by Fronetics | Jul 6, 2017 | Blog, Content Marketing, Data/Analytics, Marketing
Businesses report these 3 content marketing challenges are the largest they face. Here’s how to track your progress in overcoming them.
Is content marketing working well for your business? If not, you are not alone. Though it is one of the most effective ways to grow your business, content marketing has been challenging B2B and B2C organizations since its inception.
You may think it should be simple: Write, post, get more customers. But content marketing is much more complex, demanding more time, thought, and careful strategy than churning out a few blog posts.
First and foremost, what you produce must engage readers. This is, however, one of the biggest content marketing challenges facing both B2B and B2C marketers.
In fact, the 2017 State of Inbound Report found that content creation is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of content marketing challenges that businesses face. Here are 3 marketing challenges and ways to track your progress in overcoming them.
3 content marketing challenges
1. Generating traffic and leads
Echoing their priorities, marketers today find generating traffic and leads to be their biggest challenge. In fact, 61% of those surveyed listed it as their number one challenge. ‘Content is king’ has become a marketing mantra, but how can you turn your content into actual leads that turn into sales?
Tying revenue directly to publishing and distributing content can be difficult. Thinking about social media content within the context of your entire sales funnel can make it easier to determine effectiveness. Content is typically used to attract leads, to encourage readers to subscribe to your blog, or to have prospects submit contact info to get higher-value content. Continued engagement nurtures leads and moves them further down the sales funnel.
Track this: The cost to get a lead. You can then determine the percentage of leads that move on to become qualified leads, the percentage of qualified leads that then become opportunities, and the percentage of opportunities that are ultimately won. At the end of the day, you’ll be able to calculate the revenue generated from leads that entered the funnel from your content marketing efforts.
2. Proving the ROI of marketing activities
Coming in at a close second, 43% of marketers felt that proving their ROI from content marketing activities was their biggest challenge.
Whether launching a product or a new social media campaign, we look for instantaneous numbers that will affirm we made the right choices. But here’s the problem: Not all metrics are created equal. Content marketing ROI is harder to confirm than checking a few quick numbers.
Lean-startup pioneer Eric Reis said, “The only metrics that entrepreneurs should invest energy in collecting are those that help them make decisions.” In other words, measuring your ROI will tell you if an effort was profitable so you know where to put your time and money.
ROI can help you determine whether it was worth spending your resources in a particular way. This is extremely useful on platforms like blogs and social media, where things are constantly changing. Using ROI as a litmus test, you can keep experimenting and making sure you’re using these tools effectively.
Track this: Use tools like HubSpot, Hootsuite, and built-in analytics platforms like Twitter Analytics, Facebook Insight, and YouTube Analytics to track detailed information about engagement with your content.
3. Budget
Organizations that have a documented content marketing strategy are more likely to be successful than those that don’t. But setting aside the funds to develop and implement these strategies can be tricky.
The State of Inbound Report found that 30% of marketers struggle to secure a budget for their marketing efforts. Content marketing competes with other marketing campaigns (outbound, native, etc.) for funding. The Content Marketing Institute’s latest trends report states that, on average, 29% of B2B brands’ total marketing budget is spent on content marketing, leaving a majority of funding going toward other efforts.
Content marketing is here to stay. In fact, it’s at its best when it’s integrated with your other marketing efforts, becoming a part of your entire marketing strategy.
Track this: Content marketing serves every marketing channel. Experiment with overlapping marketing budgets to increase your efforts for whitepapers, sales collateral, social media posts, and to make sure your advertisements and visual messaging are in sync. Content serves every marketing channel, so you’re wasting time claiming you don’t have the budget.
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by Fronetics | Jun 8, 2017 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing, Social Media
Word of mouth happens organically, but these three tips will help your business get the most out of this kind of recommendation.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been relying on friends and family for recommendations on everything from cars to coffee makers. The oldest — and perhaps the most effective — form of marketing is word of mouth (WOM). Today it’s easier than ever to research opinions on products and services through social media and review sites.
Buyers are no different. They value the opinions of peers and colleagues. In fact, B2B buyers rank it among their top three resources for information. And, in general, 82% of Americans seek recommendations when making a purchase of any kind.
It makes sense: User reviews offer an unbiased, credible experience regarding a company’s products or services. So potential customers do not have to rely exclusively on information the organization provides. What’s more, reviewers often share more than just opinions; they frequently include related tips or good-to-knows, which offer extra value for the reader.
You know buyers are out there talking about your company, so make their chatter work for you. Here are three tips to turn word-of-mouth marketing into leads.
3 ways to make word of mouth work for you
1. Identify target influencers
More and more consumers are turning to third-party reviews over brand messaging. In fact, data from MuseFind shows that 92% of consumers trust an influencer more than an advertisement or traditional celebrity endorsement.
Influencers have established credibility with their followers and the ability to sway opinions. By identifying key influencers in your sector or industry, you can begin to foster a partnership and help drive the messaging about your brand and products. Influencer marketing drives brand awareness and builds relationships with your target audience.
2. Talk about the exceptional
Social media has allowed word-of-mouth referrals to go one step further. With digital reviews, companies have a new responsibility to respond to customer comments, both good and bad. This creates an opportunity to demonstrate exceptional customer service.
Be available, be responsive, and be attentive to customers who leave comments on social media and third-party review sites. This will create a loyalty that translates into customers that care deeply about your product and are much more likely to share with their peers and coworkers. It also allows users checking your social media or third-party review sites to witness your exceptional customer service firsthand.
3. Make reviews easy
The easiest way to get people talking about your company is to give them the opportunity to do so. Seek out customer reviews on specific products or processes and share them far and wide.
One unique way of capturing this information is using a platform like Yotpo. By directly sending customers an email with a built-in review form, this company is able to collect quality feedback in the form of customer reviews or user-uploaded images. These credible experiences can be shared as a marketing tool on your website, social media platforms, and elsewhere.
B2B marketers need to be thinking about the power of word-of-mouth recommendations. There is no shortage of thoughts and opinions being shared online, so use these opportunities to your advantage.
Have some good ideas on how to utilize word-of-mouth recommendations and customer reviews? We’d love to hear them!
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by Fronetics | Jun 7, 2017 | Blog, Content Marketing, Data/Analytics, Marketing, Social Media
Building brand awareness is one of the key benefits of content marketing, but it’s notoriously difficult to measure. Until now.
Content marketing is a long-term solution through which a business establishes a relationship with and earns the trust of target customers. It’s called building brand awareness. Drawing the public’s attention to — and heightening their knowledge of — your business ultimately generates leads that turn into sales, after all, which is the end marketing objective.
Let’s be honest: This doesn’t happen overnight. And it’s often difficult to quantify (as opposed to a vanity metric, such as website visits). But that’s not a reason to throw in the towel. There are ways to measure the work that you’re putting into your content marketing program. And, more specifically, there are ways to measure brand awareness.
4 metrics that indicate you’re building brand awareness
1) Social media reach
The reach of your social content has a direct impact on your brand awareness. The larger the reach, the larger the potential audience.
Twitter originally had an internal tool that tracked how many times a tweet had been shared, but stopped supporting this data back in 2015. So where do you go to track your social media reach?
Sharedcount is a free online tool that allows you to track the number of times a piece of content has been shared on social media, including Facebook, LinkedIn and Google. Sharedcount is an easy way to get basic information about your social reach, so you can spend less time tracking tweets and more time producing your content.
2) Brand mentions
There’s a great deal of value to be gained from monitoring discussions about your brand online. Tracking brand mentions can lead to honest feedback and objective insight from potential leads.
There are several options you can use to track brand mentions. We prefer the ease of Google Alerts, which allows you to easily set up a custom alert, or Hootsuite, where you can track brand mentions, as well as specific keywords and phrases, across all of your social media feeds.
3) Blog shares
By adding a share bar to your blog posts, you make it easy for readers to share your blog content on social networks, spreading awareness about your content and your brand through the amplifying effect of social media.
These share bars are easy to set up and even easier to monitor. By measuring your average number of shares per blog, you can track what content your users are drawn to and what pieces fall flat.
4) Search volume
One of the main sources of traffic for most websites is through simple searches. If people are searching for your company or products, that’s a pretty solid indication that they are aware of your brand.
Using online tools, such as Google Adwords or Moz, you can track the searches for your products, blogs, social media platforms, and any other variation that you find useful. These tools are free, easy to use, and perfect for determining if your company is popping up when customers are searching.
Content marketing takes time, but there are hints along the way that your efforts are working. Using these tools to measure brand awareness offers clues that customers are finding your company in their search efforts. If the needle is not moving in a positive direction, always adjust your strategy to until you find what works for your business.
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by Fronetics | May 31, 2017 | Blog, Content Marketing, Data/Analytics, Marketing, Social Media
Analyzing the right metrics is crucial to determining whether you are achieving content marketing ROI.
We all want to see the fruits of our labors. Whether launching a product or a new social media campaign, we look for instantaneous numbers that will affirm we made the right choices. But here’s the problem: Not all metrics are created equal. Content marketing ROI is harder to confirm than checking a few quick numbers.
A spike in homepage hits may be the result of your marketing efforts, or it may be because of ghost spam. (Or, both.) Regardless, more visits do not necessarily correlate to increased revenue — just more visits. Even so, 83% of B2B enterprise companies (over 1,000 employees) use web traffic as their main metric for measuring content marketing ROI.
The number of email subscribers is another common success metric. But, again, having 100,000 email subscribers means nothing if only 0.001% are opening them. You actually could be losing money in terms of resources allocated if the emails aren’t helping drive sales. That’s why it is crucial to focus on your company’s return on investment (ROI). You could waste hours reviewing a hundred different analytics that tell you nothing about how revenue was affected by a particular effort.
Know where to allocate resources
Lean-startup pioneer Eric Reis said, “The only metrics that entrepreneurs should invest energy in collecting are those that help them make decisions.” In other words, measure the things that will tell you if an effort was profitable so you know where to put your time and money.
ROI can help you determine whether it was worth spending your resources in a particular way. This is extremely useful on platforms like blogs and social media, where things are constantly changing. Using ROI as a litmus test, you can keep experimenting and making sure you’re using these tools effectively.
According to our Social Media Use Report, 81% of respondents wanted a tracking and measuring tool to prove their ROI. Your resources are limited, so it’s crucial to evaluate your efforts with meaningful numbers that illustrate their affect on your bottom line.
So what are they best metrics to use? Here are three of our favorite tools.
3 tools for measuring content marketing ROI
1) Built-in Social Media Analytics Tools
Most social media platforms have their very own built-in tools that give you detailed information about engagement with your content. Even better, most of these tools are free. Twitter Analytics, Facebook Insight, and YouTube Analytics are just a few examples of tools you can use to measure exposure and engagement with your followers. This priceless information will help you gain a better understanding of your followers and the content they are drawn to.
2) Hootsuite
Hootsuite promotes smarter, data-driven social media marketing decisions backed by real-time analytics that allow you to spot trends as they develop and drill down for insights on how your social content is performing. It takes all your top social media platforms (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn) and combines them into one application for full-scope results.
3) HubSpot
Measuring ROI through HubSpot is both accurate and convenient. HubSpot sends you weekly updates on your campaign performance and allows you to pull any reports of your own. Standard analysis includes: visits, leads, percentage changes, submissions, bounce rate, downloads, and much, much more. HubSpot Marketing Analytics can identify blog articles, landing pages, emails, and social media posts that perform well in terms of specific keywords.
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.
Let us help you get started. We’ve created a monthly marketing reporting template just for you. This template tracks your marketing metrics and generates graphs you can use in reporting and presentations. Click the button below to get the template (an Excel document) now.
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by Fronetics | May 24, 2017 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing
Ready to give up on content marketing? Chances are, you haven’t given it a fair shot.
You’re three or maybe even six months into your new content marketing program. Congratulations! You’re probably noticing an uptick in web traffic, social reach, and other engagement metrics like time on page. You’re right on track! But you have no leads or sales to speak of. And whether that’s got you nervous that you’re doing something wrong, or just has your boss breathing down your neck to get some results FAST, I’m here to tell you: Now is NOT the time to give up on content marketing.
In fact, giving up now is just about the worst thing you can do. You’ve already made the majority of the investment without giving your program time to deliver your return.
Why does content marketing take so dang long to work?
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 shouldn’t give up on content marketing before the seeds you sow have time to bear fruit.
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. (Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute, says more like 18.) The point is, content marketing is not a magic, overnight solution. The reason reflects why content marketing is effective in the first place.
4 reasons why it’s NOT time to give up on content marketing
1) Developing your strategy takes time.
Only 11% of companies without a documented content marketing strategy find their efforts to be successful, compared to 60% of companies with a strategy in place. (That number rises to 86% when the company designates someone to lead the strategy.) The significant increase in effectiveness can be attributed to the careful thought and research that goes into building a strategy.
You will need several months to build the foundation of your content marketing plan if it is to be effective. You need time to research the kind of content that resonates most with your audience and to truly understand the (very specific) demographic that finds value in what your company offers. Then you need time to determine and test which distribution channels will most effectively reach your target audience, to discern a plan for content production, and to build out an editorial calendar reflective of your strategy.
Without getting all of these pieces precisely right, you’ll waste an enormous amount of energy and resources working on an ineffective strategy. Take the time to evaluate the market for your business and its content marketing strategy, and you’ll realize results in time.
2) Becoming an authority takes time.
The goal of your content marketing efforts should be to be a consistent source of information and value to your audience, who gradually will come to trust your authority and reward you with their business when they are ready to make a purchase. And establishing yourself as an expert doesn’t happen overnight.
Consistency is key for two reasons. For one, the average B2B buyer consumes between two to five pieces of content before making a purchase decision. If your content is old, arbitrary, contradictory, or otherwise unreliable, buyers will chose a different vendor whose content is more trustworthy. Consistent and consistently good content keeps your target audience engaged and builds your credibility with them.
Secondly, search engines rank websites based on several factors, and one of the most important is consistency. If your company blogs every other month, compared to companies that post several days a week, your posts will be penalized in search results. And since very few readers click beyond the top five search results, you’re drastically reducing your organic search potential.
As a SumAll article put it, “Whether getting traffic to your blog or your content ranked in the search engines, it doesn’t happen overnight, but instead by repeatedly creating and distributing quality content on a frequent basis for the long-term.”
3) Building your audience takes time.
The B2B buying process is becoming longer and more complex because the majority of buyers (82%) are using more sources to research and evaluate products and services, and they are spending more time in the research phase itself. In fact, 71% of B2B researchers start with a generic search — rather than searching for a particular company — and do an average of 12 searches before even engaging with a specific brand’s site. They are 57% of the way down the sales path by this point, meaning they have already spent a fair amount of time educating themselves with the enormous amount of information available to them on the internet.
This means you need to allow your target audience time to find you and complete thorough research about you and your competitors before you even realize that the lead exists. And likely there will be more time before a sale takes place.
Content marketing is much more about lead nurturing than producing instant results. As you build your reputation as a valuable source of information, you will simultaneously build a loyal following of readers and content consumers who continue to return to you for knowledge and, ultimately, purchases. Relationship-building is not a streamlined process, but it does foster the ever-valuable repeat business that will have a greater impact on your bottom line than a one-and-done sale.
4) Your sales cycle takes time.
Unfortunately, content marketing cannot decrease the length of your sales cycle. Thus, you can’t expect to see the fruits of your labors (in terms of dollars) until at least one cycle is complete.
There should be, however, hints along the way that your efforts are working. Metrics like increased website traffic, email registrations, and social reach offer clues that more potential customers are finding your business in their research. You should take these signs and continually evolve your strategy to accommodate what is working for your business.
Also keep in mind that while content marketing can have an enormous impact on generating and nurturing leads, it does not deliver sales on a silver platter. Sales teams still play a major role in building on those relationships and closing deals.
Please don’t give up on content marketing before it’s had time to play out. You’ll not only lose out on your initial investment, but also all the leads and sales that will eventually come your way once your program has had time to develop fully.
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