What it’s about
As founder of Content Kite, Simon Thompson is naturally very interested in the power of content to help businesses grow. He kept hearing that agencies were traditionally not very good at creating content for themselves, instead relying on referrals for 90% of their sales leads. But this was all anecdotal information, so Simon wanted to see what the data had to say.
Simon and his Content Kite team analyzed the websites of 1000 digital agencies. They categorized each site as:
- No blog
- Had a blog and posted once a quarter (None)
- Had a blog and posted 1-3 times /quarter (Poor)
- Had a blog and posted 1-3 times/month/ (Mediocre)
- Had a blog and posted once a week or more. (Great)
Once a week or more would be what Simon would consider an optimal agency blog.
The alarming stats from this showed that only 7% of agencies posted once a week, while 36% of the agencies sampled were only posting a few times a year. And 30% of agencies had no blog at all, deciding for one reason or another it’s just not for them.
Simon believes that good content marketing can help agencies bridge the ‘feast or famine’ gap that many suffer from, bringing in quality, sustainable leads. In this interview, he shares his tips for how agencies can get serious ROI from their blogs.
Takeaways:
1. Get a content strategy in place
Simon finds that many people get scared off by the term ‘content strategy’, but the team at Content Kite approaches it with a simple framework called ‘Hub and Spoke’. They suggest their agency clients come up with a central idea or topic that helps a specific person solve a specific problem. For example, Content Kite’s specific person (AKA target audience) is a digital agency owner, and their specific problem is getting more leads. So all the content they create reflects that - its purpose is to help a digital agency owner get more leads.
2. Upgrade your content to a lead magnet
A lead magnet is an extra piece of content that you offer in exchange for an email address, an ebook, or white paper. They help build your email list so you can create relationships that may turn into leads. When people visit your blog, you know that they’re interested in that single topic. When you create a lead magnet that is specific to that piece of content, then you significantly increase the chances that the reader is going to sign up to your email list to receive more about that particular topic. It might be a checklist, a cheat sheet, or even a pdf version of that article. Blogs that offer lead magnets see an email sign-up increase anywhere from 50-1000% compared to those that don't.
3. Reach out to other bloggers
People think if they create really great content it’s naturally going to get shared. That may be somewhat true - good content does eventually get shared but to kickstart that process Simon recommends reaching out to other bloggers. When you write a piece of content, do a search for similar articles that have been written on that topic and make a list of the authors. Then email them: “Hey, I notice you wrote an article about X. I wrote a similar article/opposing view. Here’s the link, have a read, and please let me know what you think.” Hopefully, they’ll share your post.
To increase the chances, reach out to that author and ask for additional insight, or a quote you can insert in the article and link back to them. It’s good ‘ego-bait’ - it helps their SEO, and they’re likely to share the article because they appear as an ‘expert’.
4. Share multiple times
For a quick content win that can double your traffic, share across your social platforms multiple times:
Facebook: once on publish and once a month later;
Twitter: once on publish, then two hours later, the next day, the next week, the next month and again a month after that;
Google Plus: once on publish, once the next week, and then the next month.
Show notes:
Content Kite has put together a free 7-part email course to help agency owners get more ROI from content marketing.
Check out Content Kite’s new podcast, The Growth Lever Podcast
