Content marketing is a long-term solution. Here’s why it takes so long to see results.
You are committed to your content marketing program. You’ve created blog posts, uploaded videos, and collaborated with industry leaders. You may have started noticing an increase in web traffic, social reach, and other engagement metrics like time on page. You’re on the right track!
The problem is your lack of leads or sales. Your boss is pressuring you for results, and you’re starting to question your efforts. Are you doing something wrong?
The answer is NO.
In fact, you’re doing everything right. Now you need to give your investment time to deliver on your return. But I know you’re asking, “Why does content marketing take so dang long to work?”
[bctt tweet=”Content marketing is a long-term solution that helps businesses build brand awareness, grow their audience, and generate new leads and sales. ” username=”Fronetics”]
Content marketing is a long-term solution that helps businesses build brand awareness, grow their audience, and generate new leads and sales. But it takes time and effort to achieve results. You don’t want to give up before you see the fruits of your labors.
Just how long will it take for your content marketing strategy to yield results? Well, that really depends on your business and your goals, but you can count on at least six months. Content marketers Neil Patel and Carol Ann Tan both write that content marketing strategies take at least six to nine months to start seeing results.
But that doesn’t mean you should throw in the towel. Here are 4 reasons content marketing doesn’t show results overnight but is still well worth your time and investment.
Video: 4 reasons why it’s NOT time to give up on content marketing
Please don’t give up on content marketing before it’s had time to play out. We understand you want to see the fruits of your labor. But if you pull the plug too early, you’ll lose out on your initial investment, not to mention the leads and sales that are eventually coming your way.
An important part of your content strategy should be optimizing historic blog content to ensure it’s attracting as much traffic as possible.
We all know that creating original content on a regular basis is important to improving SEO and attracting organic traffic to your website. But, here’s a surprise: Most of your traffic will come from older blog posts.
An important part of your content strategy should be optimizing historic blog content to ensure it’s attracting as much traffic as possible.
If you have a lot of content, that may scare you. (Sounds like a lot of work!) But, as with everything, being strategic about optimizing historic blog content will pay off many times over. Here’s how I suggest going about that.
Pick your posts
At Fronetics, about 80% of our traffic comes from posts that are 6 months old or older. HubSpot also discovered a similar trend: 76% of its monthly views came from old posts, as well as 92% of the company’s monthly leads!
[bctt tweet=”76% of HubSpot’s monthly views come from old posts and 92% of their monthly leads.” username=”Fronetics”]
But not all posts were created equal. In fact, HubSpot found they got about half of their monthly leads from only 30 posts, and they blog at a blistering pace of about 200 new posts every month. Going back and optimizing hundreds of your old posts is a waste of time.
Hunt through your analytics and look for historical blog posts with:
High traffic and high conversion rates: Readers view these posts often and convert frequently after reading them. Found any of these? Congrats. Most companies won’t have more than 1 or 2.
High traffic but low conversation rates: These are the posts are viewed often but don’t generate leads.
Low traffic but high conversion rates: These posts only garner a small number of hits but do well generating leads due to a higher-than-normal number of call-to-action click-throughs.
All set? Have a list of good blogs to work with? Here comes the fun part!
5 tips for optimizing historic blog content
Here are 5 tips to squeeze the absolute most out of your older blog posts (in terms of leads and conversions).
1. Update the content.
Rework it for today. Take out anything outdated and use a little finesse to make it more relevant. Don’t overhaul it; that’s unnecessary for a well-performing post.
2. Spice up the call-to-actions.
You’ll want to pay special attention to this for the posts that have high traffic but low conversion rates. CTAs have evolved. Old ones just aren’t going to appeal.
Revamp the CTA placement and appearance, and think (hard) again about your CTA content. Consider the language of the CTA and whether it fits the reader’s goal. What keyword(s) are they using to find the page? And does the CTA reflect this?
There’s so much information out there on making strong CTAs, but the bottom line is the CTA must match the intent of the audience.
Keep it bold. Keep it clear. And make ‘em an offer they can’t refuse.
3. Relook at your keywords.
For the posts that do well converting leads but don’t get a lot of traffic, you’ll need to take a fresh look at keywords.
Trying to rank for certain keywords in each blog post you publish is a practice on the way out. But it still has merit here, as long as you understand it within the larger picture of restructuring your website content into topic clusters and pillar content.
And here’s the beauty of optimizing historical blog content: You already have the data to know which keywords your audience are using to find the posts. Then prominently feature the keyword(s) in several places.
If you’ve done the hard work to update the CTA and the keywords, updating the meta description is a natural next step. Keep it as close to (but not over) 155-165 characters. Include your keyword(s). Explain the value of the post to the reader. And keep in mind your ultimate CTA goal. Everything should align to make the meta description a true synthesis of the post; if it doesn’t, go back and tweak a little more.
5. Republish and keep the URL.
Things that are “fresh” receive preferential treatment from Google. (We know it’s hard to believe when 2012 articles are at the top of your search results, but it’s true.)
But do not lose that original URL when you publish again. It pulls way more SEO “rank” than a new one. Keep the URL even if you updated the title of the post and the URL doesn’t match perfectly anymore. It’s OK.
(It’s not a bad idea to put in an editor’s note at the end of the article if the blog already has garnered comments, so your future audience won’t be confused by a publish date that is later than the date on the comments.)
And that’s it. 30 days after optimizing your historic blog content, go back and see how successful your efforts were. Track the metrics: post views, CTA click-throughs, lead generation, and keyword ranking. We’re betting they’ve gone up.
Measuring the success of your SEO strategy shouldn’t be done by measuring the success of one post at a time. But making the most of your best old posts is an important part of any good content marketing strategy.
Final tip
The final tip isn’t really about optimizing historic blog content, so let’s call it a ½ tip. Remember how Tip 1 recommended reworking the old posts but warned against overhauling them with large rewrites?
Well… Here’s the thing. If you have 12 historic blog posts you just optimized, you should write 12 new blog posts on that same content, too.
Recycle that good historic content into additional fresh content. After all, it’s what your audience is searching for!
Use these three steps to calculate content marketing ROI to show the value of your investment.
As supply chain and logistics businesses are finally recognizing the merits of content marketing, many are looking into it. But it doesn’t take much research to realize what an enormous investment it is. And how difficult it can be to calculate content marketing ROI.
[bctt tweet=”A data-driven approach to calculating Content Marketing ROI lets you continually adapt to the needs of your audience, ensuring an ongoing, robust ROI.” username=”Fronetics”]
Many companies we talk to need help convincing management that it’s a worthwhile investment. To that we say, use data!
But what data should you use? How do you quantify certain benefits, like growth in brand awareness? And do you really have to keep track of all the hours you spend writing blog posts, managing social media, etc.?
Here arethree basic steps for how to calculate content marketing ROI.
3 steps to calculate content marketing ROI
1) Set up your ROI measurement.
It’s important that you measure content marketing ROI at the initiative level. This means calculating the ROI of your blog, your webinar series, your Facebook marketing, etc. individually.
After calculating the ROI of each initiative, you can aggregate that data to determine your overall content marketing ROI for your business.
2) Know as much detail as possible.
“To measure ROI, you have to know, in as much detail as possible, the R (return) and the I (investment) of your content initiative,” says Jay Baer, president of Convince & Convert. Baer walks his readers through the example of figuring out ROI for a podcast, including calculating total investment in the project (including preparation and execution), and calculating total return.
Content marketing is about creativity. By the same token, think creatively about every measurable avenue of return in each of your initiatives.
3) Calculate your ROI.
The formula for ROI is universal: return minus investment, divided by investment, expressed as a percentage.
And there’s some good news for supply chain and logistics content marketing: “Content marketing ROI calculations are indeed easier for B2B companies because they almost always have visibility at the transaction layer,” writes Baer.
Once you’ve calculated ROI for each of your major initiatives, it’s time to think strategically about optimizing your content marketing resources, in terms of allocation and timing. Having hard data helps you answer questions about which initiatives are most fruitful, what language engages your audience best, when your efforts are most likely to pay off.
Ultimately, this data-driven approach lets you continually adapt to the needs of your audience, ensuring an ongoing, robust ROI.
Also in social media news April 2018: Instagram shuts down API platform, LinkedIn’s updates aimed at helping B2B marketers, and Facebook expands split ad testing.
Facebook has been busy creating updates focused on user security in the wake of the Cambridge/Analytica scandal. Since the data breach, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has committed to protecting user’s information and outlined several initiatives in the works to “prevent abuse, protect personal data and privacy, improve security, and take down fake accounts.”
One of the key takeaways from the scandal has been the lack of regulations overseeing business practices, as it applies to user data. It is safe to say that new regulations are looming in the not-so-distant future.
[bctt tweet=”“Computer science is undergoing a ‘reckoning’ and an ‘ethics crisis’ not unlike what has happened in chemistry with dynamite, in physics with nuclear bombs, and in human biology with eugenics.” Yonatan Zunger” username=”Fronetics”]
Google engineer Yonatan Zunger wrote in the Boston Globe, “Computer science is undergoing a ‘reckoning’ and an ‘ethics crisis’ not unlike what has happened in chemistry with dynamite, in physics with nuclear bombs, and in human biology with eugenics.” These regulations could have major impacts for advertisers, who have been capitalizing on data collected by social media platforms. Regulations that limit the tracking and retaining of user data will especially affect target advertising that relies on capturing data from target audience users.
Fronetics is staying on top of these changes and will continue to provide social media recommendations and updates on regulations.
Here’s your social media news for April 2018.
Facebook Changes Include More Transparency Around Ads and Pages
Facebook is working to make important changes that are aimed at increasing transparency and authenticity. “By increasing transparency around ads and Pages on Facebook, we can increase accountability for advertisers — improving our service for everyone,” says Rob Goldman, VP, Ads, and Alex Himel, VP, Local & Pages, in a statement on Facebook’s website.
Last October the social media giant rolled out restrictions on electoral ads on Facebook and Instagram. This April, Facebook is expanding those restrictions to all “issue ads” — for example, political topics — so only authorized advertisers that have been approved by Facebook can run issue ads. These changes are aimed at preventing any additional user data and privacy issues.
Facebook is also enforcing a verification process for all admins managing pages with large numbers of followers. “Those who manage large Pages that do not clear the process will no longer be able to post. This will make it much harder for people to administer a Page using a fake account, which is strictly against our policies.”
YouTube Introduces TrueView Ads
YouTube’s new ad format, TrueView for Reach, is its latest update aimed at boosting engagement for advertisers. The format allows advertisers the ability to build ads from 6 to 30 seconds long, with the skip option available after 5 seconds. “Our six-second bumper ads were designed to drive more reach among the audiences you care about, especially as they become increasingly on-the-go. They showcase not only the fun of storytelling in six seconds, but also the benefits of adapting to consumer behavior,” posts Ali Miller, Product Manager, Video Ads, and Khushbu Rathi, Product Manager, Video Ad for YouTube.
Facebook Improves and Expands Ad Split Testing Capabilities
Last October Facebook gave advertisers the ability to create split tests in Ads Manager’s Guided Creation workflow. The new update this month allows users to create tests in Quick Creation flow, making it even easier to manage ads in bulk and test ads against one another. Quick Creation will also feature a dashboard that shows “standard KPIs for the ads in your split test, such as CPM, CPC, CTR and more, to inform your marketing strategy.”
Instagram Cuts Off Older API Platform
In light of Facebook’s data security issues, Instagram announced it is shutting down the API platform, effective immediately. They have also greatly reduced the amount of data developers can access per hour, dropping from 5,000 calls per hour to only 200. Tech Crunch reports Facebook’s bold action to reform its APIs shows it’s willing to prioritize users above developers — at least once pushed by public backlash and internal strife.
LinkedIn Rolls Out Native Video for Sponsored Content and Company Pages
LinkedIn introduced autoplaying native video ads that will appear in the news feed section as stand-alone posts, as well as the ability to include native video on a company page for businesses and publishers. These changes were developed to help B2B marketers grab the attention of their audiences and increase engagement. “While video is a proven and popular tactic to engage decision-makers, the challenge has been finding a quality environment in which to reach them.” The update will be available to all businesses in the next few weeks.
Twitter Expands its Official Partners Program
Back in 2015, Twitter introduced its Official Partner Program, a select set of companies aimed at helping brands increase their ROI on advertising, brand awareness, and scaling customer care. The program has been so successful, Twitter announced it’s expanding the program to include six new partners: Curalate, Jebbit, VidMob, Vidsy, Animoto, and Social Native. “Each provider offers a unique solution that expands the advertisers’ toolset and delivers high-quality creative for brands on Twitter.”
Supply chain leaders should use these 5 social media tips to grow brand awareness and increase your company’s profile as an employer.
Like most busy executives, it’s hard to find time for your daily tasks and projects without adding social media into the mix. But having a presence on social media is no longer optional for leaders. It’s a necessity.
Though branding might not come easily for some supply chain management executives, it is key in today’s digital world for positioning yourself as a thought leader in your industry, as well as gaining positive traction as an employer.
We’ve talked a lot about the supply chain talent gap. Here’s where a consistent, informative social media presence could help you and your company.
Millennials in the workforce are more likely to apply for jobs with companies that have a strong social media presence. They want to work for leaders that are openly posting about industry trends, collaborating with competitors, and working toward innovative products and services. What better way to highlight your role as an industry leader than through social media?
Getting started can be intimidating. There are lots of different social media channels. And even more options regarding content within those channels. Do you start a blog? Post on Twitter? Upload videos to YouTube? It’s not as easy as just writing a few blog posts and throwing them up on Facebook.
So how do you get started cultivating a social media presence? Here are 5 tips to help any supply chain leader.
Infographic: 5 social media tips for supply chain leaders
Don’t let the hype of social media deter you. A strong personal brand is a major asset to any executive or aspiring executive. It doesn’t have to be a chore. It can become a fun and fulfilling part of your work routine, and it pays off. We hope these tips are useful even if you’ve been active on social media in a professional capacity before!
