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!
Focus on what you do best — and save time and money — by parceling off these 6 marketing tasks to outsource.
If you’re anything like me, you’re busy — not-enough-hours-in-the-day busy. We find that supply chain and logistics marketers are some of the most overworked professionals in the industry. One person (or a very small team) is often responsible for all marketing and sales efforts for an organization. So I want to let you in on a little secret: Outsourcing is your solution to being too busy.
[bctt tweet=”Outsourcing marketing tasks allows you to focus on insourcing your core competencies.” username=”Fronetics”]
Outsourcing marketing tasks allows you to focus on insourcing your core competencies. In other words, you can start focusing on what you do best and delegate specified tasks to external experts.
The content marketing landscape is constantly changing. There are more and more marketing tasks to cover: social media, videos, blogs, emails, etc. How can you truly focus your attention on any one area when you have so many balls in the air?
Don’t work harder. Work smarter.
Outsourcing marketing gives you the opportunity to remove some of the time-consuming and laborious tasks from your desk, so you can get back to the core of your marketing efforts.
That doesn’t mean you have to outsource all your marketing tasks, or even half of them. Choosing several areas beyond your staff’s expertise, or tasks that are particularly tedious, can help you improve your marketing efforts and take stress off an overworked internal team.
Here are six areas you should consider outsourcing.
Video: 6 marketing tasks to outsource
Final thoughts
Finding the right partner is key when you choose to outsource marketing tasks. You have to trust the people to whom you are delegating tasks, so that you know the work is getting done the way you want while you focus your attention on other tasks.
The right partner will work with you to develop a strategy that closely aligns with your business goals. Your partner can even execute the strategy for you and provide regular updates on how it’s working. This kind of results-driven approach will ensure you’re stretching your marketing dollars to the fullest extent and getting the kind of results that will grow your bottom line.
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.
Here are four simple steps to measure your company’s content marketing ROI and the success of your content marketing strategy.
Measuring your content marketing ROI gives you valuable insight into what’s working (and what’s not) with your content marketing strategy. It’s important to measure if your efforts are profitable so you know where to put your time and money.
Content marketing ROI is harder to quantify than just tracking how many likes your social media pages have. But tracking certain metrics is important for understanding how your content marketing activities are performing. Keeping a close eye on your ROI allows you to make cost-effective marketing choices and to avoid costly mistakes.
In the article, How to Measure Content Marketing ROI: A Simple 4 Step Process, eCommerce content marketing and SEO consultant Bill Widmer breaks down the simple four-step process that will quickly — and effectively — measure your content marketing ROI.
Every company has specific key performance indicators (KPIs) that help shape their marketing strategy. These KPIs will be the foundation for measuring your content marketing ROI.
Infographic: How to measure your content marketing ROI in four easy steps
We all want to see the fruits of our labors. Whether launching a new social media campaign or creating new videos for your blog, we look for instantaneous numbers that will affirm we made the right choices. Calculating ROI might take some time – both in the few extra minutes to do the math and the amount of time that needs to pass before all the data is available — but that number will be invaluable to you.
