A Look Into Content Marketing Success Stories

What do people normally do if they have mundane information they want to spread?

• Write a press release.
• Submit it to a site.

Unfortunately, too often the PR needs of the business are mismatched with the needs of the publisher.

What did BlueGlass do? Our approach was to use content marketing to promote the use of content marketing. We practice what we preach. 

Our goal was to get big coverage and create buzz in social media. What was really important was the message – showcase our service offerings and announce the acquisition. We included a PR announcement, and emphasized the importance of our services.

We generated a lot of links, and a lot of leads. Sorry, #youhadtobehere to see our results. 

BlueGlass follows a five step process for creating viral infographics, 

1. Find partners with the right audience
2. Brainstorm and get pre-approval with publishers
3. Collaboratively create content
4. Enhance promotions after it’s published
5. Add value for the publisher

• Publishers with 1M+ visitors per month
• High volume social sharing of content
• Open to a variety of content mediums
• Strong community: lots of feed subscribers, lots of comments on each post

Content needs to,

• Serve the needs of your business.
• Serve the needs of potential publishers.
• Get pre-approved.

Work with people who have experience with their own audience to find the best idea to reach that audience.

Make the publisher feel that this was their idea, and they’ll want to promote it.

Tell a story that is:

1. Simple
2. Unexpected
3. Concrete
4. Credible
5. Emotional

The Content Marketing Explosion infographic met each of these points,

• Simple: Has a simple message
• Unexpected: Data points are surprising
• Concrete: Highlights many facts and figures
• Credible: Uses data from high authority sources
• Emotional: It’s a wake-up call

After you created something that is marketable, you can take it further.

Publish supplemental content by creating a blog post about your feature.

Drive traffic to the publishers post with:

• paid traffic
• re-syndication

Make their life easier for the publishers by using:

• embed codes, QC/QA

Make the publisher look good by:

• promoting their past content
• helping drive social engagement through your network

The final syndication results for “The Content Marketing Explosion” :

•  Over 63 different mid to large sized blogs and websites wrote posts about our content

A second infographic we’ll shared is a co-branded infographic we did with Copyblogger, 15 Grammar Goods that Make You Look Silly.

Our goal with this infographic was to drive massive exposure.

• Drive high volume of targeted traffic
• Build lots of links to our new service page
• Spread co-branded IG far and wide
• Drive massive social sharing
• Drive leads

We capitalized on the opportunity to work with a great publishing partner. Then, we tapped a proven idea to create a piece of content with mass appeal.

The Grammar Goofs infographic came from a mash-up of three previous posts that were very successful on Copyblogger. So, the lesson? Choose a concept with mass appeal. Massively shared content has common traits, it is

• Universal but feels personal
• Nostalgic, or appeals to our vanity

• Audience is everything.
• Involve publishers and partners along the way.
• Create something remarkable.
• Once your content is published, your job has just begun. Always add value.

The big picture: Content initiatives should be based around an editorial calendar. They should serve a larger overall strategy. In this case, these two initiatives drove links to the same place, the brand new BlueGlass Service Page.

Combined, this strategy generated  natural and descriptive links:

• 466 inbound links
• from 108 unique linking domains
• 6,283 unique visitors the BlueGlass

First of all, you need to start engaging your people:

• Who are your customers?
• Where do they hang out ?
• How should you engage?

This is not about where you can advertise to your customers, it’s where they hang out, and how you can engage with these people.

So, who are your customers? Each customer is different, understand the main groups. Where do they hang out? Are there certain social networks that they are on more? What are the best ways you can engage with these people?

The key is to know who you’re trying to reach, and engage these people based on where they actually are. Usually, you can double down on one place.

Publish awesome content:

• Start a blog.
• Create content.
• Be consistently awesome.

• Use WordPress, self-hosted. Don’t use any other blogging platform.
• Use AWeber, drip email marketing. When it has to do with content initiatives.

• It’s about creating content that people really want to read. It makes them laugh, and smile.
• Have an understanding of what your audience likes and dislikes. This helps you optimize your writing.
• Create content that teaches. 
• Be consistently awesome. Be ready to address any issues.

Starting a blog:

• It costs KISSMetrics just $7.35 per sign up for 30-day trial. This was calculated by breaking down the cost of running the blog.

Creating Content:

•  50 infographics, 300 posts, 10,000 comments
• Co-branding works extremely well for infographics

“How do colors affect purchases?” – KISSMetrics infographic

• 15 k tweets
• 5k k likes
• 1 radio show

“Bounce Rate Demystified”

• 4k Tweets
• 500 likes
• 300 LinkedIn Shares

It’s best if you can create an infographic that is spot on with your audience.

The next infographic is more informational. I don’t call them infographics, I call them info-guides. Infographics have lots of stats, they’re timely, they have a lot of data to back up what the infographic is about.

“What Makes Someone Leave a Website”

• 3,900 Tweets
• 707 likes
• 366 LinkedIn Shares

There’s a big difference between infographics, and info-guides.

Focus on actionable metrics for your content. It’s easy to drown in a seas of vanity metrics. Hone in on the metrics that matter based on your own specific business goals.

• Designing for conversions.
• Qualitative measurement.
• Quantitative measurement.
• Optimize and improve results.

Design for Conversions. You have to collect email addresses when you first create a blog. Make sure it’s prominent on the page. Put up special bonuses – free downloads, tool kits, courses. Tailor this to your audience. Use overlays that pop up that actually hit on your audiences needs – they are willing to fill this out. These conversion rates are very high. House ads also help. One key thing you should optimize on a blog – page views per visit.

Add side bars that include one of the following:

• most popular, case studies, latest
• current hits, all time, my favorite
• earn more, entrepreneurship, money diaries

I don’t care what analytics package it is, if they’re not giving you data for what’s actionable to you, it’s not valuable for you.

When it comes to measuring and optimizing, you need to have a process for what you need to test.

Quality Measurement with Micro Surveys

• What do your readers want to read? Add “micro surveys” that ask your readers, “What should write about next?”
• Did readers get value from your content? Per post, get a score of its action-ability. Have a micro survey that asks “Was this article actionable” and provide only Yes [here's what I learned] and No [I was looking for...] answers.
• How can you improve your content? “What’s the one thing missing from our blog that you’d like to see?”
• Ask people, “I am a…” based on their job positions or industry
• How can you delight your readers? Use a survey to figure out special offers that your readers want. “If we really want to delight you and truly knock your socks off with an incentive to join our mailing list, how should we do it?”

• Testing button colors is lazy.
• Create buttons that will give your readers a decent understanding of what the product is.
• Test your call to action.
• Learn which variation leads to more repeat readers.

Download Hiten’s deck here: http://kiss.ly/kissblueglassla2012