According to the 2012 MarketingSherpa Lead Generation Benchmark Report, 54% of marketers use content marketing as a lead generation tactic.
Join Flint McGlaughlin, CEO and Managing Director, MECLABS, this Wednesday for our next free Web clinic with – 5 Steps to Effective Content Marketing: How to extract the maximum revenue from your content – to learn from our recent discoveries about optimizing content marketing.
But before we shared our content marketing discoveries, we wanted to learn what content marketing tactics have worked for you. Here are our favorite responses from your peers …
Generating content and sharing it via free tools
Content is king and the queen is a hub of strong useful information with spokes emanating from it like those of a wheel to many free social networking platforms where your brand, your consistency and your offerings drive the engine that is your enterprise.
I set up a Google blog as an extension of my volunteer work that blossomed into a website ($10 a year to buy and convert it from a blog to a domain in my name) containing the basics of entering and succeeding in the venue as well my books and articles on the subject for download via Box (also a free application).
The idea was to refer clients to article links at the site to avoid repeating myself over and over to new business clients and still keep myself available for specific inquiries and problems.
I linked everything together on LinkedIn and began answering questions in the “Answers” feature there. I also registered at many of the free applications for networking websites on the Internet to see how that could benefit my work. Twitter, BlogCatalog, Facebook, Widgetbox, Empire Avenue, Pinterest, About Me and similar free applications have served my site well.
The Adsense Feature added cash flow. Roughly 30% of my clients began coming via LinkedIn or LinkedIn-related networking. The result has been heavy traffic, good efficiency in supporting in excess of 6,000 counseling cases over the last 7 years, and virtually no expense to me as a volunteer working for a non-profit organization.
– Kenneth Larson, volunteer, Smalltofeds
Converting traffic from content marketing
What I’m trying to push for more and move is concentrating on high-activity over high-volume traffic.
We dialed up friction in some of our websites with a hypothesis that such elements will increase engagement.
What we recently did was include a welcome video after the landing page right before the one-time-offer. We saw a huge increase in one time offer sales despite having less people actually see the page.
Another one is a playable clip on the landing page. We saw a decrease in signups but almost double the sales in one time offers.
– Roland Mirabueno, Conversion Rate Specialist, Mindvalley
Outsourcing for original content
When it comes to content marketing, I must be positive that my content is Original. The best solution to do this is, outsourcing.
Outsourcing worked very well in one of our lines of business. We outsourced academic professors for our content writing.
– Ahmed Seddiq, senior operations officer, Emirates Group
From unknown to Amazon’s Top Ten list for its category for over two years
I’m a big fan of MarketingExperiments, so I’m happy to share this with you and your audience.
I’m a published author of eight books, six for commercial publishers and two self-published. I self-published my latest book and was unknown in an entirely new field. My previous seven books were all on computers and technology; my eighth book was on quilting.
To promote my quilting book, I developed a blog tour for 10 days that propelled me from unknown to Amazon’s Top Ten list for its category for over two years.
The key elements that made it a success?
- Doing guest blogging over a concentrated period of time. Ten guest posts in 10 days. It was a ton of work, but totally worth it. Think “book tour,” but online and I was able to visit international blogs that would have been far too expensive to travel to on a book tour, like Canada and Australia.
- Using multimedia in each guest post. Each piece of content had a different format: podcasts, videos, tutorials, interviews, etc. I mixed it up so people following along for the entire tour would stay involved and interested.
- Gave away a copy of my book at each stop on the tour.
- Sold the book through Amazon, a trusted seller, so people had no qualms about buying through them
– Maria Peagler, founder, SocialMediaOnlineClasses.com
Related resources
5 Steps to Effective Content Marketing: How to extract the maximum revenue from your content – Wednesday, October 17, 2012, 4:00 – 5:00 p.m. EDT (20:00 – 21:00 UTC)
Conversion Optimization for Content: Publishing site decreases bounce rate 43%
Competitive Marketing: How do you grab customers’ attention?
Selling Free Content: Why Seth Godin never gives anything away for free
Good post! I have seen people religiously post edited articles from other sources for content marketing. Will that work?
Third-party content can certainly be effective, but consider posting a mix of your own content in there as well. If you have trouble generating content, you may want to look at the content your company is likely already generating internally, and look for ways to share that with your audience. This blog post has some helpful tips…
In the end, the source of the content is less important that your relationship with your audience. If you show that you value serving them and not just selling to them, they will trust the third-party content that you share. So “religiously posting edited articles” (with, I hope, permission of the original copyright holder) could work if the focus is on serving your audience. If the focus is on a naked traffic grab with a hard sell, that’s not really content marketing, it’s just a bait and switch.
When you create original content, make sure to use a friendly voice,. Write simply and conversationally. People “like” a pleasant read. And use humor!