The Long Tail of Content Marketing
Often times we deal with companies that want to make an immediate impact with their content marketing.
The challenge is that content marketing does not provide the immediacy of paid search. A successful content marketing strategy is developed over a longer time and the tail has a much higher ROI than any other marketing program.
The chart below effectively illustrates this point. While paid search might deliver 9 leads on average for every $1,000 spent from month one, a content marketing strategy builds over many months and can yield an average lead rate more than 3x greater within 36 months.
4 Tips to Accelerate Your Content Marketing Results
Clearly a content marketing effort requires some additional patience and long term vision, but, there are a few things you can do to help trigger activity a bit faster and there are a few tools and services that can help.
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Understand the keywords that have the best impact
SpyFu, SEMRush, and Alexa are services that allow you to measure organic and paid traffic from search. When they are used appropriately, they can give you tips on the best keywords to use based on the performance of your competitors.
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Research and find relevant trends to leverage
Buzzsumo and Topsy are two sites that can help organizations find influencers and the topics they are talking about. This can help define and predict trends to leverage when developing content. For example, if an influencer is talking about the impact of IRS breach on cybersecurity, that can be a strong indicator on what is top of mind for your audience.
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Trigger sharing of content to gain more reach faster
ContentMX offers a leaderboard within its newsletter templates that encourages the sharing of content online. The leaderboard lets your newsletter subscribers compete to share the most.
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Use your own lists to create traffic and buzz
Send a newsletter with fresh content that includes links back to social media discussions on that same topic. Platforms like Constant Contact, Eloqua, ExactTarget, or MailChimp are a great starting point. Then ContentMX can be added on top to create a newsletter and manage the content and and social media integration.
Organic Search vs. PPC
Here is a SpyFu chart illustrating inbound clicks for the website of a ContentMX client who is using both paid search and organic SEO techniques. You can see the different performance in these two categories.
Organic search generates more clicks and traffic on a regular basis. In the comparison below, we observe that the value of this traffic is much higher.
For this ContentMX client, the out of pocket expense paid for keywords was $77,000 while the the value of the clicks they received from organic keywords was equivalent to a whopping $182,000 over the same period.
A Plan for Real Content Marketing Success
Reaping the results of content marketing requires planning and typically takes about 6 months to begin to see results. The ContentMX marketing platform accelerates those results to realize true value from your content marketing much sooner. ContentMX can help with SEO, content curation, social sharing, and the effective use of your own custom content.
Talk with ContentMX about receiving a free assessment and a content plan. One of our managing editors can show you how we produce a steady stream of SEO friendly content from our writers, and all the tools you need to make it happen. Start here: http://www.contentmx.com/content-marketing-assessment/