This document discusses various content marketing tactics and strategies. It provides examples of tactics used by a content marketing agency for different clients. These include events link building, reporter outreach, link bait, ego bait, news jacking, definitive content, and more. For each tactic, it summarizes the results in terms of pageviews, social shares, links gained, and other metrics. The overall document serves as a case study on how a full content marketing approach can be implemented for clients across different industries.
18. @DavidMChris
Paid: SEO increased quality score. Lower CPC = more traffic
Referral: Content Marketing built links that drove traffic
Social: Social media following grew, website content shared
Organic: SEO, links & social engagement led to ranking higher
Direct: Stronger online presence resulted in more direct traffic
Work Together
25. @DavidMChris
Timeframe: 2 Months
Client: Local Charity
Time: 5 Hours
Events Link Building Pageviews
14
T on P
00:15
Fol.
Link Dom
11
Nofol.
Link Dom
6
Results
James Young
@DavidMChris
33. @DavidMChris
Timeframe: 1 Year
Client: Vet
Time: 21 Hours
@alex_broseph
Reporter Outreach Pageviews
20
T on P
00:09
Fol.
Link Dom
7
Results
@DavidMChris
41. @DavidMChris
Title: Wayman Tisdale &
Thunder Practice Facility
Client: Hospital
Time: 41 Hours
@alex_broseph
Link Bait Pageviews
446
T on P
01:25
Fol.
Link Dom
10
Results
@DavidMChris
46. @DavidMChris
Title: 25 Men Every Man of
Style Should Follow
Client: Tailor
Time: 7.25 Hours
@thedanholmes
Ego Bait
Results
Pageviews
375
T on P
03:28
Shares
94
Reach
12,390
Fol.
Link Dom
1
Social
81
@DavidMChris
50. @DavidMChris
Title: Ozcar
Client: University
Time: 80 Hours
@The_Atom_Ray
News Jacking
Social
2
Pageviews
540
T on P
02:07
Shares
414
Fol.
Link Dom
6
Nofol.
Link Dom
4
Reach
50,824
Results
Social
2
@DavidMChris
69. @DavidMChris
Title: Ryan Drake - Drinking
Games for One
Client: Digital Conference
Time: 5 Hours
@DavidMChris
Ego Bait Pageviews
331
T on P
03:37
Shares
73
Reach
24,933
Results
Conversions
6
@DavidMChris
73. @DavidMChris
Title: Royce Young Video
Client: Digital Conference
Time: 4 Hours
@DavidMChris
Ego Bait Pageviews
394
T on P
05:03
Shares
2
Results
Fol.
Link Dom
2
@DavidMChris
77. @DavidMChris
Client: Digital Conference
Time: 30 minutes
@DavidMChris
Syphoning Search Pageviews
686
T on P
02:43
Results
Fol.
Link Dom
1
Conversions
1
Social
27
Email
42
@DavidMChris
79. @DavidMChris
Title: Confluence conference
Client: BigWing Interactive
Timeframe: 2 years
Time: 320 Hours
Events Link Building Pageviews
21,815
T on P
02:21
Shares
3,865
Fol.
Link Dom
87
Nofol.
Link Dom
26
Reach
1m+
Social
756
Results
Clients: 3
Tickets: 300
Hires: 2
@DavidMChris
Email
240
@DavidMChris
83. @DavidMChris
- Foster a Community of Content Creators
- Identify SEO Opportunities
- Create Content to Rank
- More Eyeballs = More Links
- Sell Advertising Against Content
The Community (about.com)
84. @DavidMChris
- Immerse in Industry Content
- Curate the Space
- Blog to Knowledge Gaps
- Create Definitive Content
- Engage Thought Leaders
- Convert Visitors to Users
(7.5 visits before conversion)
The Curator (moz.com)
85. @DavidMChris
- Create Controversial Content
- Adhere to a Regular Editorial Calendar
- Ego Bait Others (Monday Morning Tweets)
- Agro Bait Others (Local Celebs & Politicians)
- Build a Social Following
- Be Consistent & Create Loyal Readers
- Sell Advertising
The Provocateur (thelostogle.com)
86. @DavidMChris
- Identify Friends/Influencers
- Build Relationships
- Create Content of Mutual Benefit
- Distribute Together
- Secure Permission Assets (Signups)
- Continue the Conversation
- Convert Permission to Sales
The Collaborator (hubspot.com)
87. @DavidMChris
- Create Content Others Want
- Stand Out in your Space
- Grow Social Following & Encourage Sharing
- Establish Authority on a Topic
- Reach Other People’s Audiences (Outreach)
- Diversify into Other Media (Books/TV)
The Celebrity (thepioneerwoman.com)
The answer is to build assets that people want to link to and then build links to those instead.
This is me and my career path from journalism (where I learned about content), through audience development (picking up social media skills) through SEO and link building (learning search and outreach) to helping to build a full service digital marketing agency – BigWing Interactive – and pulling all of those inbound marketing disciplines together into our content marketing product.
The biggest misconception about content marketing is that it is just about creating content. I believe that content marketers should create their own content, promote it, grow an audience, evaluate the reception of their content and adjust their behavior accordingly in a virtuous circle where they continue to get better results over time.
But having clients see exactly what you’ve been up to every month meant we had to align our activities with their marketing goals.
We have our content marketers ask themselves the following two questions at the planning stage of every piece of content.
1) What is the goal of this content. And there are just five permissible goals.
Conversions, permission assets (like email signups), Qualified Traffic, Social Engagement and Relevant Links.
A measure of whether these are truly “relevant” links, “qualified” traffic and “engaged” social activity is whether there’s a possibility for the traffic they drive to actually convert.
The second questions is “What is the promotion plan?”
It’s not enough to just create great content.
We need our content marketers to leverage as many inbound marketing tactics as possible. I like to group these inbound marketing tactics in four disciplines.
Content – often a blog posts, landing page, infographic or video.
Social – Posting, curating, growing an audience
Search - All the things we think of as SEO
And Outreach – the leg work of getting others involved.
Some people say Content Marketing is synonymous with Inbound Marketing, some say it’s a subset.
Here’s what I think.
A traditional journalist is all about the content. They hit publish and forget it – the audience is assumed.
Other functions lean on their own blend of inbound tactics.
To be effective content marketers need great content chops, and abilities in search, social and outreach. The broader and deeper their grasp of all of inbound marketing tactics, the better able they will be to promote their content.
There’s a particular spark that’s necessary to be a successful content marketer.
It’s the understanding that the audience you own (the 1000 people who read your blog and 10,000 facebook friends) is only a tiny subset of your potential customers, and that to grow that audience you need to reach other desirable audiences, and that an audience is desirable to the degree that it includes your potential customers.
It’s the understanding that the audience you own (the 1000 people who read your blog and 10,000 facebook friends) is only a tiny subset of your potential customers, and that to grow that audience you need to reach other desirable audiences, and that an audience is desirable to the degree that it includes your potential customers.
It’s the understanding that the audience you own (the 1000 people who read your blog and 10,000 facebook friends) is only a tiny subset of your potential customers, and that to grow that audience you need to reach other desirable audiences, and that an audience is desirable to the degree that it includes your potential customers.
So why are we even still talking about link building?
Well the fact remains that a strong link profile is still essential for ranking well.
And that 39% of our client’s conversions come from Organic Search, and an additional 23% come from paid search.
When it comes time to buy, customers search for what they want – they click on the paid and organic results, and they buy.
So attaining relevant links should be one of your content marketing goals.
This is a visualization of the internet and how all of the content is interlinked. Trip advisor is close to the center in the ‘vacations’ neighborhood of content because so many other websites link to its content.
Unforgettable Honeymoons dot com is out on the fringes of the ‘vacations’ neighborhood of websites because very few other websites link to it.
A website like Wikipedia would be right in the middle. Linked to from everywhere.
There are also such things as “bad neighborhoods”. Places like pornographic websites, or websites that only exist to send links to other websites and try to manipulate Google into thinking other websites are more important than they in fact are.
The game is up for these bad neighborhoods because Google has gotten amazingly good at sniffing them out and penalizing them by taking them out of the rankings. Beware – if your website gets too many links from websites in bad neighborhoods, your website could be removed from Google.
So it’s a popularity contest.
So I’m going to use that framework for all of the example tactics I have for you. And I’m going to present them to you in the order that they move from talking to an irrelevant or disengaged audience, to talking to a highly desirable, or fully engaged audience of your potential customers.
So this is pretty much a pure link building tactic.
You just need to hold an event and building a landing page for that event on your website.
This is NewView Oklahoma, a charity for the blind in Oklahoma City. They don’t do a lot, but they do have regular tours.
There are usually about 20 events listing websites in most reasonable sized markets, and by going out there and listing their event on all of them we were able to build a link every 18 minutes. The problem with these events links is that the high authority national websites only give nofollow links, through which no authority passes, and in the smaller local event directories the event listings disappear once the date of the event passes.
So in 5 hours James Young generated 11 followed linking domains and 6 nofollowed linking domains. But look at the traffic numbers. Only 14 page views and a measly 15 seconds time on page for the visitors. There’s no real interest in this event, and no real advantage to the customer to building these links other than their potential to help them rank higher for other keywords.
In my mind that qualifies this as a pure “link building” exercise.
And I’d like to take a moment to compare that with a completely different way of going about events link building.
“Reporter Outreach” is basically a PR exercise.
We use HARO – a free service that puts you in touch with reporters looking for sources, and Profnet a similar service that costs $3,000 a year.
And we’ve managed to massively increase our success with reporter outreach by a few tweaks.
We build our sources their own profile page on their website that really sells them as an authority.
Then we watch HARO for requests that re-occur and we blog about those topics.
And in our email outreach we let the journalist know that yes
We’ve already written about this topic and they can feel free to take quotes from our blog post.
That they can validate their source with this profile page and use their photo
And that this source has previously been quoted in the Associated Press
Over the course of a year we answered 41 reporter requests for this client and in nearly half of them the reporter quoted our client as a source.
We then do another round of outreach to secure the link – and we’ve found that publications are much more likely to want to link to the source’s bio page than to the homepage of the website.
We’re building some strong and relevant links to this client in this way.
This is Alex Joseph – give him a shout out – he’s the master of outreach.
But again how motivated are people to actually click on these links and visit our customer’s website. Not very.
The traffic that comes from mentions of your brand tends to be more engaged.
We’re not having a lot of luck with Talkwalker or Google Alerts any more so we use a search query like this.
That’s a search for the brand name, but excluding the brands website from the results. And If you set yourself a monthly alert to do this, you can tell Google to show you only the previous month’s pages.
When we did this for INTEGRIS – the largest hospital network in Oklahoma, we found all these mentions for…
A basketball award and the Oklahoma City Thunder’s practice facility – both of which they have naming rights for.
So we built landing pages on their websites for these entities. And we made them as rich and engaging as possible. The awards page has a list of all of the people who have ever won the award.
The practice facility has a ton of information and a video.
Which is actually a whole other tactic – link bait.
We requested 22 links over about 6 months and 45% of those links were granted using this method.
And these were some huge websites – like NBA.com and CBSSports
And you can see that those 10 links are actually driving engaged traffic that is reading the content. Those visitors, and by association the links, are therefore of a much greater value. They might even ultimately convert.
I would argue that links that send engaged visitors to your website are also going to be algorythm update proof indefinitely because they add value to the user.
Ego bait is similar to link bait, except the focus is on people.
You can see this is a more sophisticated tactic, engaging more of the inbound marketing skills and with a potentially greater payoff.
This client makes exquisite custom suits in Washington DC.
We want to get them noticed by fashion bloggers, journalists and influencers…
So we create a post about the 25 men of style you should follow on social media.
We outreached to all 25 and 10 of them promoted the content to their followers and one of them linked from his blog.
By the way, when you’re doing content marketing a good rule of thumb is that you should budget about half of your time to creating the content and half to promoting it. A big mistake people make is spending all their time on creating the content and then leaving the rest up to fate.
Ego Bait allows you to create relationships with the influencers in your space. One of these men of style – who happens to be a style blogger for Esquire – now shares our other content.
That’s 7 hours well spent – not least for the link, the 94 shares and the 81 additional social media followers.
This one’s a little more unusual. Again, it’s quite an advanced tactic using a lot of promotion, but with a big upside.
One of our clients is a university, and one of their alum, Hailey Hilburn, go onto American Idol with her yodeling ventriloquist act. She got through the first round, but the judges voted her puppet off, so we recorded his debut rap single as an independent artist and released it on Youtube.
And then did a bunch of PR outreach to the publications that cover American Idol, getting links from the Hollywood Reporter and Yahoo. We also secured coverage and links from local newspapers, radio stations and blogs, who are always hungry for national
That content took some investment, but the crucial point here is that to make this happen we had to have a trusting relationship and open communication with the client, but I also needed to know the strengths of the content marketer. Adam was going to do a narrative short film, but I new he’d produced rap albums in the past, so I had him do that instead. And it was really successful.
The final example I want to show you we’re finding works better than anything else – we like to call “definitive content”. As you can see, when done right it can use all of the different disciplines and drive all the goals, even the bulls eye - conversions.
One of our clients is a landscaper in Colorado Springs and they also install Christmas lights.
So we decided to create the definitive Christmas lights guide for Colorado Springs.
If you’re going to try to create definitive content ask yourself these questions:
1: Has it already been done?
In this case it had.
2: And can we do it better?
In this case we could.
So here’s the guide, with an interactive map. The green stars are houses that the landscaping company did the lights for. We also featured local coffee shops on the map as hot coco stops and collaborated with them to share the content.
We also asked for suggestions from the Colorado Reddit community, incorporated them, and later shared the finished product with them.
And reached out to 30 homeowners associations, 20 of whom contributed to or shared the guide.
Sounds like a lot of work, but it only took an hour and a half with Mail Merge.
It took off like a rocket on social, getting over 1500 likes, comments and shares.
And their Christmas lights page received 242% more page views than it had last year. And it started ranking higher.
Even the competing content linked to us.
And next we intend to pursue the competing content’s backlinks because there are a ton of great local opportunities there.
From end-to-end this content took Rachel 14 hours, and it drove 3 links, 8000 page views with 3 minutes time on page. But best of all these were local people who were expressing an interest in Christmas lights – a highlt desirable audience – and so it even drove 5 conversions, which paid for the cost of the content marketing many times over.
So props to Rachel – let’s all tweet her and say – “well done”.
This is content marketing – Cheryl is lending me her audience and I’m positioning my marketing message to you about a related conference in Oklahoma City within the context of valuable information.
The complaint I heard most as a link building manager was “nobody wants to link to my website”.
The answer is to build assets that people want to link to and then build links to those instead.