Content Marketing Success – The top 3 tips from KISSmetrics, The Sales Lion, & Marketing Experiments

If you perform a search on “content marketing success”, Google comes up with 2 million+ results in about half a second. But of the scores of marketers out there talking about content marketing, only a few are actually qualified to give advice on the subject. Among them are: Sean Work of KISSmetrics, Marcus Sheridan of The Sales Lion, and Paul Cheney of Marketing Experiments.

Being the awesome guys they are, they didn’t hesitate for a second when I reached out and asked them to share some of their knowledge and experience.

So here you go – the top 3 tips for successful content marketing from Sean Work, Marcus Sheridan, and Paul Cheney: 

1. Don’t publish junk. I’ve seen plenty of cases where a site will learn that blogging “keeps the search engines coming back” and helps their “long-tail SEO”. So they try to find ways to source as much incoherent, gibberish laden content that they can find at the cheapest possible price. It just doesn’t work.

2. Yearn for beautiful layout and design. Having great content is one thing, but ugly packaging can really ruin the experience. Ask yourself, would Steve Jobs approve of our “content packaging”? How would he “box” it?

3. Be consistent. If you’ve decided to publish content, you need a regular frequency just to get the momentum you need to find your angle. And after that, you obviously need to be able to maintain course. If you’re involved in an operation where it’s hard to stick to a regular process, consider outsourcing your content marketing.

Bonus tip: Stock photos are getting played out. After seeing the same photos over and over again – they are just “cheesin” up the world. I’m of the opinion that if you can’t find any relevant images that add to the content, just leave it out.

Sean Work is Director of Marketing & Minister of Propaganda at KISSmetrics. For your daily fix of free marketing guides, analytics advice, and optimization tips, check out out blog.KISSmetrics.com or follow Sean via Twitter.

 

1. Take the top 50 questions you get every single day from prospects and clients (via phone, email, face to face, etc.) and write those questions down. Now turn those 50 questions into 50 blog posts and answer them exactly as if you were talking to a customer face to face.

Also, make sure the question is the title of the blog post. The 50 posts will then turn into the foundation and pillars of all your marketing and sales and SEO strategy from that point forward… And just by doing this one thing, you will be in the top 1% of your industry.

2. Don’t be afraid to address any and every possible question a consumer might ask. In other words, if someone asks you to compare yourself against your competition, that’s a blog post you should write. If someone asks you to compare your product X versus another company’s product Y, you should write that article (or produce that video). I see nothing as off limits. Again, if someone is asking it or thinking it, we need to be writing and teaching others about it. That is the essence of a great content marketer.

3. Content is an evergreen. It should be used again and again and again throughout the sales process. The more content a prospect reads, the further down the sales funnel they go, which is why it is a must that we as sales professionals and marketers make sure they are viewing, reading, and consuming out content. I call this process ‘assignment selling‘, but it can work wonders for any sales department when done the right way.

Marcus Sheridan helps business and bloggers dominate their niche through his unique online marketing strategies. Make sure to download his popular and FREE 230-page eBook, Inbound and Content Marketing Made Easy.

1. Before you dump precious time and energy into a content strategy, test different content approaches with a PPC campaign. This way you’ll be able to tell whether your audience will prefer webinars, blog posts, whitepapers, email newsletters, etc.

You can also test different angles and headlines for larger pieces or series of content. I would probably test in Google’s display network before I ran tests in search, because people are already reading content, and they may be more likely to respond to ads offering more of that content rather than a sale.

2. Before you sit down to write anything, think about the value proposition of the individual piece you’re working on. In other words, ask yourself:

“If I am the ideal reader/viewer/listener of this piece of content, why should I read/view/listen to it rather than any of your competitor’s content?”

It’s much easier said than done, but when you have the answer to that question in mind before you start, the writing part goes much faster.

3. Make your content profitable. When we usually think about content marketing, we tend to view it with more of a social media, “give it away for free,” mentality. That’s fine. I’m not proposing that you charge for your content (unless it’s your product).

What I AM proposing is that you measure and track how your content is contributing to your bottom line. For example, if you write a whitepaper you need to know how many leads it produces and what those leads are worth to your business. Everything you produce should be able to justify its existence with profit. If it doesn’t you need to start rethinking your strategy, or just go back to PPC ads tied to landing pages.

Paul Cheney is Junior Editorial Analyst at MarketingExperiments.com. He turns raw research into blog posts and Web Clinics for MarketingExperiments readers. You can get more from Paul on Twitter.

There you go: 9 specific, actionable tips for achieving content marketing success – now it’s time for you to take the next step apply them to your online marketing strategy !

Michael Lykke Aagaard is a self-employed copywriter and self-confessed split test junkie and landing page fanatic. He writes about all things related LPO and online copywriting for higher conversions.

Michael is Danish and hails from wonderful Copenhagen. That’s why the rest of the blog is in Danish – in case you were wondering…

Marketing Experiments recently featured one of Michael’s case studies – check it out here.