I recently attended the “Content Marketing for Demand Generation ROI: Create, Track, and Optimize Your Content Strategy,” webcast presented by Dayna Rothman, Director of Content Marketing at Captora. Dayna shared some great ideas for marketers looking to improve their content marketing. If you weren’t able to attend, below is a recap of Dayna’s presentation on creating, tracking and optimizing your content strategy:
Today’s Shifting Buyers
Sales used to be the first contact with a buyer, but in today’s world it’s the marketer that starts the relationship. Additionally, buyers now live in a multi-device, multi-channel world with an endless supply of information at their fingertips and a finite amount of attention.
Content marketing is a way to get your buyer’s attention in a way that is not pushy or “salesy”. Content should be the king and queen of all your marketing programs and “the fire that fuels all of your demand gen programs”.
Scaling Your Content Production Efforts
To be successful with content marketing, you have to generate enough content to break through the clutter which can be overwhelming to marketers. The first step in this process is creating a content team, which could potentially include a chief content officer, managing editor, content specialist as well as an outsourced team.
Once you have your team, you are ready to ramp up your content production. A great way to do this is by repurposing existing content and generating new content types from the original piece (i.e. repurposing a series of blog posts to create an eBook).
Content Promotion for Lead Generation
There are a series of steps to follow in order to successfully promote content. To start, you can leverage your website homepage to feature your latest content piece behind a form as well as a content resources section. Another recommendation is to create a blog post to promote new content as a “teaser” encouraging readers to download the piece. It’s also important to remember the valuable social media real estate you have at your disposal, such as your Facebook cover photo or Twitter profile.
Email marketing can also be very useful for content promotion. Consider sending an email to your database for large content pieces and/or a content newsletter that regularly highlights new pieces. Sponsored emails purchased from a vendor with a relevant subscriber database can also be used successfully. Finally, lead generation doesn’t stop at acquisition – set up nurture tracks to keep your company top-of-mind with prospective customers by continuously introducing them to new content.
Content Marketing Return On Investment
Now that you have produced and promoted your content, how can you prove ROI? This has been a struggle for many content marketers and has been seen as a “Bigfoot” that is elusive and difficult to capture.
The first step in determining ROI is to define your goals and metrics and establish benchmarks. The first metric you should be tracking is the number of content downloads via forms or a marketing automation tool. Another metric to include is cost-per-lead to see which pieces are giving you the most “bang for your buck”. Also, first touch and multi-touch attribution is key to determining revenue and pipeline generated by content. This will let you know the first piece that brought someone into your program, as well as all of the pieces that were touched throughout a lead’s journey to conversion. You can then use this information along with the investment amount to determine the ROI of a particular piece.
As you can see, it is possible to track the ROI content marketing, and with the right promotion strategy you can make an impact in your bottom line. You can view the deck from this webinar here and let us know your feedback on the presentation by commenting below.
There are no comments