Can SMB's afford the impressive ROI of Content Marketing?

Does it feel like your brain right now?

 

Marketers have a lot to think about these days. This infographic by Ian Cleary and Venngage captures the diversity of skills and tasks that marketing now involves. And not that this is just the marketing tech person so that on top of these come other skills like creativity, strategic thinking, etc...

 

One of the obvious consequence is that for small teams, it's hard to assemble all these skills in a small group of individuals - let alone a single person. 

A good reality check by Sujan Patel on the myths and realities on automated writing. 

 

No, it's not coming soon to take your job as a content marketer. 

 

But there are some interesting take-aways on what it means for your content today. Some questions you should ask yourself:

 

- How would my content be different if it was written by a robot? 

- Do I know my target audience? 

- Am I showing empathy for my readers? 

 

The above chart also helps understand where humans are (still) superior to machines.

As Suzie Blaszkiewicz of GetApp puts it, the history of content marketing is far from being linear... There's been a lot of conflicting best practices and advice given by content marketing influencers over time.

 

One theme remains constant though: content marketing is hard and time consuming. So looking for tools to be more efficient and measure what works is the only given that you can count on when you embark on a content marketing journey.

 

(Note that GetApp conveniently plugs in its Top 25 content marketing Apps on the market ranking which is a great resource to my latter point).

AI is already here. Whether we notice it or not, a growing number of applications or websites are using AI technology behind the scenes. 

 

Marketers can not be ignorant of these changes that will deeply change the nature of the customer relationship. 

 

HubSpot's presentation gives a good and visual summary of the various areas AI will impact and why it matters for marketers.

As content marketing matures, the question of its ROI becomes important. And it's a delicate one because there are many components to it. This post by Jayson DeMers does a good job at giving the big picture of content marketing ROI but of course the devil is in the details. 

 

If you're a B2B marketer, it's helpful to consider aligning your content marketing objectives with your funnel. Your objectives then simply become:

 

- filling your top of the funnel,

 

- engaging prospects and nurturing them into qualified leads,

 

- helping close deals,

 

- keeping customers happy over time. 

 

Once you've established that, the next question becomes the technology and analytics system to measure ROI. As we've explained here, funnel performance has historically been measured through marketing automation software. But marketing automation is not designed specifically around content and this is why it's usually not enough to really understand the granular performance of each piece of content.

 

In addition to understanding the big picture, you also need to derive actionable recommendations on how to improve your content, either by doing performance audits or by using predictive insights. 

We started Scoop.it 5 years ago when digital content marketing was just getting started. Nobody has a crystal ball but we found some interesting trends by doing this survey and interviews:

 

- Technology will keep helping us work faster.

 

- But it might have an even greater impact by helping us work smarter.

 

- Automation is one aspect but to really empower result-driven strategies, intelligence is what smart marketers want to see being developed. 

 

Meet the content marketer of the future.

Startups should be focused and there's a tendency in Silicon Valley to be "product-only" companies while in early stage. But building a product without customer feedback is a recipe for disaster so marketing is not a late stage activity. And as Susan Su from 500 startups articulates very clearly in this webinar, content now prevails over ads in many ways so that your best bet as a founding team to get your first users, collect feedback and iterate from your MVP might well be content marketing. 

 

The thing is content is complex and time consuming so entrepreneurs embracing it need to be efficient. This webinar gives a great list of recommendations on how to do that and be a lean content marketer.

Remarkable presentation by Rand Fishkin who makes a crystal clear point on what republishing content to other platofrms can bring. 

 

Rand says you can increase your traffic, reach and SEO by 3x. On our end we can attest this works though there are many reasons we'll come back on to not systematically do it / overdo it. So if you're interested in what results this can bring, read our post on the results of our own experiment. 

Different people have different needs when it comes to consume content. For isntance, I don't drive to work so I mostly read text. But a lot of people who drive to work love podcasts to make their commute useful. 

 

Now the key point in this post by Sujan Patel: to optimize your reach, you need to use multiple formats. Not just when you have multiple audiences to reach but also because your same targeted audience is comprised of diverse people receptive to different formats.

 

On our end, we've been focusing a lot on text historically but we've been pleasantly surprised by how well SlideShare did for us and more recently webinars.

 

The next question for the lean content marketer convinced of using multiple formats is: how can you create these multiple pieces under different formats with the minimum effort? 

 

This makes me want to do a follow-up on how to use repurposing for this as I believe it's a great way to think about solving that problem: creating under one format and repurposing to another is a great way to increase the shelf life of your content and diversify your traffic. 

Interesting debate. Not sure I agree yet with the conclusion as we certainly keep seeing great numbers from gated content ourselves and the post doesn't offer any data to back up the claim. But I can follow the rationale and it's clear that gated content on its own doesn't provide traffic, SEO or results anyway. It needs to be combined with traffic-driving content as part of the right content architecture (more on this in this - gated - ebook).So definitely worth a read and a thought on how your content is designed to create conversions.

Great post by Chief MarTech Scott Brinker who gives a good overview of how AI will change marketing. The whole piece is insightful but the above chart is particularly interesting to understand the various ways AI can add value depending on the nature of the task. 

Successful people are impatient. When we're driven by results we want things to happen fast. And we tend to set unrealistic expectations for ourselves, our teams and the actions we're taking. 

 

When it comes to content marketing, this is even worse.  Because it's marketing and marketing is historically a lot about campaigns and ads, i.e. programs you can initiate quite quickly. Digital marketing made things even worse. Google created the expectation that anyone can become a marketer and start spending $50 worth of AdWords to be successful. Facebook encourages you to boost a post in a few clicks with an underlying viral reach promise.

 

The truth is that content marketing takes time. Not a deal-breaker, 5-year down the road type of time. But at least some months. 

 

As these case studies by Fractl, a content marketing agency, show, there are huge benefits you can build with content marketing. Tangible ones too - not just fuzzy and unmeasurable results. Solid business KPIs like lead generation will be significantly improved by content marketing.

 

But in months - not in weeks. 

AI is fast becoming the must-have technology for marketing. Just like the need to have a mobile strategy a few years ago, marketers now need to have a data and AI plan. Collecting data was just the first step. What you do with it is what will matter. This post recaps key trends in marketing and AI. Specifically for content, I'll make a prediction myself that we'll see content marketing intelligence become a more and more important topic in 2017. What topics should you write about, what content can you extend the lifetime of, how to generate more results from your social distribution, etc... these are just a few of the questions AI algorithms are simply better fitted to answer than humans.

This post on Michael Brenner's Marketing Insider blog is spot on. Guest author Grzegorz Błażewicz explains the different problems that can be solved by automation: research, distribution and measurement. 

 

While content marketing automation can be seen as an opportunity right now, I would make a stronger point that it actually is an obligation.

 

Research is critical to create good content. Content marketing is about being the best answer or one of the best answers to your customers' questions. How can you be the best answer without researching what's out there? And if you need to understand what's out there you need to automate content discovery.

 

No content ever generated traffic without getting some distribution first. It's not "build it and they will come". But in a world of information overload where everybody's embracing content marketing, optimizing content distribution is a priority. This means sharing multiple times on social media, generating email automatically and amplifying successful content to extend its lifetime. In this study, we actually measured how much more results you could generate through organic content amplification - without any paid distribution budget. And again, there's no way you can keep track manually of:

 

- all the pieces of content you need to share and distribute via email,

 

- how many times you've shared or emailed them,

 

- which ones deserve to keep being distributed and which ones shouldn't.

 

Finally, measuring content performance is the key to ROI. Again, it's imperative as if you don't measure it, you won't be able to make it a sustainable and valuable strategy for your business. Here again, it's impossible to crunch numbers better than a computer. More than that: tracking systems need to be in place to enable the proper attribution of business KPI's to content, aka content marketing analytics.

 

Humans will and need to stay in the picture of course. While some automated content creation technology starts to be used for sports and finance, it's not capable of creating content for sophisticated buying processes. But the key is to leverage technology and automation for what it's good at and focus our efforts on creativity and strategy - making our content marketing both human and efficient. 

Great post by Julia McCoy of Express Writers. 

 

And yes, even though I'm a techie, I believe there are dangers in over-automating. 

 

But, as I wrote for the Content Marketing Institute here, I believe the key to avoid these dangers while be efficient is to use automation to be smarter and not just faster.

 

I see a lot of people try to take shortcuts and implement automation as a way to do that. But content marketing is about building relationship and trust with your target audience so that they feel educated (not sold) on the topics that will potentially lead them to consider your products. The "building relationship and trust" part is not something a machine can do - and over-automating can be counter-productive.

 

Having said that, content marketing is tough and time-consuming so it's definitely a must to automate repeatable tasks such as social media distribution for instance.

 

But beyond that, technology that helps us be smarter is really the next step:

 

- research tools such as Buzzsumo or the Scoop.it suggestion engine and that helps understand what content to create by automating content discovery and research,

 

- bots such as GrowBots, developed by HubSpot's CTO that answers questions, kind of like a Siri for marketers.

 

- predictive insight technology such as the one we launched in the v2 of our own Scoop.it Content Director and that provides actionable recommendations on how to get more results with the content you've already produced.

 

Overall the future of content marketing automation should be to help you getting more from content - and not just more content.

@Paul Chaney articulates why content curation is a great complement to creating your own content. Among the benefits he outlines:

 

1. Time saving: in our own findings from customers, we've seen curated blog posts are 4-8x faster to create than original pieces. And yes, they do perform well from a traffic and SEO standpoint - especially when you enrich curated content with your own insights. 

 

2. Building trust: content marketing works when it's not about you but your customers. While it's tempting to plug your own services or products in the content you create, you won't do that with curated content that - by definition - you didn't author. 

 

To this, I would also add that content curation is more accessible so it's easier to make it collaborative and have several people in the company contribute curated content.

Should you own your blog? Or aren't you better off leveraging an established audience like Facebook's, Medium's or the LinkedIn publishing platform?

 

We've covered this many times inluding in this post where Mark Shaefer, Michael Stelzner and Mitch Joel. 

 

Joe Pulizzi gives a vibrant defense of owning your content house by comparing the appeal of the alternatives to the dark side: sure, it can be seen as faster for building traffic but then, he says, how come the valuation of Facebook seems to be directly correlated to the decline in organic reach of Facebook pages? 

 

The above graph - put together by Jay Baer - is crystal clear: while it's tempting to fish where the fish is, social platforms that invested in building their audience are not here to let you capture it for free. 

 

In the world of rented land, it's pay for play.

Content marketing needs to be more predictive. Sure, it's not an exact science and probably never will be. But planning your blog's growth with a bottom up approach as Devesh Khanal gives a step-by-step example in this post is super helpful nevertheless as, among other things:

 

- it helps you understand how your key metrics work,

- it forces you to identify what are the things you can leverage; that are within your control,

- it helps set expectations.

 

Note: this model is traffic-based as it's their #1 objective but you could add conversion in the equation and build a similar-type of model for reaching a target of leads instead of visitors.