Why You Need a Content Marketing Agency in 2017

This post was originally published on the RelationEdge blog on September 29th, 2017.

The RelationEdge blog was deactivated in February 2020.

Does content marketing really work? Which tactics make it more successful? Is paid content promotion worth it?

To find the answers to these content marketing questions and more, we took a look at two content marketing studies from this year – Zazzle’s State of Content Marketing 2017 study and a collaborative study from the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs: B2B Content Marketing: 2017 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends — North America. Based on responses from thousands of marketers, these studies show what’s working and what’s not when it comes to content marketing.

If you’re a marketer or business leader looking for insight why you should consider hiring a content marketing agency, read on.

Insight 1: Content Marketing Works

Content marketing has earned its place at the marketing table. According to Zazzle, nearly 80% of marketers say content marketing is effective. The study from the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs shows the same result, with 75% of respondents saying content marketing increases audience engagement, 72% saying it increases leads, and 57% saying it increases sales.

This is great news on a few fronts. Marketers understand the value of content marketing, and they see its value beyond merely increasing web traffic. According to Zazzle, marketers are measuring the success of content marketing in terms of brand awareness (85%), engagement (83%), improved search engine visibility (71%), lead generation (70%) and more.  

Insight 2: Content Marketing Is Getting a Bigger Piece of the Pie

Now that content marketing is at the table, it’s taking a bigger piece of the marketing pie.

On average, Zazzle survey respondents spent 23% of their marketing budgets on content marketing. Not one respondent expected to invest less in content marketing in the upcoming year—in fact, 70% expected to invest more in content marketing in 2017.

Similarly, the CMI study found respondents spent an average of 29% of their marketing budgets on content marketing. A more modest 39% expected their investment in content marketing to rise in the next 12 months, while 45% thought it would remain the same.

It’s hard to explain the large discrepancy in how many respondents said their content marketing budget would increase. It may have to do with geographic location—Zazzle’s survey was conducted in the UK, while the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs surveyed North America.    

Insight 3: Many Brands Face Content Creation Challenges

Even understanding the importance of content marketing, and investing significantly in it, many brands find it a challenge to produce content. Of Zazzle respondents, 65% said they find it a challenge to produce engaging content, and 60% say they can’t produce content consistently. Similarly, almost 50% of respondents to the CMI and MarketingProfs survey said they had challenges creating content.

This is a bit of a puzzle: if brands recognize the importance and effectiveness of content marketing, why are they struggling to produce it?

Well, more than half of the respondents to the Content Marketing Institute worked on a small or one-person marketing team which served the entire organization. It’s no surprise a one-person shop would struggle to keep up with content creation. Sure enough, of those brands whose content marketing success had stagnated from the previous year, more than half (52%) said that they didn’t have enough time for content marketing.

On the other hand, 53% of those whose content marketing was more successful than the previous year said that spending more time on it was a factor in making it more successful.

Even for a one-person shop, it doesn’t have to be this way. Small marketing departments should consider asking for outside help if they’re struggling to create content. It doesn’t have to blow the budget, either — something as small as four standout whitepapers can make a huge impact.  

Insight 4: Too Few Content Marketers Know Best Practices

Only 6% of marketers are clear on best content marketing practices, according to Zazzle. Yikes! This shows a huge knowledge gap to overcome. There are tons of free resources out there for your team to brush up on everything content marketing-related, and conferences and webinars provide learning opportunities too.

If you’re among the 94% who doesn’t feel confident about content marketing best practices, take action to change that now. Given the importance of content marketing in increasing leads and sales, your business could depend on it.

Keeping Audiences in Mind When Developing Content Strategy

This was originally published on the RelationEdge blog on July 11th, 2017.

The RelationEdge blog was deactivated in February, 2020.

There’s a lot to consider when developing a content strategy. Topics. Timing. Channels. Keywords. Approval process and workflow.

But the first step to an effective content strategy is identifying your audiences. Your entire content strategy flows from your audience. It’s impossible to identify and address the needs of your clientele without knowing first who they are, and what drives them.

The next time you sit down and develop your content strategy, take a close look at who your audience is, and why they should be interested in the content you’re developing. You may think you’re meeting their needs with your current content strategy — but after a deeper dive, you could come to realize that there’s someone you’re missing.

Develop Customer Personas

For your content strategy to resonate with your audience, you must have a clear idea of who your audience is. Customer personas make your audience real by sketching out important characteristics such as age, gender, location, hobbies, goals and values.

If you haven’t already developed customer personas, now is the time to do it. We have a step-by-step guide to take you from start to finish of developing clear, useful customer personas.

This may seem like a strange exercise, but it’s an important one. When you develop personas, you deepen your understanding of how your customer thinks. This understanding is invaluable when producing content that resonates with them.

Consider how your content will differ for a 40-60-year-old male golf enthusiast and a 24-35-year-old female music lover. The type and tone of content will be entirely different, and that’s why it’s important to develop customer personas and clearly identify your audience.

Consider Where Your Audience Is in Their Journey

When you’ve identified your audience, you can consider where they are in the buyer’s journey. Are they at the awareness stage, where they are getting to know your company and its products? Are they at the stage where they are considering purchasing your products? Or are they at the decision stage, where they want to become a customer?

These are important questions which determine the kind of content you need to include in your content strategy. If you’re looking to speak to the part of your audience in the awareness stage, it may make sense to focus on your blog and social media to get the word out about your company. If your audience is in the consideration stage, it may be a better idea to develop white papers, case studies and testimonials that showcase how your company and its products stand out from the competition.

Whatever stage your audience is at, your content strategy needs to guide them through the buyer’s journey to take them through to the final step where you close the sale.

Create a Content Segmentation Grid for Multiple Audiences

During the first step of developing content personas, your company probably had numerous personas representing multiple audiences. A content strategy alone won’t tell you enough to know whether your content is effectively reaching each audience.

For that reason, it’s worthwhile to create a content segmentation grid. A content segmentation grid maps your personas against the stages of the buyer’s journey to ensure you have content that speaks to each of your audiences.

Your content segmentation grid will look something like this:

Awareness stageConsideration stagePurchasing stage

Joe, 45-year-old golf enthusiastBlog post: using sunscreen on the fairwayCase study showing how your sunscreen doesn’t run in outdoor settings.Newsletter with special discount offerShannon, 27-year-old music loverBlog post: using our sunscreen at outdoor concertsInterview: musician on their scare with skin cancer and why they use our sunscreenNewsletter with special discount offer

Even in cases where the type of content is the same (such as the newsletter in the purchasing stage), this grid will remind you that the content itself should differ. Different tones and different offers will appeal to different audiences.
By conducting this exercise, you will see if your content marketing is too light or too heavy on a particular stage or a particular audience.

Appeal to Emotions

When you’re developing content for your company, you tend to want to tell your audience about the features that makes it special. This creates a content strategy based solely on communicating facts and rationale. While that may not seem like a bad angle to take, it probably won’t be as successful as using emotions.

Emotions are one of the most effective ways to connect with people, hold their attention, and build lasting relationships. Being able to affect your audience emotionally is what will make your content more engaging and your company more special. That means it’s not just your business benefits your content strategy should be focused on – it’s your emotional benefits, too.

Try to keep in mind the emotions associated with the different interests, values, and goals of your customer personas, as well as the emotions experienced along the buyer’s journey. That way you can create a content strategy to trigger the right feelings, at the right time, for the right audience.

Keeping different audiences in mind will help you develop a better, more robust marketing strategy to appeal to all your markets. Don’t neglect this important first step.

Vulnerability and Transparency as Content Strategy

Originally published on the RelationEdge blog, September 19th, 2016.

The RelationEdge blog was deactivated in February, 2020.

A few weeks ago, I spent a morning at a lecture for the creative community in San Diego. The guest speaker was Scott Lewis, the Editor-in-Chief of the Voice of San Diego, a non-profit local news organization.[1] The theme of the lecture was love, but Scott took an interesting approach to the theme; I thought I was in for a lecture about romance, but Scott surprised me, instead focusing on the importance of vulnerability, transparency, and opening-up to tell our stories.

According to Scott, vulnerability is more than feeling weak or feeling exposed; it’s about being transparent and open about who you are, what your goals are, and what you want from the world. Vulnerability in the telling of stories — news stories, content, or even conversations – is opening yourself up and being clear about what you are aiming for, why you’re telling each story, and what you want to receive from your conversations.

As I listened to this lecture, I realized that these goals of transparency and vulnerability could apply equally well when it comes to content marketing, and the benefits of creating a narrative about the most vulnerable aspects of your business. In a world of inauthentic marketing and advertising, being authentic and transparent in your content marketing is a way to stand out and build established relationships with your audience.

Vulnerability, Transparency, and Content Marketing

Good content involves readers and makes them interested in your company and your story. An engaged customer or prospect is more likely to think of and trust your brand when they are ready to make a purchase. This is one of the main goals of content marketing.

But often, when companies are developing a content marketing strategy, they focus on telling only the positive stories, the ones that place them in a good light. This makes sense, as you’re more likely to share things that show your company as a positive entity, and sharing positive news about your company doesn’t make you vulnerable – you aren’t likely to lose a sale if you share a feel-good story about your last volunteer outing, or your latest client win.

Do these rosy marketing stories embody the reality of any company? Most likely, no, they do not. A business is a complicated endeavor, with personal relationships, corporate goals, and a lot of behind the scenes mechanisms. Companies face real consequences if they release information that is proprietary, or tell stories that paints them in a negative light. Despite these realities, there are benefits to being transparent about your company in your content strategy. When transparent content marketing is a goal, there can be some terrific results. Transparency can be used as a way to break through the inauthenticity of traditional marketing, and build a community of like-minded people that see your company as a leader. With all of these potential benefits, you may want to weigh the risks, look at your content strategy and ask – is it time to become more vulnerable?

Transparency as Content Strategy

A number of companies have made radical transparency a large part of developing their content strategy and sharing their brand story. Companies like Buffer, Zapier, and Elite SEM have built part of their brand and content strategy around being transparent, and sharing the losses as well as the wins.

For example, Buffer shares the experience of working in a rapidly scaling company in their Open blog, which they describe as: “Our journey to great productivity, more transparency and a happier work culture.” Open is focused on what it’s like to run a startup, how they have developed their benefit plans, their salary formula, and even features a monthly financial report that shares revenue from the last month. It’s transparent – radically so – and it has been a huge benefit for the Buffer brand in building authority and authenticity with their customer base.

Buffer has also documented how being transparent has been a boon for their business. In “The Transparency Movement: What It Is, Why It’s Important and How to Get Involved,” Buffer tracked their financial performance and found that their transparent approach to their content coincided with a change in their revenue trajectory – resulting in greater profits over time.

Can we conclusively say that the transparent nature of Buffer’s blog solely influenced their earnings? No, but what we can say is that it did drive attention to the brand, and since they had a strong product offering, they were better positioned to drive revenue.

In “Tough News: We’ve Made 10 Layoffs. How We Got Here, the Financial Details and How We’re Moving Forward” Buffer Founder and CEO Joel Gasciogne took radical transparency as far as it can go, and shared the mistakes the company made that led them to laying off 10 members of their staff. The post holds back nothing, goes into financial errors, management decisions that didn’t go well, and how that ultimately resulted in 10 people losing their jobs. It’s the perfect example of a company being radically transparent with their blog content.

Even in cases where Buffer shared negative news, the news was met with generally positive response (and a lot of media coverage), again positioning them as an industry leader, and making their content instantly engaging and uniquely informative.

Bringing Transparency to Your Content Strategy

The reality is, radical transparency like Buffer’s Open blog is simply not a feasible strategy for most marketing departments. The structure of most companies is not set up to share everyone’s salaries, share monthly financial statements, or even talk about some of the missteps behind the scenes; but this doesn’t mean you can’t make transparency a goal in your content marketing strategy.

Transparency, vulnerability, and truth are ways to build trust with your readers and market your brand as authentic. One of this biggest missteps in content marketing is to be inauthentic; inauthentic content is misleading, and assumes consumers aren’t well informed – and how could you ever expect success when you don’t treat your customers as an informed audience?

One way to avoid this inauthenticity is to be transparent in your content marketing. As an example, one of RelationEdge Digital Agency’s goals is to share expert advice and opinions with high-authority websites and their readers. We have been published on websites like Entrepreneur, Marketing Profs and Tech.co —  relationships we were able to establish by writing articles that shared actionable insights into digital marketing that we learned from our own experience working in the field.

When we first started reaching out with posts we had written, we found that publishers were more interested in what we had to say if we were authentic: when we gave advice without selling a service or our brand, and instead shared information and advice about our industry. When we were authentic in offering advice, we were able to show that we had valuable expertise to share with our community. Instead of telling our readers how great we are, we showed them, by sharing genuine insight, and proving that our company is engaging and informed.

Where to Start

If you have a goal of being more vulnerable in your content strategy, there are few small ways to start.

1.      Reveal Your Source

There is no harm in sharing where you gleaned your information – even when you are trying to position yourself as an expert in your industry. Experts are not only intelligent, but they are also well-informed. Being well-informed involves reading about the experiences and expertise of other people in your industry, and even outside your industry. Sharing an idea without sharing how you came to it is inauthentic, and poor practice as a writer.

2.      Tell People Who You Are

When you write a blog post, always include an author bio so people can find out who you are, and what makes you a trusted authority to speak about your topic.

3.      Make Interesting Stories Your Goal

Instead of sharing only positive news, consider sharing lessons you’ve learned by making mistakes, and (here’s the key) how you fixed these mistakes. Hearing what went wrong and how someone worked to fix it will always be more interesting than hearing about a win without the background. This will make you uncomfortable, and even vulnerable in some cases, but it will result in better content that resonates with readers.

4.      Be Transparent and Develop Content Around It

This is an advanced goal, but if you have buy-in from your team, think about developing content focused on making your strategy more transparent. Sharing your goals, how you are working towards them, and what you have learned is a great way to build authentic, actionable content that people are interested in reading. Make vulnerability a goal, work towards it, and measure the results.

[1] – Creative Mornings is a lecture series held in over 150 cities across the world, where creative people gather to hear a lecture from a community member about a chosen theme. (These events are held once a month and are a great way to meet other people in the creative community in your city – you should check them out!)

7 Steps to Take When Creating a Content Calendar

Originally published on the RelationEdge blog, August 29th, 2015

The RelationEdge blog was deactivated in February, 2020

If you write for or maintain a blog, you’ll know that one of the hardest parts of your job is to come up with consistent, engaging content. Posting regularly to a blog is one of the best ways to market your business and grow a community around what you do. In fact, companies who regularly post to a blog receive 97% more links to their websites than those who don’t. Those who update regularly over a long period of time see more results as well — blogs that have over 51 posts see an increase of 53% traffic, blogs with over 100 posts see an increase of 3x that traffic, and blogs with over 200 posts see 4.5x the traffic — posting frequently is key when you decide to host a blog on your website.

With that in mind, what’s the best way to make sure that your blog is maintained with engaging and informative content? A resource that we have found essential is a content or editorial calendar. A content calendar summarizes the strategy for blog content; outlining major themes, topics and resources for your blog. A plan of 1 – 6 months helps to create a long term strategy for what your blog content will be, and can be used to guide your efforts and plan how you will use your resources. And face it; having a written plan with due dates and schedules is one of the best ways to keep you accountable.

Since we’ve convinced you that a content calendar is the way to go, here are 7 steps that you can follow to build a content calendar of your own!

Step 1: Determine How Many Posts You Will Write

Before you start to develop a strategy around topics or themes, you need to know how many posts you are planning to write, and how often you will be posting. Hubspot recommends that bloggers try to post over 16 posts per month (4x per week), but for many companies, that schedule can be unrealistic. If you’re just starting a blog or just starting to post regularly to your blog, 1x per week is a great goal, though statistics show that at 10-11 posts per month is when you will start seeing the most traffic results from your efforts. If you have the resources, aim for 3-5 posts per week. If not, make sure you set a reasonable goal. Posting once a month is better than not posting at all, after all!

When determining how many posts you will be producing, don’t forget to consider creating different kinds of content such as: whitepapers, infographics, or ebooks. These engaging and informative types of content are read and shared more often than blog posts, and sites that feature infographics have 12% faster traffic growth than those who don’t. Keep in mind how many of your resources will be taken up by these types of content — infographics, ebooks and whitepapers are often longer, involve more research, and require graphic design assistance that blog posts do not.

Step 2: Determine Where Your Content Is Going

The next step of building a content calendar is to decide where the completed content is going to end up. Likely, much of the content that you produce will be going to your own blog, but you should also plan to contribute some of those posts as guest posts to important blogs and websites in your community. Contributing guest posts is a great way to build your brand’s authority, equity, and send signals to search engines and communities about your contribution to the web. Acting as a thought leader in your industry is a great way to build trust and respect with potential clients as well.

Determining where your posts will end up will help you with the voice and approach to each topic – after all, you would write differently for your own community than you would for someone else’s. Once you have determined a possible placement for a guest blog, be sure to make notations about their style guidelines and length requirements to your content calendar so you can minimize the number of revisions you will need to do to meet their standards.

Step 3: Develop a Theme

Now that you know how many posts you want to write and where you will be posting them, you can start developing content topics! One of the best ways to do this is to develop themes – a broad theme can help to guide writers and topic choices, and also create a comprehensive experience for your readers. For best results, plan out your themes for a few weeks or months at a time. This will help you to appear as an expert on your chosen topic areas (and after researching and writing multiple blog posts on a topic, you will become an expert!) and will also make it easy to refer to earlier blog posts as resources. You can also build on previous posts and create a series of posts, which can then be repurposed into a whitepaper or ebook — the possibilities are endless!

Step 4: Pick Individual Topics

Step four is to pick the individual topics for each blog post or type of content. Using the themes you chose earlier, break each theme down into individual posts, each covering a part of that theme. Think about how blog posts can refer to each other and how they can work together. Have some fun with topics too —throw in a quiz or an anecdotal story to add some personality to your blog and drive engagement.

You can also use this step to develop your headlines. Copyblogger has found that on average 8 out of 10 readers will read your headline, but only 2 of 10 will read the rest. Writing a great, engaging headline is a large part of having a successful blog, so take your time here and write headlines that will intrigue and interest your readers.

Step 5: Expand Your Scope

Since you don’t write the blog posts in your content calendar right away, you should write a brief description about what you want each post to be about before you forget. Include in this description the goal of each post, the questions that you will answer, and any specific notes about the content that you will need to remember later. Don’t count on just your memory; the more information you add here, the easier it will be for you to write these posts later.

Step 6: Resources

This step is quick, but vastly important — add links in your content calendar to articles, blog posts, and books that you will use when researching each blog post. Again, this will make it as easy as possible to start each blog post when it’s time to write it, and you won’t spend valuable time trying to find that one resource that you remember from weeks ago. Also, if there is more than one person writing for your blog, including resources will make it easier for other writers to craft the blog post you were envisioning and meet your expectations.

Step 7: The Most Important Step of All – Approval

If you write and maintain your own blog alone, you can skip this step, but if anyone else reviews and approves your blog posts, this is the most important step of all — gaining approval. There’s not much worse than spending hours of effort on writing a blog post about a certain topic only to find out that your manager doesn’t like the topic, and wants you to write something else. Avoid this by going through your finalized content calendar with anyone that has a say over what goes on your blog. Make sure that everyone has come to a consensus with what blog posts should be about before you start to work on them.

If you follow these seven steps, you should be well on your way to maintaining a frequently updated blog with interesting and engaging content! Do you use a content or editorial calendar when you write for your blog? How do you organize yours?

You Can’t Edit Your Own Writing: But Here Are 5 Tips That Will Help You Try

Originally published on the RelationEdge blog, September 24th 2015

The RelationEdge blog was deactivated in February, 2020

Anyone who has worked tirelessly on a writing project and has found a typo despite multiple edits, knows the ultimate frustration of writing: finding your own mistakes. This isn’t unique to just one writer, all of us have felt our stomachs sink just after we press send on the email; “Did I really just type ho instead of how? How did I miss that?”

The good news is that it’s not your fault. Well, not your conscious brain’s fault, at least. Research has shown that familiarity with what you’re editing makes it harder to see errors, and easier for you to miss obvious mistakes while editing. It turns out that part of being a good editor is unfamiliarity with what you’re editing—which is bad news for the writer that just finished a draft and needs to get it out the door right away. As novelist Zadie Smith said in her essay That Crafty Feeling “The secret to editing your work is simple: you need to become its reader instead of its writer.” With this in mind, how do you properly edit your own work? How can you change yourself from the writer, to the reader?

Your Brain Is Working Against You

The old adage “familiarity breeds contempt” is fairly accurate when it comes to editing your own work. The more familiar you are with what you’re reading, the more difficult it is to see typos, awkward phrasing, or any other mistakes. Your brain works against your goals, filling in the blanks and glossing over errors in your writing—it knows what you are trying to say, and will read what’s written as if it is saying what you want, whether it’s written that way or not. Psychologist Tom Stafford describes this phenomenon quite well in an article for WIRED: “We don’t catch every detail, we’re not like computers or NSA databases… Rather, we take in sensory information and combine it with what we expect, and we extract meaning.”

An article in the Journal of Research in Reading confirmed what many writers know through experience: familiarity with a text has a negative impact on detecting errors. This is bad news for writers, as no one is more familiar with what you’ve written than you yourself, making you the worst person possible to detect and fix errors in your own work.

In an ideal world, every writer would have an editor at their beck and call, available to review everything they’ve written before it’s published; but we all know that this is far from reality. Proofreading well means you have to trick your brain into thinking it is reading something for the first time. If the secret to editing is becoming the reader instead of the writer, what can you do to help trick your brain and edit your own work properly?

5 Tips for Editing Your Own Work

The overall key to editing your own work is to make what you’ve written look unfamiliar to you, or to approach it differently than how you wrote it – this will make your brain work harder to understand what was written, and make it more likely for you to see mistakes.

Print It Out

Reading off of a hard copy changes the way type looks and gives your brain more of a tactile interaction with what you’ve written. Something as simple as running your finger over the text while you read it can effectively change the way your brain interprets what you’re reading, and can be key to tricking your brain into thinking it’s reading what you’ve written for the first time.

Read It Out Loud

Using your voice changes the parts of the brain that process what you’ve written, and will make awkward phrasing and difficult sentences more apparent. An added benefit is that reading what you’ve written out loud will help you to see how the text flows: chances are, if what you’ve written doesn’t sound good out loud, it won’t read well on paper.

Read It Backwards

Starting from the last sentence of your work, read what you’ve written backwards. This doesn’t mean reading each individual sentence backwards word by word, but instead reading each sentence individually, out of context. The removal of context allows you to focus on each individual sentence, helping you see mistakes, and making your brain work harder to fill in the blanks.

Step Away

Sometimes taking a day or two away is the best way to see problems with what you’ve written. If time allows, give yourself a few days in-between writing something and editing it. Even better, work on something else – the change in pace will reset your brain and help you see editing mistakes easier.

Use an Editing Tool

If you’re pressed for time, try using a tool like Grammarly or Hemingway Editor to look over your work. These tools aren’t subjective, but they are very effective at pointing out when you can replace a complicated word for a simpler version, or when you’re using the passive voice (my personal vice).

Stop Your Brain From Sabotaging Your Writing

Ultimately, the best way to get results from your writing is to have someone else look at it. Whether this is a professional editor, or even just a peer, the perspective that a new set of eyes can bring to your writing will improve what you’re trying to say, and reduce the number of mistakes. Though we encourage you to ask for assistance when it comes to editing, these tips will help you tidy up your work if using an editor isn’t an option.