloud solutions? Set up news feeds and alerts and assign the big stories and breaking news for commentary.
Join us next week as we dive into O through Q in our ‘ABC’s of Content Marketing’.
