In this presentation, you will see how one academic institution was able to go from traffic and shares to inquiries and starts all thanks to the advancement of their own content marketing strategies and tactics.
Learn about:
- Playing content marketing baseball in order to get the most out of every opportunity and win the long game
- Progressively step-up your content game by moving from blog posts to interactive data visualizations
- Using technology to get more leads out of your content marketing efforts
By the end, you’ll be able to see how it all fits together in order for you to start generating leads of your own.
How to Take Your Content Marketing Efforts from Infancy to Maturity
1. How to Take Your Content
Marketing Efforts from
Infancy to Maturity
GRANT TILUS | COLLEGIS EDUCATION
SMSS Las Vegas 2016 Join the Conversation: #SMSsummit
2. 2
Who Is Grant Tilus?
Copyright Collegis Education, Inc. Proprietary and Confidential.
• Inbound Marketing Manager
• Content Marketing Director
• @GrantTilus
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Sitting Up
No content strategy
No defined goals
No uniform structure/standards
No idea what the readers want
Starting to create content
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Crawling
Content strategy outlined
Quality assurance through peer reviews
Some production structure in place
Starting to learn about optimizing for the audience
Not yet driving any real business value
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Walking
Streamlined process for writing, editing and creative
requests
Focused on answering target audience’s questions
Committed to measurement and analytics
Starting to drive real business value
Leadership buy-in and support for investment
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Running
Improved content differentiation
Imagery
Data
Types of content
Going back to retroactively fix missed opportunities
Kick-start organic rankings with paid social promotions
Buy-in from the entire organization
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Parkour
Content strategy aligns with organizational strategy
Actively engaged in larger content strategy projects
Earning digital authority across the web for highly
competitive terms
Attracting attention externally
Promoting the brand purpose
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4) Focus on Your Purpose
Copyright Collegis Education, Inc. Proprietary and Confidential.
68. 68
Common Content Metrics
Copyright Collegis Education, Inc. Proprietary and Confidential.
Website Traffic
Clicks
SEO Rankings
Time on Page
Comments
Subscriber Growth
Social Shares
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Actual Business Metrics
Copyright Collegis Education, Inc. Proprietary and Confidential.
Website Traffic
Clicks
SEO rankings
Time on Page
Comments
Subscriber Growth
Social Shares
Customer Retention
Loyalty
Brand Awareness
Sales
Customer Evangelism
Lead Generation
Lead Nurturing Upselling
51% of marketers cited measuring content effectiveness as a challenge.
“Content Marketing Institute, “2015 B2C Content Marketing Trends–North America”
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Recap
Copyright Collegis Education, Inc. Proprietary and Confidential.
• Follow a Process
– If you don’t have one, borrow one
• Be Self-Conscious
– Know what works, what doesn’t and what you need
• Act Deliberately
– You must choose, but choose wisely
• Focus on Your Purpose
– Can you prove the ROI?
Slide: “Hey everyone, come and see how good I look.”
Imager: Self portrait
We all know that content is king and were all using it…but
How Would You Rate Your Performance?
How Would Rate Your Content? How are you measuring effectiveness?
What championship content looks like…
The flood of content marketing has raised the bar for getting found and shared.
Some of our content fails.
After you plant the seed, it likes to time develop and mature.
It’s important to understand how you can mature to drive the creation of better content.
It’s Ad hoc, lack structure or standardized process for content development.
Some structure and processes in place. Beginning to manage for quality through editing but quality usually takes a backseat to deadlines.
Committed to a uniform process and standards with a vision for your content.
Commitment to planning, quality assurance, hiring, training and budget even if leaders change. Better storytelling, design and ROI.
The team acknowledges, embraces, and fosters content measurements and analytics. Drives content innovation. And takes risks. Content strategy is closely aligned to the corporation’s business strategy. Actively involved in promoting the benefits of quality content throughout the organization.
How we went from Sitting to Parkour for a client in the higher education space.
Early adopters when the bar for content was lower than it is today.
Sitting Up: Writing blogs with no clear direction
Pinterest = >300 total visits in 4 years. Not optimized for long-term success.
Choose pricing = 500 total visits IN 4 YEARS!
Crawling: Starting to make some moves in the right direction.
Finance > 300 visits in 3 years
Accounting > 500 visits in 3 years
Walking: Starting to gain some momentum.
Business degree = 1,000 visitors in 3 years. Earned 4 total conversions. (Assisted or direct conversions)
HR Salaries < 8,000 visitors in 3 years. Earned 2 total conversions.
Running: Confident in our abilities.
10 Facts > 20,000 visits with 1,000+ assisted and direct conversions
Career Guides > Created one, proved the model and then create 5 more for each product area. 2000+ downloads each year. Roughly 5-10% of which end up inquiring.
Parkour: Let’s doing something crazy.
What Career Should I Choose > 150,000+ visits in 2 years. 33 assisted and direct conversions.
Self Learning > 2,700 visits in the past year. 14 Assisted and Direct conversion. While also driving awareness for a major initiative.
Process is critical for sticking to develop consistency that will allow you to build upon and continue to level up your content marketing efforts.
Trello is a collaboration tool that organizes your projects into boards. In one glance it tells you what's being worked on, who's working on what, and where something is in a process.
It provides structure
It makes planning and production process simple.
It helps you stay organized
These are all key questions to answer during the planning stage.
Trello Makes the Content Production Process Efficient
Repeat the process. Find areas to optimize it and adjust accordingly.
Being aware of what works, testing new ideas (creating something unique and different from what is already out there) and understanding how to repeat success. Def: intensely aware of oneself
Review the opportunity in the keyword, assess the competitive metrics, review the competitions content, creating something better.
Testing new content concepts. Some work, some don’t.
Finance vs. Accounting > 160,000 visits in 3 years with 87 assisted or direct inquiries
Proven success in the type of content. Now spread the idea across topics.
Finance vs. Accounting > 160,000 visits in 3 years with 87 assisted or direct inquiries
Robert Half is free data, same with BLS, Census, etc.
Burning Glass is a paid tool that only certain organization are utilizing. Besides us I’ve only seen it being used by the NYTimes
Google Consumer Survey and HARO
Know when you’re not the expert and get someone with authority.
We need to act deliberately because resources are limited. The most limited resource is TIME.
It’s about making deliberate choices in your content production planning. Everyone wants to hit homeruns but it takes time to evolve.
Content that is easiest to produce on a consistent basis. Typically less competitive but are critical pieces of content for your audience. A great place for test new ideas for different content types and subjects.
Build tools to scale the creation of this type of content. We can now use the templates to develop as many different types of maps or quizzes that we want.
Special projects that require lots of planning, buy-in and investment. Received over 1,000,000 views in 2 years and hundreds of assisted and direct conversions.
Be deliberate helps you make important production decisions to continue to drive improvements.
Remember the bigger picture of what your trying to accomplish.
What Are You Measuring? How often are you setting goals and measuring against them? The only way to track progress is through measurement. It’s important to use KPIs to toward your actual business goals.
Leaders are focus on the business goals. Business goals = real value to the business. Learn how your content provide real business value and you’ll be better able to show leadership the ROI so you can get more resources.
Don’t rely on others to track your progress. Track yourself, drive value and prove it.
The big picture goal of the blog is to generate leads. We tested adding the CTA box in the content stream on blog articles in stead of just on the right hand bar and it increased our eBook downloads by almost 50%! Nice ROI.
It doesn’t matter where you are now in terms of content marketing maturity. If you have a good process, remain conscious of what your doing, act deliberately and focus on your purpose you’ll mature and get better results.
Don’t be ashamed of where your coming from or where you are now. We’re All in Different Places from different places. It’s about where you want to be.