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Understand Your Content Marketing ROI

I was asked recently about content marketing ROI, specifically around blogging and email marketing. I’m a big believer in the importance of content marketing over other forms of marketing (since I’m a professional content marketer), and I like to sing the praises of business blogging services and email marketing.

When I was trying to explain content marketing ROI, I only had a couple personal case studies to draw on, but they’re outliers. (More on them in a minute.) Instead, I pulled up statistics from several other content marketing and digital marketing sources.

  • Blog posts are statistically the most effective tool for building brand awareness, with 31% of B2B companies listing short articles as the highest-performing content in this respect (Content Marketing Institute)
  • B2B companies who blog consistently receive 67% more monthly leads than companies who don’t blog regularly (Demand Metric)
  • 78% of marketers have seen an increase in email engagement over the last 12 months (Hubspot)
  • 47% of B2B buyers consumed 3-5 pieces of content from a company before engaging with one of their sales reps (Demand Gen Report)
  • 95% of the B2B service and product buyers admit that they view content as a trustworthy marker when evaluating a business (Demand Gen Report)
  • 71% in the B2B industry review an organization’s blog during their buyer’s journey (Demand Gen Report)
  • On average, a company’s blog produces 67% more leads per month. (Demand Metric)
  • Costs 62% less than traditional marketing, generates 3x more leads (Demand Metric)
  • The return on investment for email marketing in 2018 stood at $42, which is an increase of $10 from the DMA’s previous report. (Direct Marketing Association UK)
  • The ROI for manufacturing can reach 1,372% (FrontPageSage’s own customer research)

“What’s YOUR Content Marketing ROI?”

I’m sometimes asked about my own content marketing ROI. That’s a little harder since I’m an outsourced vendor, and most companies won’t share their internal sales data with me. But I have a couple.

“Do you at least have a range or an estimate?” they’ll ask. I tell them this:

“In the early days of this agency, we worked with a construction equipment manufacturer that made $200 million per year in gross revenue. He was Internet-savvy and tracked the hell out of everything. He found that he got a 6% bump in his total sales as a direct result of our blogging services. That worked out to another $1 million per month in increased revenue.

“About the same time, we worked with a mystery shopping agency with two full-time employees and two part-timers. Their total sales were roughly $750,000 per year. After three years of writing 8 blog articles per month, they had tripled their business three times and grew to 27 full-time employees. They also landed a million-dollar contract for a national wireless company during our first year with them.

“So, our range of improvement can be anywhere from 6% to 900%.”

Of course, this is a bit frustrating since it’s a broad range, but I use it as an example to illustrate a few important points:

  • Your content marketing ROI is only as good as your actual content.
  • Quality rules over quantity, but you should still blog at least once a week. Don’t forsake consistency either.
  • There are a high number of variables that affect your content marketing ROI, anything from your field, your content, your competition, and how much Google updates its algorithms.
  • High-quality written content will always outperform mediocre content. Always.
  • A variety of content formats will outperform a single format. In other words, don’t put all your eggs in one basket.
  • On the other hand, don’t rely solely on video. At this point of SEO development, videos help SEO, but not in the same way that written content does. Google still relies heavily on written content.

What about email marketing?

Email marketing has a number of different benefits — too many for me to go into here, but I can say this. Email marketing is a great marketing method because it’s the only one where potential customers have said, “Yes, I’d like to hear from you later. Here’s how you can reach me.”

  • The problem is, most email marketers abuse it by sharing poorly-written and created content. If you want high engagement, send out interesting stuff.
  • Some email marketers send too many messages. (I just unsubscribed from a new newsletter after getting four emails in four days. I don’t have time for that!)
  • This is the place to customize content. Segment your subscribers into different groups and offer them different content options. Bookriot.com has almost a couple dozen email newsletters each about different book genres, giveaways, and contests. This way, you’re not given one single email that appeals to everyone. I get only one email per week about the books I would want, and nothing about the books I don’t.
  • Your email list is all yours. If they wanted to, Twitter and Facebook could wipe out all your followers and fans. You can’t export that list or use it somewhere else. You can’t switch social networks and take all those followers and fans with you. But your email list is worth its weight in Bitcoin!

Your content marketing ROI is going to be a lot higher and easier to measure and manage than traditional marketing or even social media marketing. It can also give online advertising a run for its money because content marketing reaches people when they have a question or an interest. They’re thinking about buying, so they do a Google search to start their buying journey. If your blog content shows up on the Google search, then you’re in the hunt!

But if not, then you may have a problem.

Photo credit: 12571684 (Pixabay, Creative Commons 0)

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The Future of Content Marketing Will Not Be Different

What is the future of content marketing?

I’m often asked, what will content marketing look like in the future?

People are surprised with my answer: Just like it does now.

It’s not going to be different, we’re not going to see some major new way of “consuming content” (I really loathe that phrase!), and there’s not going to be some new method of content delivery that we’re going to have to learn.

Because when you look at content at its barest essence, it’s just words, images, and sounds. That’s what it has always been, that’s what it will always be.

It was words, images, and sounds when cave dwellers drew on cave walls and grunted their delight. It was words, images, and sounds when the Ancient Greeks passed down knowledge with stories or told stories with plays. It was words, images, and sounds — well, not so much sound — when the first ever movie of a galloping horse was made or the world’s oldest surviving film, Roundhay Garden Scene, was made.

It was words, images, and sounds when newspapers, radio, and television all had their heyday and when they were replaced by blogs, videos, and podcasts.

Content marketing is no different from any other form of communication in our history. We’ve used words, images, and sounds to communicate the entire time. But the only thing that has changed has been the medium we use — the way the content gets consumed read, watched, or heard.

Content creation tools don’t matter

Eighty years ago, we had newspapers, radio shows, and movie newsreels. Television became popular 70 years ago, launching the Golden Age of Television.

And now, everything you could ever want — including samples of old newspapers, radio shows, newsreels, and TV shows — are all available on your laptop, tablet, or mobile phone.

You can read about how those media were made eighty years ago, or you can make and share a 21st-century version of it for other people to read, watch, or hear.

Because it’s still the same old words, images, and sounds.

And it won’t matter one bit how those are made. The secret to doing well at content marketing is to be able to do words, images, and sounds well.

You have to write well. You have to sound good. You have to know how to frame a photo or a video. You have to create things that are interesting. You have to know how to tell a story. You have to know how to capture your audience at the very moment they click your link.

The tools don’t matter.

I’ll say it again: THE TOOLS DON’T MATTER!

Years ago, I used to argue with people who claimed: “there’s no such thing as social media experts because the tools are too new.”

My response then is the same as it is now: I don’t have to be a tools expert, I have to be a communication expert. I have to be good at conveying a message in my chosen medium. The tools can change from week to week, and it won’t affect me one bit because I don’t have to master the tool, I just have to master the craft.

Think of it another way. A carpenter that has spent his entire life swinging a hammer isn’t less effective just because you gave him a pneumatic nailer. A chef doesn’t forget how to cook because you switch out her gas stove to an electric one. And writers aren’t suddenly reduced to creating doggerel just because they switched pens.

So when people think you need specific Mailchimp or Constant Contact experience to be an effective email marketer, that’s wrong.

When people think you need to know how to use Hubspot or WordPress to be an effective blogger, that’s completely wrong.

It’s like saying a photographer is not a good photographer because she uses Nikon and not Canon. Or that a writer is not a good writer because they use Apple Pages and not Microsoft Word.

The tool does not create quality content. WordPress and Hubspot don’t make you write well. Constant Contact doesn’t make you a good email marketer. The latest video camera doesn’t make you a good videographer any more than a great camera makes you a good photographer.

The tools do not make the artist. A good artist can make good art with crappy tools, but a bad artist cannot make good art with good tools.

So it doesn’t matter what happens to the tools: WordPress may go away. Hubspot may fall into the sea. YouTube could be eaten by a pack of hyenas.

None of that will change how content creators make their art.

If WordPress were to go away, bloggers aren’t going to be thrown for a loop or cast out on the scrap heap. We’ll just shrug our shoulders and continue to tell good stories on the new distribution method. And blogging itself won’t go away, it will just be called something else.

Podcasting won’t go away because there will be other ways to deliver episodic information and entertainment via audio distribution.

Videos won’t go away because — well, video’s just never going to go away. In fact, it just surpassed blogging and infographics as the most commonly used form of content marketing. (I’m still a little salty about it, thank you very much.)

The artists and creators will still have a way to make and distribute their work, even if the tools for that distribution go away, change, or die completely.

Remind me how is this about the future of content marketing again

My point is, when you ask about the future of content marketing, just remember, the core elements of content marketing — words, images, and sounds — are never going to change. We’re still going to read, we’re still going to watch videos and look at pictures, and we’re still going to listen to music and information.

The channels will change, the methods of production will change, and even the popularity of the content formats will change. (Freakin’ video!) But the need for quality content will never change. That’s the one constant you can count on.

So if you’re in the content creation business, just focus on improving your craft. Become the best creator you can. Learn your art so you can be one of the best creators around. Worry less about the technology, because that won’t affect whether you’re good at your job. And when the method changes, you’ll already know what you need to do.

Photo credit: Steve Shook (Flickr, Creative Commons 2.0)

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The Conundrum of Writing With Integrity

I recently heard Jamal Greene on a recent Two Writers Slinging Yang podcast interview, talking about his time writing at Sports Illustrated.

He talked about writing at Sports Illustrated where the writing became an issue of what the reader wanted. He called it a form of customer service, or “serve to order.”

If the customer wants it, or the editors thought they wanted a certain product, and your job as the writer was to produce that product. And over the time I was at Sports Illustrated, it became more and more oriented towards customer service and that didn’t touch me.

If you’re in it because you like to write in a certain way, and then you’ve got to write in a way that’s going to get eyeballs, you’re not really writing with the kind of integrity that you want. And I felt that and I didn’t think I was ever going to get to the point, for good reason, where I had the kind of autonomy to write in the way I wanted to write

The phrase writing with integrity stopped me in my tracks. I had to pause the podcast and ruminate on that for several minutes.

As content marketers, we don’t get the chance to write with integrity very often. Sure, we like to be ethical and truthful. Despite the stereotype people have of marketers, we do try to operate with honesty and truth. But when do we get to actually write with integrity?

When do we get the chance to be open and transparent — the buzzword among many bloggers in the early-2010s — and share what’s really going on? When do we get the chance to tell a good story because it’s a good story and not just one more entry on our content marketing calendar?

“Today, we need an article about how developers can download our API and use our testing environment.”

Not something that allows for a lot of “writing with integrity.”

The problem is, the same that Greene experienced at Sports Illustrated, is that the integrity articles — the long-form, in-depth articles — are not the most popular ones. They’re the best ones, to be sure. But they don’t get the eyeballs. And that’s what journalism is about these days: getting eyeballs and clicks and visits to move advertising revenue. The long, well-done articles don’t get the traffic, and so they don’t get the attention. They’re the ones that get submitted for awards and for inclusion in anthologies. But they don’t get the same kind of traffic as “10 Reasons Why Your Favorite Team Sucks and 10 Why They’ll Win Their Division.”

It’s this way with business blogs. There are certain articles that get all kinds of traffic, but they’re not always the enjoyable, long-form articles that exercise your writing muscles. Instead, you have to write the kinds of articles where you say, “I got a creative writing degree for this? A damn monkey could write this!”

It’s even harder if you write for a corporation, or if you’re in the B2B world, where being dowdy and rigid is practically the price of admission. Very rarely do I see B2B blog articles that are fun, funny, or interesting. (And the ones I did see were more than likely ones that I wrote.)

Content Marketing With Integrity

But that doesn’t mean you can never do it. There are times that companies should be a little vulnerable and tell some stories that show people your history. Let them learn from your mistakes. Write a piece that talks about how your company nearly folded, and it was only thanks to some last-minute maneuvering that saved everyone. (Trust me, that story will be out there anyway, so you might as well be the one to tell it.)

Tell the story about how your solution didn’t work for a customer right away, and it took some additional work, consulting, and even training to get things to work properly. Don’t skip over that part in your case study, embrace it and showcase it.

Just like sportswriters have to write the daily news stories and game recaps (also called “gamers”) in order to be able to write the long-form features that make sportswriting so interesting, marketers need to carry water on a daily basis, writing the serve-to-order stories before they can write their other, better stories.

Of course, you may be in an industry or work for a business where you don’t get to write with integrity at all. Financial services, lawyers, pharmaceutical companies, and other highly-regulated businesses tend not to be able to write something that risky.

But for the rest of you, stop worrying about stories that will only bring in the eyeballs. Take a risk once in a while on a story that’s not a listicle, or something that promises “X Secrets to Improve Your Productivity.” While I like those articles and think they’re great traffic generators, they’re not very interesting or deep.

If you’re into the content marketing funnel philosophy, keep writing your “top of funnel” articles to bring people in. But try writing with integrity and transparency, and write the article you’ve been itching to write, and use it at the bottom of the funnel where people are about ready to sign.

Take a risk, try something new, and write the story you’ve been feeling, not the story on your content calendar.

Photo credit: Devanath (Pixabay, Creative Commons 0)

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Who Should Make the Final Editorial Decisions About Writing?

When you’re a writer, everyone thinks they can do what you do. They think they’re good at writing and, well, it’s painful to watch.

They send a few emails and write a report so convoluted that it would choke a hippo, and suddenly they’re Pulitzer-winning writers and editors.

Now they want to dip their dirty fingers into your writing to “make it better.” So they root around in there like the bartender just put out a bowl of complimentary peanuts and they haven’t eaten in days. Only their idea of making it better is going to make things worse.

The copy that you spent hours on — the thing you’re educated and trained to do! — is made worse than when it was still just scribbled notes on a lunch napkin.

So, content marketers, who should be the final say in the actual language of your writing?

Ultimately, the person who pays you, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t say something when you’re the expert. And unless the person who pays you is a “my way or the highway” type, you should get the final say.

Years ago, when I was the crisis communications director at the Indiana State Department of Health, I was in a meeting with one of the Assistant Commissioners — my boss’ boss’ boss — and the head of our legal department phoned in with some “helpful notes” for a press release I had written.

When we hung up, I told the AC, “Yeah, I’m not doing any of that.”

“I don’t blame you,” he said. Because he recognized that writers write and that lawyers are not good copywriters.

Even my own boss recognized the importance of what I did. Gary was a retired U.S. Army colonel (who commanded his own tank brigade) and was now in charge of the Emergency Response division. He won my eternal admiration when he told someone else with helpful notes, “Erik knows what he’s doing. Leave him alone.”

When you’re a content marketer, specifically when you’re a writer, you should be the final arbiter of the best way to say something. Not your boss, not your client, not the graphic artist who took three English classes.

You’re the wordsmith. You’re the ink slinger. You’re the word nerd. You’re the one who studies language and pays attention to how authors structure sentences. You’re the one who reads David Ogilvy essays because the guy can outwrite most authors.

You’re the one who laughs at Oxford comma jokes (An Oxford comma walks into a bar, where it spends the evening watching the television getting drunk and smoking cigars).

You’re the one who has actually read books on writing. You listen to the Grammar Girl and A Way With Words podcasts because you like them. (Disclosure: I write for Grammar Girl once in a while.)

So why are you letting other people root around in your writing? Stand up for it and don’t let people muck around in what you’re trained to do and they’re not.

Now, this does not mean you’re the subject matter expert. Your SMEs should have veto power on their specialized subject.

You’re not a legal expert. Your corporate attorney should have veto power over the things that will put your CEO in jail.

And you’re not a design expert. Your graphic designer should tell you that your 1,000-word manifesto won’t fit on a 4×6 printed postcard.

But when it comes to putting the best words in the best order to tell the best stories? That’s all you.

So you’d better know your stuff.

It really does mean reading books on writing. And listening to Grammar Girl and A Way With Words. And reading David Ogilvy. And stealing from your favorite authors.

Because when the time comes, you’re going to need to defend your work and show that you know your shit.

One time, a client pointed out an error in one of my articles I had written for him.

“You can’t end your sentences with a preposition,” he said.

Robert Lowth. He was actually a fascinating person if you’re a word nerd.

“Actually, that’s not true,” I said, and I explained to him how that should have never been a rule in the first place. I recited the history of Robert Lowth and how he created this rule in his 1762 book, A Short Introduction to English Grammar. (Read about Robert Lowth here.)

“Oh,” he said. “You clearly know more about this than I do.” And when it came to language and word choice, he let me do my thing from then on. But it did take me speaking up and showing that I knew my shit.

As a writer, you need to study language, grammar, and punctuation. You at least need to know the rules (and the non-rules) of writing so you know when you can break them. You want to be able to tell people why their 4th-grade grammar lessons are incorrect and explain how common usage says we can now do things like start sentences with “Hopefully” now.

So be a student of language and the mechanics of writing. Because when it comes to defending your work and your choices, you need to be able to stand your ground and show why people need to just let you do your work.

Because the next lawyer who tries to tell me how to “fix” my writing is going to hear my equally valid opinions on how they should practice law.

Photo credit: Erik Deckers (Me. I took that photo.)
Photo credit: Oil painting by Robert Edge Pine ((1730-1788))

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Blogging For Your Business Speaker Schedule

I’m part of the Blogging For Your Business seminar series this month, and it’s already well underway. I’m very honored to be a part of such an august group and know several of the names on here.

If you want to learn about how blogging can establish you as an expert in your field, boost your SEO, and stand out from your non-blogging competition, this is a great event for you. You’ll learn from several of the experts in the industry, you can register right here.

And if you register in time to hear my session, I will be giving away a free ebook on 12 (Or More) Steps to Improve Your Writing. (Link coming soon.)

  • Monday, May 3rd – Barry Feldman – Fast-Track Your Content Marketing Plan

    • Monday, May 3rd – Amy Woods – Repurpose Your Content Like Top TV Talk Shows

    Tuesday, May 4th – Debra Eckerling – Goal-Setting Simplified For Your Business Blog Using the D*E*B Method

    Tuesday, May 4th – Jason Falls – Holy Smokes! How to Push the Envelope and Stand Out With Social Content Strategy

    Wednesday, May 5th – Mary Kate Gulick – Cornerstone Content: Your Best, First Content Move to Boost Credibility & Authority

    Wednesday, May 5th – Rebekah Read – The 3-Step Plan to Getting Your Website Shown on Google

    Thursday, May 6th – Vicky Laffey – Never Be Stuck for Content Ideas Again!

    Thursday, May 6th – Jennifer Grayeb – How to Know if Your Marketing Is Working and Exactly What to Do if It’s Not

    Friday, May 7th – Erika Heald – How to Audit and Refresh Your Existing Blog Content

    Friday, May 7th – Ilise Benun – Content Marketing on Steroids

    Saturday, May 8th – Lily Ugbaja – Creating Content That Ranks and Converts

    Sunday, May 9th – Chad Pollitt – How to Attract Over 50K Subscribers in 6 Months

    Monday, May 10th – Urwah Kamran – The Bait: How to Create a Freebie That Turns Your Audience Into Paying Customers

    Monday, May 10th – Christine Marie Pizzuto – The Right Content Mindset

    Tuesday, May 11th – Amanda Webb – How to Attract More Blog Readers Than Ever Before

    Tuesday, May 11th – Chris Craft – The Power of Repurposing Content in Digital Media

    Wednesday, May 12th – Cara Chace – How to Fix Your Pinterest Strategy if It’s Not Working

    Wednesday, May 12th – Erik Deckers – Content Marketing Secrets Learned From the Giants of Fiction< — I WILL ALSO BE DOING A FACEBOOK LIVE Q&A AT 3 PM EDT THAT DAY. (Be sure to join the group early so you can just show up at 3PM

    Thursday, May 13th – Mike Allton – How to Create 10x Content 10x Faster

    Thursday, May 13th – Kelsey Formost – 5 Steps to Start and Grow Your List

    Friday, May 14th – Jessika Phillips – How to Capture Attention, Amplify Your Message, and Keep Them Coming Back for More

    Friday, May 14th – Lisa Sicard – Alternative Social Media Networks: Where Are Your Ideal Customers Hanging Out?

    Saturday, May 15th – Joe Pulizzi – How to Use Content to Accomplish What Few Can Achieve: Build Your Business Into an Empire

    Sunday, May 16th – Ashleigh McGarity – How to Make Must-Read Headlines That Will Attract 438% More Traffic to Your Website

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What is the Ideal Paragraph Length?

What’s the ideal paragraph length? Is there an ideal paragraph length? Are there hard-and-fast rules that govern how long our paragraphs — “grafs,” if you’re cool and/or “in the biz” — or can you just create paragraphs of different lengths willy-nilly, like some damn hippie?

The latest episode of Grammar Girl’s podcast opened with this horrifying story:

A while ago, I saw a comment on Facebook about professors who are teaching college students to make all their paragraphs the same length. The woman wrote, “There are professors at my school who deduct points, sometimes even letter grades, if paragraphs aren’t the same exact length throughout a paper. Because writing should be ‘balanced’ and it can only achieve ‘balance’ if all paragraphs are equal in length.”

Since this is one of the most preposterous things I’ve ever heard, I thought I must have misunderstood, but I asked for clarification and learned that the “uniform paragraph length rule” is so pervasive at this university that one professor uses a ruler to measure physical paragraph length in an introductory English class.

Let me say it right now, upfront.

There is no one ideal paragraph length.

According to Grammar Girl, both the Yahoo! Style Guide and the college handbook A Writer’s Reference (affiliate links) say the ideal paragraph length is between 100 and 200 words. However, “good writers treat this as a suggestion and not a hard and fast rule.”

The problem is, we live in an age of skimmers, not readers. If you’re a content marketer, blogger, or essayist, you don’t have the luxury of getting people to dig into a block of text between 100 and 200 words. Large blocks of text without any white space make our eyes glaze over — at least mine do — and we just zone out and get the early morning stares. A big block of text just looks boring as shit. People ignore long paragraphs because they’re dense, so we should avoid cramming in that many words, of which this is the 100th.

Seriously, that graf is exactly 100 words long.

That one was eight.

And that one was four.

Do you see the difference? Do you feel how much easier it felt to read the short one-sentence paragraphs instead of that 100-word monstrosity?

Like it or not, people don’t read, they skim. They prefer short paragraphs, not long chunks of text. Sure, you can slip them in once in a while, but people tend not to read them. Did you even notice I said “shit” in that 100-word paragraph up there?

Unfortunately, writing teachers tend to give young writers bad advice, which is why there are “rules” about paragraph length.

Just remember, there’s the right way to write, and the school way. And the two are frequently different.

Paragraphs Aren’t a Part of Your System, Man!

Paragraphs can — and should — be varying lengths. If you want to write 200-word paragraphs, go ahead. If you think you can manage several 200-word paragraphs in a row, be my guest. But I’ll bet if you were to do a heat map or readability study of your work, you’d find that very few people are slogging their way through that bog.

There are already several “rules of English” that we can safely ignore. Either they’re obsolete, the language has changed, or they never should have been a rule in the first place.

I’ll admit, I’m not a big fan of some of the changes that are happening to the English language. Like the fact that “literally” now means figuratively. (Seriously, go to Google and enter “define literally!” That irritates me to no end!)

Conversely, some things were incorrect in the first place, and they’re only now being fixed, like the whole “don’t end your sentence with a preposition” thing.

Teaching students that a paragraph must be of a certain length is also terrible teaching. Good writing will have paragraphs of varying length, from a couple hundred words (Yeesh!) to just one word. To teach otherwise is a disservice to your students because many of them will go through life thinking it’s a requirement when at best, it’s a guideline.

And before you tell me, “You have to learn the rules before you break them,” I would say 1) there’s not a real rule about paragraph length, and 2) you can teach people that paragraph lengths vary without blowing their minds.

They can make the leap from not knowing how long a graf is to knowing that it can be different. You don’t have to spend an entire semester teaching them this one rule, only to tell them, “Just kidding!” at some undetermined point in the future.

Bottom line: there’s no ideal paragraph length, and you can make them any size you want.

Seriously.

Photo credit: Qimono (Pixabay, Creative Commons 0)