Category: Content Marketing
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Advanced Content Marketing Metrics: Reading Time, Part 1
Today, let’s take a look at a more advanced content marketing metric: reading time. For the written word, like blog posts and large articles, one of the more useful metrics to know is average time on page. How long did someone spend reading our content, and does that match up well with our content? To…
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How to Connect with Audiences Through Content Marketing
Leigh asks, “What is your best advice for building connections with audiences through content marketing?” Make content that’s valuable to them. That’s it. Look, nothing makes a connection to someone else like saying, hey, I made you this thing that’s helpful and useful to you, and I made it thinking about what you need. It’s…
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Solicited Review: Content Inc. Second Edition
The Second Edition of Content Inc. is a fascinating read. If you’re an experienced content marketer, the first five chapters are nothing new; everyone with 5 years or more of content marketing experience should already know and do most of the Content Inc. framework. For newer, more inexperienced marketers, the Content Inc. framework is a…
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How to Think About Conversion Efficiency in Content Marketing
One of the more interesting content marketing metrics that I rarely see in the field is conversion efficiency. There’s some content that simply outperforms other content, but one of the things we forget to include in our normal analysis of content is how much effort, in terms of time and resources, went into the promotion…
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Google Analytics: A Content Marketing Engagement Test
Here’s a content marketing question to start your thinking: what would you assume the relationship is between average time on page and word count? I would assume there would be a linear relationship, right? More words on a page means more time to read, so there should be a linear relationship between these two variables.…
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How to Think About Gating or Not Gating Content
There’s an endless debate in marketing – B2B marketing especially – about whether you should gate content or not. Let’s review some of the arguments for and against. In Favor of Gating Gating content, on the surface, makes logical sense. You as the marketer are providing a trade – information for information. It’s a barter.…
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Are Content Marketing and SEO Worth Trying for a New Entrant?
Brett asks about whether the learning curve for the average new entrant in content marketing is even worth trying. Given the complexity of competition and the likelihood that existing market competitors are more practiced, is it even worth doing? The answer isn’t necessarily easy, and is dependent on your content marketing goals. Are you creating…
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Does Content Length Predict Traffic Generated?
Alexiy asks, “What is your opinion: To maximize success with content, is it best to stay consistent with the length (how many words) and medium (blog vs video) or provide a variety for your audience?” Opinions without data are irrelevant, so let’s look at the data to make this decision. I took a sample of…
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How To Think About Content Marketing Strategy
Stephanie asks, "Which comes first, content or the distribution strategy?" Neither comes first. What comes first is your goal, your objective. If you’re not clear on the objective, then you’ll create content poorly aligned to your goal, and then you’ll distribute content in the wrong places. Goals are everything for marketing, but in any situation…
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Content Strategy and the Marketing Blog
Over the holidays, I looked at two things regarding my personal content strategy. First, I asked you, my community, what format content you’d like more of from me. Your answers were pretty clear: You want more content that’s text, that’s faster to consume. What you don’t want is more rich media to try digesting, and…