It seems counterintuitive, but it’s often more of a challenge to drive content growth in larger companies than in startups and ambitious small businesses. With their complex webs of demanding stakeholders, bureaucratic dictums, and compliance guidelines, many of them just shrug and say, “Why bother?”
So, they end up with a ton of vanilla content that no one reads. Or they live with a content deficit that forces the need for a larger advertising spend.
It doesn’t have to be that way. As 3M’s Carlos Abler points out, it’s all about effective content management, no matter what your company’s size.
Light a Fire in Your Boardroom with Content Marketing Stats
Focusing on cross-selling and product cross-functionality, engaging customers and B2B accounts, and delivering a stellar experience at every point of content, has propelled 3M’s content strategy into the stratosphere.
Abler’s brilliant fusion of “content, data, and customer experience” – the foundation of his strategy – would have never seen the light of day were it not for his brilliant management skills. Through creating content that informs, inspires, and engages prospects, customers, and company stakeholders, he started a program called “Content-2-Revenue.”
The name says it all. No matter how large you are, there’s always some upstart company waiting in the wings, ready to take your place.
Just look at the search results for your products. Chances are, there are probably several smaller, newer companies that rank in the top end of the results.
The digital space is the great equalizer, and world-class content is what sets a company apart. If your company isn’t down with content marketing as a way of life, chances are, your revenue will undergo a slow bleed.
As does Abler, that’s the message you need to shout to the suits that call the shots in your company. Content marketing isn’t just a fad anymore.
It’s an ROI-generating machine. According to a Demand Metric report, it generates 3 times the leads as traditional marketing strategies but costs 62% less.
The same study reveals that 60% of all customers are inspired to seek out a product after reading content about it. So, if you want to move the content marketing needle among your company’s top brass, take these kinds of statistics to your next meeting.
Grow Your Content Geometrically
If your company has fallen behind in its content production, you can pump up the volume quickly without losing quality. Instead of planning to grow by a fractional number, aim to multiply your production by a whole number.
For example, if your previous goal was 5% (.05), make your new goal to grow by 500% (5x). Or, if your current goal is 10% (.1), aim to grow by 1,000% (10x).
But how? Glad you asked.
Stop Being a Perfectionist
No, you shouldn’t fire your editorial staff. But you don’t have to obsess over every jot and tittle in your next blog post.
Just provide enough trusted references and reasoned arguments to prove your point and move on.
Repurpose Content to Give It New Life
You’ve probably got a ton of past content in your content repository. Instead of letting it just sit there, repurpose it as other types of content. Here are some ideas:
- Turn a blog post into an infographic, a video, and an episode in your podcast.
- Repurpose a video as a blog post and expand the information in it into an ebook or white paper.
- Expand a great blog post into a white paper.
- Republish links to your top-performing evergreen content on your social media channels.
- Translate all your content into the languages spoken in your overseas markets.
You get the picture. Since you’ve already done most of the research, it should take little time to repurpose it for consumption by new markets and on new channels.
Document Your Content Marketing Strategy and Align It with Your Corporate Goals
Since your goal is to grow your content in proportion to your desired corporate growth goals, why not include that in your content strategy? When you align your strategy with your company’s overall goals, your content teams have a measurable target to hit.
Make sure that your documented strategy includes updated, fleshed-out customer personas. That way, your content teams will have a picture of exactly whom they are writing for in the front of their minds as they work.
They’ll create more personalized content that targets your customers’ and prospects’ needs and solves their problems. When that happens, your content will become more shareable, giving it an extra set of legs throughout the digital universe.
And, if you keep your content strategy close at hand – say, on your content calendar itself – it will serve as a constant reminder to your creatives to strive for those goals. And, when they see their content bear real-world fruit when the content analytics numbers roll in, they’ll have extra motivation to put out even more effective content in the future.
Grow Your Content with Search Intent Optimization
If you’ve ever searched for something online, and your search engine coughed up a pile of mixed results, some of which are way different from what you wanted, don’t blame Google (OK, maybe a little).
Blame the content marketers that didn’t optimize their content for search intent.
Don’t end up as they did. Instead, create content that steers people to where they need to go to find the information and products they need.
- For informational searches: Research the questions your target audience is likely to ask regarding your area of expertise. For example, a person with a clogged drain might be weighing trying to fix it on their own as opposed to hiring your plumbing service. Provide them with plenty of information for typical plumbing problems so that they’ll likely grow their trust in you as a valuable source of information.
- For navigational searches: People who want to find your website might not remember your complete name. For example, if someone just types in “Divvy” in a search, they might not get to our site. But, you can fix that in the meta title. Include a description of each page that is specific to the purpose of the page. That way, they’ll likely reach us on the second try, at least when they type in “Divvy content marketing” because our home page meta tag has both our name, “DivvyHQ,” and “The Spreadsheet-Free Editorial Calendar Application” in it. Plus, the on-page content on the home page contains plenty of references to the fact that we offer a tool that can make content marketing a breeze. Those two factors guide search engines – and our target customers – to our site, even when they can’t remember our entire name.
- For commercial searches: These people are nearly ready to buy, but they want to research the best products or services to meet their needs. Content that compares your products and services with your competitors’ products, as well as user-generated content, such as product reviews, can help them decide to choose yours over your competitors. Be sure to include a link to your sales page – for B2C searches – and one to an in-depth white paper or brochure for B2B searches.
- For transactional searches: Here’s where you have to be a little careful. Instead of stuffing your sales pages with outdated keywords like “plumber Pittsburgh,” use synonyms, related keywords, and natural language search terms to capture a larger share of your market. Use long-tail keywords to narrow down searches even more. Since they’re looking to buy your product or services today, you’ll need to include rich, detail-filled content that fleshes out the unique benefits they’ll get if they choose yours. Be sure to close transactional content with a powerful call to action to close the deal.
If you haven’t optimized your older content for search intent, it’s well worth your time to revamp it for today’s demanding audiences. Doing so will help you grow your content’s reach into new market segments that couldn’t find you online before.
Growing your content in proportion to your business won’t be a Herculean task if you have a single place where you can find, revise, collaborate on, create, and automate all your past and future content. DivvyHQ is a content marketing platform that can do just that.
And, if you get the enterprise version, you’ll also be able to analyze the results of all your hard work. Start your 14-day free trial today!