Let's face it: content marketing is hard. How should you you structure your team? How often should you create content? How long should it be? How should you distribute and measure it? When should you optimize and do paid promotion? We get these questions (among many, many more) nearly everyday at NewsCred.
Inbound Marekting 2.0 - The Paradigm Shift in Marketing | Axon Garside
How NewsCred does content marketing
1. How NewsCred does
content marketing
What we learned and where we’re going in 2016
Alexa Biale
Brand Marketing Manager
Liam Moroney
Demand Generation Manager
2. @newscred | #ThinkContent
Content is the core of our marketing strategy.
Create content your audience actually wants.
Deliver content the way your audience wants it.
Content marketing success is all about consistency.
Focus on retention just as much as acquisition.
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Agenda
3. @newscred | #ThinkContent
Where we’ve been
In 2014 we realized we needed to
educate the market and connect with
people. So in April 2014 we made
huge shifts in our content strategy.
And the results showed.
4. @newscred | #ThinkContent
From 2014-2015 we saw…
49% unique visitors increase from
increasing our original content production
800% ROI for just one whitepaper (400
leads and 3 opportunities )
And once a client: 41% higher renewal
rate, 33% more likely to be upsold, 24%
higher MRR than average – equaling to
$72M in customer lifetime value
5. @newscred | #ThinkContent
And today…
Marketing drives 40% of
NewsCred’s revenue on a first touch
basis, and influences 100% of deals.
Content marketing is our most cost
efficient channel. For every $1 we
put in, we get $14 out.
8. @newscred | #ThinkContent
Paid vs. Organic Search Traffic Repeat Visitors
Social Shares + LikesSocial Followers
Organic Search Share of Voice
Pageviews
Articles Viewed
Most marketers focus too narrowly on
vanity metrics like “followers” and “views.”
= Hard Metric = Soft Metric
9. But really, they should focus on business goals.
Paid vs. Organic Search Traffic Repeat Visitors
Paid vs. Unbranded Organic Search Traffic Social Shares + Likes
Social Followers Offsite SEO/PR mentions
Organic Search Share of Voice Engaged Time On Site
Engagement RatePageviews
Articles Viewed Important People
Competitor Share of Voice
Brand awareness and brand health
Is your content driving early-stage prospects to you?
How do they feel about you?
Cost per lead by channel
Lifetime Value of customer
Customer Growth
% of Leads Sourced by CM
Customer Retention
Content Journeys
Subscriptions
Site Traffic to NewsCred.com
Leads by channel
Cost per opportunity
Cost per deal
Conversions
Is your content turning
prospects into customers?
Retention
Is your content driving
retention and upsells?
= Hard Metric = Soft Metric
10. @newscred | #ThinkContent
Intent
Behavioral conversions
Action
Subscribes
Leads
Relevance
MQLs
Opps
% pipeline sourced by content marketing
ROI
Deals
Cost/opp (by channel)
Cost/deal (by channel)
For example, when thinking about conversions, we
measure business impact across the entire funnel.
11. @newscred | #ThinkContent
All this requires that you have the right tech stack...
- NewsCred Content Marketing Cloud, marketing automation + CRM
- UTM parameters on our links
- Campaigns for each effort
- Track total cost + MQLs
- Track conversion down the pipeline through deal and upsell
12. @newscred | #ThinkContent
…so that you can inform the rest of your DG strategy.
Leads that have engaged with
content are twice as likely to
accept a meeting with us.
2X 20The average NewsCred prospect
engages with 20 pieces of content
before they become a customer:
2 white papers or slideshares
1 webinar
14 newsletters
4 lead nurturing emails
1 event
14. @newscred | #ThinkContent
I AM
GREAT
Your content strategy should sit at the
intersection of what your brand stands
for and what your audience wants.
Your brand
purpose
What
customers
want
Content
marketing
15. @newscred | #ThinkContent
Stop guessing what to write about. Build a
framework to make the decision process easy.
- Brand pillars
- Tone of voice
- Buyer personas
- Product marketing
- SEO analysis
- Pageview analysis
- Engagement metrics
- Audience analysis
- Content format analysis
Your brand
purpose
What
customers
want
Content
marketing
16. @newscred | #ThinkContent
For example…
Tactical stories & best practices
i.e. How Fortune 500 companies build global content
marketing workflows
Data- driven stories: trends & research
i.e. Infographic: How Consumers Really Use
Snapchat
Exclusive interviews and profile pieces with
CMOs
How Lego builds imaginative content marketing
17. Voice/style
- Piece demonstrates an area of
expertise - reader will view NewsCred
as the go-to source on this topic
- Content is concise yet creative. We
don’t add word count just to hear
ourselves speak – we try to be as tight
in copy as possible, yet demonstrate
our creativity
- Content aligns with NewsCred brand
pillars (irrationally optimistic, rule
breaker, compassionate, against
mediocrity)
Our #1 test: Would I share this with my smartest friend?
Format
- Piece is backed by data and
research
- Piece is a profile of an influential
leader or visionary that will inspire
the reader and change the way
they think
- Content has been optimized for
SEO
- Includes actionable takeaways that
will impact how the reader
behaves after reading
Topic/content
- Content aligns to one of our
6 topic categories (Management,
Inspiration, Industry Leaders,
Measurement, Audience, Strategy)
- Content is unique, and something
that readers could only find on
NewsCred
- Content has a strong POV and
represents an interesting perspective
that will spark new thinking
@newscred | #ThinkContent
21. This story received 20 PR features and over 6K shares!
Top media coverage
AdWeek/Social Times
MarketingProfs
Hubspot
Business Insider
CMO.com
Ragan
Social Media Today
Industry/other
Column Five’s Blog
Dashburst
Visual.ly
WebProNews
Business2Community
Small Biz Trends
MarTech Advisor
Tech Insider
Buzz Plant
DIY Marketers
Digital Information World
Selling Out
Creation Agency Blog
Social media
MarketingProfs (Ann Handley) Tweet
331K followers + 18 RTs / 26 favorites
MarketingProfs (Ann Handley) Tweet again
331K followers + 23 RTs / 22 favorites
Dashburst Tweet
140K followers
@newscred | #ThinkContent
25. Your highest performing channels might surprise you.
Time of send
Weekdays are the best days to send, mid-
morning the best time
Superlatives
Phrases like "the best", "X most important",
"X essential" and similar phrases clearly grab
attention better than more modest language
Sharable Content
Infographics and other consumables
consistently perform at the top end
The Ultimate [Something] to [Something]
Subject lines that contained 'ultimate' made
up 3 of the top 20 performing subject lines,
but only works with conservative use
What/Why
Answering questions that marketers are
asking performs strongest
Name Recognition
Emails that contained posts about brands
that would align well with content were very
successful, such as Birchbox, BarkBox,
Anthony Bourdain, Intel, The Oscars
@newscred | #ThinkContent
26. @newscred | #ThinkContent
Webinars are the most effective
nurturing tool for bringing blog
subscribers further down the funnel.
Your highest performing channels might surprise you.
20% of all webinar registrants are new contacts
27. @newscred | #ThinkContent
Structured learning is important,
as long as it’s actionable.
Offer structured lessons to
some degree, while making it
easy for people to change paths
and preferences at any point.
How will we deliver a one-of-a-kind experience?
While the tone should be
encouraging, the experience
should never feel like work.
Create a sense of
community without relying
heavily on participation.
Consider ways to bring the offline and
online worlds closer – the Academy could
promote events and conferences, as well as
have rewards to offline events.
Provide ways for people to
apply learnings after they
engage with content.
Community is a feeling,
not a feature.
32. @newscred | #ThinkContent
NewsCred, 2015
There’s a compounding effect of content.
The more we publish, the greater ROI we get.
-
100,000
200,000
300,000
400,000
500,000
600,000
0
100
200
300
400
500
600
Sep-14 Oct-14 Nov-14 Dec-14 Jan-15 Feb-15 Mar-15 Apr-15 May-15 Jun-15
Pageviews
#Articles
Articles Viewed
Articles Published
Pageviews
33. Content-driven traffic SEM-driven traffic
Pros
You own the traffic
It builds on itself and becomes larger than SEM over time
Cons
Requires great content to work
Lower ROI at the start
Traffic
Time Time
Traffic
Pros
Faster ROI at the start
Predictable costs and volume
No reliance on great content-creating talent
Cons
Much more expensive over time
34. @newscred | #ThinkContent
An always-on content strategy is only possible
with a strong process + infrastructure.
35. @newscred | #ThinkContent
Optimize old posts that have high
engagement but low(ish) pageviews.
Focus on posts that have an SEO pagerank
of 4 or 5. Moving these posts to a pagerank
of 3 will make a massive difference.
Look for posts that get a lot of search traffic
but aren’t in your top 50 – 100 posts. Make
them better, longer, more valuable.
Don’t reinvent the wheel: make your content work harder.
37. @newscred | #ThinkContent
Too many businesses focus on transactional customer
value and forget to invest in the experience post-sale.
Source: For Entrepreneurs, Startup Killer: The Cost of Customer Acquisition
Cost to acquire + retain Revenue
38. @newscred | #ThinkContent
The lifetime revenue of a customer should be
3–5X the cost to acquire and retain them.
RevenueCost to acquire + retain
Source: For Entrepreneurs, Startup Killer: The Cost of Customer Acquisition
39. @newscred | #ThinkContent
• Inbound marketing
• Free trials
• Touch-less conversions
• Inside sales
• Strategic partnerships
• Customer referrals
• Field sales
• Outbound marketing
• High churn rates
• Low customer satisfaction
• Acquiring “bad” customers
• Slow/ineffective onboarding
• Recurring revenue
• Scalable pricing
• Cross sell/upsell
• Product line expansion
What can impact the balance?
RevenueCost to acquire + retain
Source: For Entrepreneurs, Startup Killer: The Cost of Customer Acquisition
40. @newscred | #ThinkContent
Integration + Implementation
Empower customers to ramp up faster, cutting down on your
own organization’s investment in time and resources.
Training Technical Support
Kick Off Go-Live
Onboarding timeline
41. @newscred | #ThinkContent
___
Higher renewal rate
41% ___
More likely to be upsold
33% ___
Higher MRR than average
24%
Content marketing directly impacts our customer
retention, upsell, and cross-sell value.
45. @newscred | #ThinkContent
Events are an extension of your content strategy.
In 2015, NewsCred’s marketing team held 95 events, and our organic and
event channels represented 76% of all marketing driven opportunities.
#ThinkContent University
15–30 people
Hands-on workshops + thought
leadership dinners
#ThinkContent Tour
150–300 people
Local speakers + hands-on
discussion groups
#ThinkContent Summit
1,000+ people over 2 days
Attendees all
hand-selected
48. @newscred | #ThinkContent
Content is the core of our marketing strategy.
Create content your audience actually wants.
Deliver content the way your audience wants it.
Content marketing success is all about consistency.
Focus on retention just as much as acquisition.
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INTRO – recap of 2015
Business case – LIAM
Content strategy + creation – ALEXA
Distribution – ALEXA/LIAM
Measurement – LIAM
Behind every tweet, like share there’s a person like you and me.
This is of course keeping in mind our marketing KPIs and how they ladder up to our company OKRs.
LIAM STARTS
1. Marketing is a revenue driver, not a cost center.
Most marketers focus on vanity metrics like pageviews, shares, traffic.
While these things are important, they don’t tie to the KPIs that your CMO or CEO actually cares about.
While you all know that Revenue is what you ultimately need to prove, the big question is: How do you work backwards to get there?
At NewsCred, we’ve built a simple framework that enables us to measure the right things, consistently, and figure out if our efforts are working.
1- brand awareness and brand health
2 – conversions
3- retention
Then, we go one step deeper and look at the metrics associated with each of those bigger business goals. The trick is to ladder up to KPIs, not stop at the metrics themselves
For example,
When we think about conversions – one big KPI that helps us prove our revenue impact – we look at conversions across the entire sales funnel.
Starting from intent – are people taking actions that are a leading indicator of their interest in NewsCred?
i.e. going from Insights to NewsCred.com or vice versa
i.e. repeatedly downloading or engaging with our content over time
Action
We don’t count newsletter subscritpions as leads. Instead, we require that subscribers have to fill out one additional form with more information on who they are. This enables us to ensure our leads have more engaged interest
Relevance
MQL – do these people matter to our sales team?
How does our content marketing channel compare to our other channels? Whether it’s events, adwords, sales outbound, referrals, etc?
ROI
Next we look at the number of deals and compare cost per opportunity and deal against our other channels. The trick is to measure content marketing effectiveness against your other marketing channels and how it’s growing and improving over time.
This kind of analysis wouldn’t be possible without the right marketing tech infrastructure. All our data is connected / integrated between our content marketing software (newscred, duh), Marketo and Salesforce.
This enables us to understand how content impacts deals and how channels impact deals too. It also enables us to bring in cost information too
Having 1) the right tech infrastructure and 2) the right framework to measure ROI enables us to get some pretty cool insights.
For example…
2x…….
20 pieces of content….
And we can do a lot with this information: for example, knowing that the average NewsCred customer engages with 20 pieces of content, enables us to figure out what content helps convert people at each stage of the funnel.
ALEXA TAKES OVER
BEGINNER:
Content marketing is all about the value exchange between your brand and your audience. The content you develop should align your brand’s purpose to your audience interests. This usually means being able to talk about a variety of topics that surround your brand or industry [insert an example.]
NewsCred customer examples include:
ConAgra sharing recipes that just happen to include ConAgra products
MorningStar sharing articles written by experts on the benefits of healthy lifestyle habits
Hartford delivering advice in the form of articles relevant to each of the 7 industries they focus on
ADVANCED:
Your brand already produces content. But do you know what to talk about? Can you tell if your existing content is resonating or not? Brands who already understand content marketing should be focused on answering how could my content be better?
BEGINNER:
Content marketing is all about the value exchange between your brand and your audience. The content you develop should align your brand’s purpose to your audience interests. This usually means being able to talk about a variety of topics that surround your brand or industry [insert an example.]
NewsCred customer examples include:
ConAgra sharing recipes that just happen to include ConAgra products
MorningStar sharing articles written by experts on the benefits of healthy lifestyle habits
Hartford delivering advice in the form of articles relevant to each of the 7 industries they focus on
ADVANCED:
Your brand already produces content. But do you know what to talk about? Can you tell if your existing content is resonating or not? Brands who already understand content marketing should be focused on answering how could my content be better?
Quality content needs to support the customer journey and evolve as the customer’s needs change. NewsCred has the world’s largest content library. These are just some examples of the content we offer and how they support the customer journey.
---Note----
Images are across every stage since we believe in the power of visual content.
70 % OF THE BUYERS JOURNEY HAPPENS BEFORE THE DECISION MAKING STAGE. YOU NEED CONTENT TO GUIDE THAT INFORMATION AND PURCHASING PROCESS
Most company’s say: meet your audience where they are.
We say: own your audience.
And create a completely unique and differentiated offering that is really tailored to your audience’s content consumption and learning style.
LIAM TO UPDATE
Consider content creation costs, too
LIAM TO UPDATE
Consider content creation costs, too
LIAM TO UPDATE
Consider content creation costs, too
Self guided
Personalized
discovery
Self guided
Personalized
Discovery
-- Think about discovering content like youw ould on a spotify playlist
Content marketing is a marathon not a sprint. Results take time but the diligence of delivering a regular cadence of content pays off in a big way. We analyzed our own customer base and found one consistent insight: There is a compounding effect to content marketing. This means that if you publish consistently everyday, month over month, the value of your content, your ROI, will increase over time.
• Looking at this graph from our client, The Hartford, the white color represents the number of articles published every month. You’ll see that their publishing cadence is consistent over the months.
• However, the total number of articles viewed increases over time. This is because articles published in early months continue to drive traffic over time due to SEO and building up a bank of evergreen content that continues to drive visitors.
• In addition, the number of pageviews also increases over time, showing that even if publishing cadence remains consistent, you’ll see a compounding effect to engagement and traffic.
• Bottom line: the ROI of content marketing increases over time.
-----
What is the difference between Articles Viewed and Pageviews?
Number of articles viewed is the number of unique articles that people visited in a given month.
Pageviews is the total number of sessions that visited any article in a given month.
If a user clicked on Article A, then Article B, then back to Article A, Article A would have 2 pageviews and Article B would have 1 pageview and the number of articles visited would have been 2.
Content marketing allows you to earn your audience’s attention versus buying it. This metric measures just that. It measures how many visitors your site has earned by providing great content versus spending money to buy their traffic.
Quality content needs to support the customer journey and evolve as the customer’s needs change. NewsCred has the world’s largest content library. These are just some examples of the content we offer and how they support the customer journey.
---Note----
Images are across every stage since we believe in the power of visual content.
70 % OF THE BUYERS JOURNEY HAPPENS BEFORE THE DECISION MAKING STAGE. YOU NEED CONTENT TO GUIDE THAT INFORMATION AND PURCHASING PROCESS
Quality content needs to support the customer journey and evolve as the customer’s needs change. NewsCred has the world’s largest content library. These are just some examples of the content we offer and how they support the customer journey.
---Note----
Images are across every stage since we believe in the power of visual content.
70 % OF THE BUYERS JOURNEY HAPPENS BEFORE THE DECISION MAKING STAGE. YOU NEED CONTENT TO GUIDE THAT INFORMATION AND PURCHASING PROCESS
Okay, the last point.
We believe the content marketing has a huge opportunity to increase retention, brand loyalty and upsell revenue. In NewsCred’s case, because we work with global enterprises, the ability for us to grow our relatioships is hugely important.
In addition, we know that increasing the lifetime value of our customers not only increases revenue but drives down our acquisition cost.
Like this. The lifetime revenue of a customer should be 3 – 5 x the cost to acquire and retain them. Our attention must shift to the customer experience – post deal.
For exampole, when looking at this chart, strategies like inbound marketing and customer referrals drive your customer acquisition cost down. Field sales typical drives in up.
We wanted to focus on what can negatively impact revenue once a prospect becomes a customer – high churn rates, low customer satisfaction, and slow or ineffective onboarding.
That’s where we had our big idea. Knowing that retention is largely decided in the first 30 days, we thought we could have the most value by making our onboarding process incredible.
The sales process isn’t over by the time a deal closes. In fact, you can make the argument that you need to focus on retention equally, or even more, than selling.
And so we launched #ThinkContent University. This is a brand new initiative available for free to people who sign up today. It’s a premium training course…. ALEXA PLEASE FILL IN
Consider content creation costs, too – not just distribution
We enable our customers to track progress and pick up where they left off. This is just another way that we are aiming to personalize our learning experience to our customer’s needs and give them the flexibility and free to grow their skill sets in the way they want to
Consider content creation costs, too – not just distribution