In this roundup, we’re diving into the top five financial content marketing case studies that have successfully transformed even the most complex topics into unexpectedly captivating content.

Brown Brothers Harriman

When it comes to financial content, there are two near-universal themes: Most people are on the hunt for more money, and they’re all itching for the secrets of how to get there. But, as all marketers know, when you try to make content that appeals to everyone, you often end up with hollow content that resonates with no one.

For Brown Brothers Harriman, the oldest private bank in America, tapping into the high-net-worth female market wasn’t just a stride towards gender equality in wealth management—it was about seizing an overlooked opportunity.

In an effort to break from tradition, BBH started the Center for Women & Wealth, coupled with a pioneering print magazine tailored for these women. They also launched a series of women-centric infographics, such as “Bridging the Funding Gap,” which highlighted the stark funding disparities women entrepreneurs face.

Take these learning lessons from BBH:

• Zero in on a specific audience: It’ll help you create hyper-relevant content that speaks directly to the concerns, aspirations, and realities of your chosen niche.
• Visual storytelling is worth a thousand words: Use it to simplify complex information.

Royal Bank of Canada

Ah, content creation—the challenge at the heart of financial content marketing only mounts when you realize you’re up against not just other financial institutions but also traditional publications, fintech startups, and even TikTok influencers.

So, how do you scale your financial content creation efforts? Royal Bank of Canada had an answer: Get everyone involved.

From the commercial banking team to the wealth management department, RBC tasked all interested divisions to create their own content. Today, RBC’s blog is a vibrant mosaic, offering everything from retirement guidance to educational insights.

Borrow a page from RBC’s playbook by:

• Decentralizing content creation: Empowering finance departments to produce and manage their own financial content fosters a sense of ownership.
• Building a unified yet diverse strategy: While allowing departmental autonomy, all content should still thread together to reinforce your brand’s core message and values.
• Streamlining the review process: Having only one or two key members as reviewers reduces bottlenecks in content production.

BlackRock

Content topics in the finance world can feel pretty daunting to the general public. BlackRock, an investment management corporation, struck content gold with a pivotal insight: People seek out nuanced, humanized narratives.

So they published “How the World Retires,” an interactive report that profiled the retirement journeys of six couples around the globe. Complete with vivid photography, an engaging write-up, and a nifty retirement calculator, the report has outperformed the average BlackRock post by sixfold in engagement metrics.

Draw inspiration from BlackRock by:

• Embracing the human element: The most powerful financial content marketing always has an element of personal connection.
• Demystifying the data: Balancing hard facts and real-life stories can make complex financial concepts more tangible and engaging.
• Exploring interactivity: Whether it’s a calculator, a quiz, a tool, a game, or a poll, interactive content elements can drive audience participation, action, and return engagement.

SoFi

While SoFi’s blogs were initially all SEO- and product-focused, they figured it was time for a revamp. “We had to breathe new life into our content to make it more editorially driven and wired for social distribution,” David Gardner, SoFi’s director of content marketing, explained.

And so, they began telling more intriguing stories that its millennial target audience would care about: debt management, salary navigation, and proactive investments. They even explored longer-form journalistic pieces with member spotlights.

The results? Nothing short of a transformation. The revamped content didn’t just ferry readers to SoFi’s blog; it turned casual browsers into engaged community members who frequently returned for more. SoFi’s organic Google traffic ballooned by 50%, and their overall site traffic increased by a staggering 970%. Meanwhile, total monthly conversions skyrocketed by 247%.

Add these tips from SoFi to your strategy:

• Storytelling is the new currency: Engage your audience with compelling narratives. SoFi’s shift to storytelling, with a personal touch, transformed their financial content from snoozefest to share-worthy.
• Choose the right topics: Don’t just rely on your gut—take the time to dig through engagement analytics, first-party data, and keyword research to understand what your audience is interested in learning more about.

Guardian Life Insurance

Convincing young people to engage with their finances is no easy feat. Bombarded with headlines like “Do you really need that 401(k) for the climate apocalypse?”, they’re not exactly lining up to discuss retirement plans.

Instead of fearmongering or doling out unrealistic optimism, Guardian Life Insurance launched a series of visually focused, fact-driven visuals to target this demographic. Take, for instance, their “How Solid Is Your Offensive Line?” infographic. By intertwining fantasy football with financial planning, the company translated tedious savings talk into dynamic, scroll-stopping content.

Three key takeaways from Guardian’s strategy:

• Conversions aren’t everything: Engagement metrics like likes, shares, and comments represent the pulse of your audience’s interest and interaction.
• Speak their language: To resonate with younger audiences, strike the right balance between education and entertainment.
• Visual appeal matters: In a world dominated by visual content, use infographics to break down complex financial concepts.

Feeling inspired by these content marketing case studies?

These top financial content marketing case studies remind us that even in an industry often characterized by complex terms and endless data points, there’s room to forge genuine connections through storytelling, visual creativity, and a deep understanding of audience needs.

To succeed as a financial services company in 2024 and beyond, finance marketers must strive to be more than a mere informant. Instead, as these top content marketing case studies demonstrate, try to become a trusted advisor who understands and addresses the underlying financial fears and aspirations of your audience.

Ask The Content Strategist: FAQs

Q: What strategies can financial services companies employ to overcome common hurdles in content creation, such as organizational silos and underfunding?

Educating business execs on the value of collaboration and adopting a more strategic approach to content creation can help decrease organizational silos, while leveraging freelance content creators can increase your team’s bandwidth and help you maintain productivity in the midst of budget constraints.

Q: How has the landscape of financial content marketing evolved in recent years, and what challenges do financial services companies face in this space?

Financial services companies are contending with a digital landscape teeming with influencers, bloggers, and fintech startups, challenging traditional marketing playbooks with compliance, organizational silos, and technological adoption hurdles. Learn more about current trends, challenges, and solutions for finance marketers.

Fuel your inspiration by diving into the best financial services email newsletters and incredible examples of content marketing from banks and the finance industry.

The financial content marketing case studies in this list are Contently clients.

The post From Bland to Brand: 5 Best Content Marketing Case Studies in Financial Services appeared first on Contently.

A few years ago, this expensive hobby motivated me to draft up a new year’s resolution to spend less money at restaurants. It went really well—all I had to do was drink enough espresso martinis with the meal to forget I even spent $150 in the first place.

I’m only kidding—don’t be like me and make vague new year’s resolutions because unsurprisingly, it’s about that time of year where nearly two-thirds of all resolutions have already been abandoned.

Both personal and professional resolutions have one thing in common: in order to stand a chance at success, they need to include measurable goals and a plan-of-action.

In the digital era, more and more companies are relying on data analytics software for their content analytics. With strategic content methodologies, intuitive engagement metrics, and a remarkable talent network, Contently helps these brands optimize their content to tell great stories and see quantifiable results that a lackluster new year’s resolution just can’t deliver.

If you’re looking to expand your content, you’re in the right place. Here is an inside look at five influential tech success stories from our flipbook of 47 Content Marketing Case Studies That’ll Inspire You to encourage your brand to make meaningful changes in the new year. 

1. How Dell Perspectives Grew Its Audience 200 Percent and Launched a Digiday Award Winning Content Site Through Bold Impact Storytelling

In order to reach the c-suite of tomorrow, Dell knew it had to target a younger audience with an emphasis on social impact stories. With Contently’s technology, editorial team, and freelance network, the tech giant was able to build a staff of writers of all races, ages, gender identities, and sexual orientations to tell great stories—and tell them right. Dell tackles racial bias in tech, challenges facing women in STEM and LGBTQ+ telehealth issues, and boasts noteworthy growth as a result of focusing on the topics their target audience was passionate about.

2. How Document Analytics Optimized the Length, Quality, and Cadence of Microsoft’s Downloadable Assets

Microsoft wanted to track the performance of their content beyond clicks and open rates to determine if reader engagement was dependent on where they encountered the content. Using Contently’s Document Analytics heat maps and page-by-page engagement metrics, Microsoft was able to narrow down where its audience focused their attention, understand how behavior differed across channels and thus optimize their demand-gen stream.

3. The Strategy That Increased Gild’s Audience by 574 Percent

Gild not only wanted to introduce a new recruitment technology into the market, but also change the way people thought about hiring software by establishing a unique brand voice and creating a scalable content program. Working closely with Contently’s brand editors and a thorough content methodology, Gild increased its investment in talent and distribution to generate a 995% rise in total attention time and a 14% spike in engagement.

4.How Contently Built a Customer-Centric Content Strategy for Xerox

In order to change audience perception during its rebrand, theveteran B2B services company needed to scale content production and drive traffic to its website. Xerox partnered with Contently to develop a customer-centric content strategy that utilized our workflow infrastructure to scale content and deliver everything from expert interviews to e-books, case studies, social content, and SlideShare presentations.

5. How HotPads Increased Blog Traffic By 4,000 Percent Through the Power of Original Content

HotPads needed to ramp up traffic and grow a loyal, engaged audience of locally targeted personas with more high-quality, original content. To appeal to hyper-local markets, the company utilized the Contently network to find qualified, vetted journalists all over the country to cover assignments. Our talent managers helped HotPads source storytellers who collectively published over 270 stories last year and increased website traffic by 4,000% in just 7 months.

The post 5 Tech Brand Case Studies That Will Inspire You appeared first on Contently.

One hundred million users is the kind of number that can seduce any marketer. But jumping onto the platform without a strategy or some boundaries is a sure-fire way to lose the respect of both your audience and your marketing team.

In order to connect with viewers, drive ROI, and—let’s be honest—have some fun, your first step should be to understand the platform’s best practices. Here are four examples of brands that have mastered Snapchat.

16 Handles

Back in 2013, 16 Handles, the New York City frozen yogurt chain, was one of the first brands to adopt Snapchat.

During the early days of Snapchat marketing, 16 Handles gave a discount to existing customers when they sent snaps of themselves eating the brand’s fro-yo. While the discount encouraged customers to return for more yogurt, 16 Handles community manager Adam Britten revealed that the most successful element of the campaign was earned media.

“One of our goals for this was exposure, so we [were] happy with the coverage this promo received in publications such as Ad Age and Mashable,” said Britten. “It’s nice to see a smaller brand like us being featured in these worldwide publications.”

Takeaway: In addition to being a great resource for engagement, innovative Snapchat campaigns can still generate earned media, especially since the platform is still in its nascent stages.

Red Bull

Influencers are plentiful on Snapchat and growing by the day. Selfie mogul Kim Kardashian even joined the platform last week.

Right now, Red Bull is one of the best brands capitalizing on this influencer network. In early 2015, the energy drink company gave the Canadian snowboarder and X Games champion Mark McMorris control of its Snapchat account to let users see inside his extreme sports lifestyle. McMorris’s Snapchat journey began with checking into a surf shop in San Diego in the morning and heading to the mountains of Big Bear later that afternoon.

The decision to pair with the athlete was on-brand for Red Bull, which prides itself on supporting an extreme lifestyle, and the content provided an unexpected source of entertainment for its user base. Involving McMorris in the campaign also helped Red Bull reach the athlete’s loyal fan base.

Takeaway: Snapchat is a very effective medium for influencer marketing. Just ask DJ Khaled. Tapping into an established following of a relevant influencer increases awareness and capitalizes on existing trust. And on such a personal platform, the content tends to be extremely entertaining. (Pun intended.)

GrubHub

During the 2015 Super Bowl, GrubHub used Snapchat to combine art and influence. The food delivery service paired images of drumsticks, illustrated by popular Snapchat artist Michael Platco, with facts about chicken wing consumption on Super Bowl Sunday. The Snap-fact art served as a memorable way to steal an audience away from TV commercials.

Takeaway: GrubHub is a healthy reminder of what can happen when you combine artistry with creative marketing. In addition to calling on an established creative, the campaign revealed how good graphics and art can make a brand stand out from all the other traditional video clips.

Lilly Pulitzer

Last summer, Lilly Pulitzer, the apparel company known for its bright fabrics and patterned designs, worked with Snapchat to create branded picture overlays that allowed shoppers in Lilly Pulitzer stores to use custom geofilters with the brand’s signature patterns.

The initiative helped Lilly Pulitzer achieve wider brand recognition, and by only giving 31 stories access to the filters, also gave the campaign a sense of exclusivity.

Takeaway: It’s possible to create partnerships and campaigns that last longer than a 10-second snap or 24-hour story when brands collaborate directly with the ephemeral giant. Additionally, geofilters give marketers a relatively simple way to promote exposure and engagement in specific locations.

Brands are still discovering the best ways to use Snapchat to connect with audiences. But while the playfulness of the platform was once expected to clash with marketing needs, these four brands have given a glimpse into how powerful the platform can be. Just ask the 100 million people who use it every day.

The post 4 Awesome Snapchat Marketing Case Studies appeared first on Contently.

B2C marketers can’t have all the fun. Sure, they can get an SNL star to spoof Fifty Shades of Grey like Audi did, or create a blockbuster movie entirely about their product like LEGO. But just because B2B technology marketers aren’t selling something as sexy as a new car doesn’t mean they can’t engage their audiences in equally exciting ways.

Aside from their products, companies in the tech and enterprise industries have something that their consumers will always want: information. And one of the best ways for brands to deliver that information is through content marketing. It’s much easier to grab people’s attention with a helpful video or infographic than a dry press release.

According to the Content Marketing Institute study “B2B Content Marketing: 2015 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends—North America,” 86 percent of B2B marketers use content marketing, but only 38 percent believe their efforts are effective. Still, 70 percent say they are creating more content than they were last year, and 55 percent plan to increase their content marketing spend in 2015.

For B2B companies to succeed as publishers, a few crucial questions have to be answered: What will they spend that budget on? How will they use it to create more effective content campaigns? And what types of content will marketers produce in an attempt to engage consumers?

In this e-book, we’ll dive into popular B2B marketing trends that have emerged in the B2B tech industry. We’ll also look at brands—HubSpot, GE, Buffer, and SAP—whose impressive campaigns offer models for those looking to pack a punch. As we’ll cover in greater detail below, these leading brands are showing others that they don’t need to sell a shiny car in order to create high-quality marketing campaigns.

Download your free copy of State of Content Marketing: B2B Tech.

The post State of Content Marketing B2B Tech: Trends and Case Studies Transforming the Industry appeared first on Contently.

B2C marketers can’t have all the fun. Sure, they can get an SNL star to spoof Fifty Shades of Grey like Audi did, or create a blockbuster movie entirely about their product like LEGO. But just because B2B technology marketers aren’t selling something as sexy as a new car doesn’t mean they can’t engage their audiences in equally exciting ways.

Aside from their products, companies in the tech and enterprise industries have something that their consumers will always want: information. And one of the best ways for brands to deliver that information is through content marketing. It’s much easier to grab people’s attention with a helpful video or infographic than a dry press release.

According to the Content Marketing Institute study “B2B Content Marketing: 2015 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends—North America,” 86 percent of B2B marketers use content marketing, but only 38 percent believe their efforts are effective. Still, 70 percent say they are creating more content than they were last year, and 55 percent plan to increase their content marketing spend in 2015.

For B2B companies to succeed as publishers, a few crucial questions have to be answered: What will they spend that budget on? How will they use it to create more effective content campaigns? And what types of content will marketers produce in an attempt to engage consumers?

In this e-book, we’ll dive into popular B2B marketing trends that have emerged in the B2B tech industry. We’ll also look at brands—HubSpot, GE, Buffer, and SAP—whose impressive campaigns offer models for those looking to pack a punch. As we’ll cover in greater detail below, these leading brands are showing others that they don’t need to sell a shiny car in order to create high-quality marketing campaigns.

Trends

Image via Syda Productions

Good old-fashioned blogging

For all the talk about exciting and innovative new content formats, blogging remains the most common content marketing outlet for B2B marketers—and for good reason. According to Demand Gen Report’s 2014 “B2B Content Preferences Survey,” out of 11 different types of content, blog posts are most likely to be shared by B2B buyers, with 40 percent saying they share them frequently. Blogs are great platforms for showcasing many different types of content: text, video, infographics. These blog posts can be any length, although the industry is trending towards a mix of longform and shortform. BuzzSumo found that long content is more viral than short content, and as a result, experts are predicting that medium-sized content will die out.

One of the biggest advantages of company blogs is that they provide an easy way to showcase a range of expert voices—from staff and executives to freelance writers and guest writers from other companies.

For example, Moz, an SEO software company, has been building a blog audience for a decade with insights for marketers and an honest, transparent look at the successes and challenges of its business. Pieces like its “Beginner’s Guide to SEO” have generated a great deal of buzz and positive feedback, and have provided a constant source of inbound leads. Moz’s blog is composed of content from a community of freelance writers, guest contributors, and its three-person in-house content team.

Though not in the tech industry per se, one of the great examples of this is American Express OPEN Forum. The credit card company took blogging a step further by creating an interactive content hub and opening it up to its community of small-business owners, cultivating an audience of millions by publishing advice from experts and inviting entrepreneurs to submit questions for the writers and other OPEN Forum members to answer.

LinkedIn

In addition to a blog hosted on your own domain, another great platform B2B companies are leveraging to establish thought leadership is LinkedIn. The social site is built for professionals to connect with one another, and now that LinkedIn has given every user the opportunity to publish content directly to the platform, marketers can share their insights with colleagues and potential customers. With paid distribution, marketers can also sponsor content like e-books and blog posts, and hyper-target that content to a very specific readership.

According to the CMI’s studies, 87 percent of B2B marketers use LinkedIn to distribute content (tying Twitter as the most-used platform) and cite LinkedIn as their most effective social media platform.

Case studies and white papers

According to Demand Gen Report’s 2014 survey, white papers are the most popular form of content among B2B consumers (78 percent), with case studies following at a close second (73 percent). These two types of content allow B2B marketers to fully explain the benefits of their products and outline how they can help potential clients; they have stronger narratives than press releases and are often more structured than blog posts.

These more detailed pieces of content have become so beneficial that Genpact, a business services company, built an international brand newsroom to churn out over 40 high-quality case studies and white papers per month.

In-person events

Skype sessions and digital hangouts have their appeal, but it’s hard to beat face-to-face communication. According to the CMI’s study, 90 percent of B2B enterprise marketers use in-person events as a marketing tactic. In fact, they’ve replaced videos as the tactic B2B enterprise marketers use most often.

In-person events can take various forms, including conferences, trade shows, and networking parties that bring people together and spur real-time discussion.

Webinars

If you can’t sufficiently get your point across through text and don’t have the resources to throw a party to meet potential clients in person, webinars can be a simple way to communicate with your audience and generate leads. According to the CMI’s report, 70 percent of technology marketers say webinars and videos are the most effective tactics they use.

HubSpot, an inbound marketing and sales platform, uses webinars as a key component of its successful marketing mix. HubSpot CMO Mike Volpe said on Quora that he believes HubSpot was the first company to hold a webinar about using Twitter for marketing and PR. That webinar, launched in 2008, had over 3,000 registrations and helped HubSpot build its social channels, as it used Twitter to generate questions and fuel discussion. Just a couple of years later, in 2010, HubSpot’s most popular webinar, “The Science of Facebook Marketing,” had a whopping 13,000 sign-ups.

Email marketing

In 2012, 59 percent of B2B marketers said email was the most effective channel for generating revenue, according to BtoB Magazine. Now, more brands continue to jump on that bandwagon as they become better acquainted with marketing automation services. Email marketing can help B2B marketers retain readers and send informative content directly to the inboxes of those who have already expressed interest in a brand. This idea is echoed by Moz co-founder Rand Fishkin, who cites the company’s biweekly email newsletter as one of the most effective tactics Moz has used for growing an audience. On that same note, Buffer also doubled its sign-ups month over month in the summer of 2014 by using email marketing.

Best-in-Class Examples

^{Image via Hubspot}

HubSpot

HubSpot has created one of the most dynamic B2B blogs in the content marketing space with its Hubspot blogs. Google anything related to inbound marketing and you’re likely to see a handful of HubSpot pieces near the top of the search results. Rightfully so. As GrowthHackers points out, HubSpot founders Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah literally wrote the (e-)book on inbound marketing in 2009.

Segmented into three main blogs—Marketing, Sales, and Agency—HubSpot’s content hub features unique and informative pieces like “14 Mesmerizing Cinemagraphs That Show Off Facebook’s New Ad Format,” “The ABCs of Finding the Hottest Prospects,” and “18 of the Best Email Subject Lines You’ve Ever Read.” HubSpot’s content drove over 2 million views in January 2015, which is an impressive stat for one of HubSpot’s key content metrics: visits.

Along with traffic, however, HubSpot’s main objective for its blogs is to drive leads. Over time, the company has optimized them for this purpose. Volpe said on Quora that placing a call to action at the bottom of every post tripled the number of leads that came in from Inbound Hub.

Joe Chernov, VP of content at HubSpot, told Contently, “I’ve joked that content is to inbound what theArc Reactor is to Iron Man. Content drives search, search generates traffic, traffic yields readers, readers become leads, and leads fuel sales. Without content, that very fundamental process stalls.”

“Content is to inbound what the Arc Reactor is to Iron Man. Content drives search, search generates traffic, traffic yields readers, readers become leads, and leads fuel sales.”

The driving force behind this process is HubSpot’s in-house content team, which is split into two groups: one for shortform blog content and another for longform offerings such as e-books and podcasts.

What are the benefits of producing content that lives on your own site? Chernov likes to quote Volpe on this one, who’s fond of saying, “We don’t like to build houses on other people’s land.” In other words, constructing your own content hub from scratch will take more time and resources than just publishing to a third-party site. However, its benefits will be far greater because you will develop a loyal audience of consumers returning to your brand’s domain looking for information that will help their own businesses.

“We don’t like to build houses on other people’s land.”

Speaking of owned media, the company also spun off HubSpot.tv, a video hub dedicated to inbound marketing that’s also associated with Inbound.org, a community discussion site for marketers, founded in 2012 by Shah and Moz’s Rand Fishkin. It has since grown to over 30,000 members.

“HubSpot is not only a company, but it’s also the catalyst of a movement,” Chernov said. “And as a community has coalesced around that movement, it’s our job to nurture and foster it.”

As B2B marketers are coming to learn, the best way to do that is through content marketing.

GE

Six years ago, would you have associated General Electric with awesome stories about robots and 3D imaging of the human body? Probably not. But you can now, thanks to GE Reports, the tech conglomerate’s online magazine.

“I basically ignored press releases and really focused one hundred percent on storytelling,” Tomas Kellner, GE Reports’ managing editor, told Contently. “My stories have real protagonists who are trying to solve real problems and reach real outcomes.”

“I basically ignored press releases and really focused one hundred percent on storytelling,” said Kellner.

For example, last year he published a story about the development of new software that allows machines to talk to each other. These machines can even tell operators if something is wrong or if their systems are going to break down. It’s not a piece that blatantly promotes GE, but it does tell a cool story that should be relevant and interesting to almost every tech field.

Kellner said, “[The stories] have to be newsworthy enough so a person who is in no way connected to GE or interested in GE or owns GE stock would still walk away and say, ‘This is a really cool piece of information, like I said, I didn’t know before, and this is a really cool company. Maybe I should come back and check on them more often.'”

The GE Reports content team is based in-house and works with marketing firm Group SJR. Kellner handles most of the reporting, but he’s developing a team of writers to help research and develop content. “There has to be somebody inside who understands what you’re trying to do and who can manage the copy and [make sure] that the tone is just right, that it fits within the company’s strategic goal,” Kellner said.

Fittingly, the CMI’s recent study found that 86 percent of the most effective tech B2B marketers have a dedicated person who oversees the content marketing operation.

GE Reports’ recent story of note, “Body of Knowledge,” did the near impossible for brands: It dominated Reddit, which is curated by moderators who are notorious for cracking down on any kind of marketing effort. The story focuses on an innovative CT scan machine that produces 3D pictures of a patient’s organs and bones without exposing them to harmful amounts of radiation.

In addition to Reddit, “Body of Knowledge” was picked up by Newsweek, Time, and The Washington Post, as well as by other international outlets. The story’s viral pickup became a catalyst for new readers to discover the amazing stories GE Reports has to offer. Now, Kellner has people coming to him with stories about the latest developments in technology.

Stories like these also establish the benefits of owned media: They drive direct feedback and encourage readers to explore your site, increasing the likelihood they’ll return to your brand for more helpful and interesting content.

“When our CT scan became old news, there were journalists out there who still wanted to run on the story, so they went for the next thing. The way they found out about [other GE technology] is because that story was featured below our CT scan story,” Kellner said. “When you publish a discrete piece of native content, you can’t really do that.”

Buffer

When Buffer, a social media scheduling app, launched three years ago, it gained almost 100 percent of its new users from content marketing. Buffer’s nascent content operation started with its blog, run by co-founder Leo Widrich, who gained momentum for the company by guest-blogging for as many publications as possible. As detailed on The Content Strategist, Wildrich wrote about 150 articles for other blogs in less than a year, which helped give Buffer the credibility and notoriety it needed to draw in 100,000 users.

The thinking was if Wildrich couldn’t get big sites like Mashable and TechCrunch to write about Buffer’s product, he would just have to take matters into his own hands and write about it himself.

Since Buffer began as a Twitter scheduling app, the blog primarily focused on tips for using Twitter. But as Buffer’s product grew to encompass Facebook and LinkedIn, Wildrich expanded the coverage to include best practices for using those social networks, as well as productivity hacks, psychological studies, and any related stories that readers might find useful. This shift introduced pieces such as “How Much Sleep Do We Really Need to Work Productively?” and “Why We Have Our Best Ideas in the Shower: The Science of Creativity.” As a result, Buffer quadrupled its social reach from 250 shares per post to more than 1,000 shares per post.

The thinking was if Wildrich couldn’t get big sites like Mashable and TechCrunch to write about Buffer’s product, he would just have to take matters into his own hands and write about it himself.

Like HubSpot, Buffer developed enough content to divide its blog into categories: social media, company culture, and engineering. Now, Buffer can cater its content not just to new readers but also returning ones, encouraging brand loyalty.

“For instance, those who may have read blog posts about some of our transparent resources like salariesor pricing will know a bit about our values,” Kevan Lee, Buffer content crafter, said in an email. “Those who read about our social media tips or strategies will understand we’re here to help people and share everything we know about how to help others succeed on social media.”

The site is run by a dedicated team of two: Lee and Courtney Seiter, Buffer’s head of marketing. However, they plan to let anyone from Buffer’s internal team have the opportunity to write on the blog.

“In this way, we kind of look at content as a task force that anyone can join or leave at any time,” Lee said. “In doing so, I’m hopeful that we’ll have the privilege of featuring different voices on the blog and encouraging a wide variety of teammates to share their perspective and learn more about content.”

As Lee writes on Kapost, his team typically publishes four or more 1,500-word posts per week on the blog, with six or more hours of work going into each piece. They also pump out at least one unique visual per post. How do they do it? In order to write 6,000 words each week, Lee wakes up at 5:30 a.m. every morning to write, and he splits each post into a three-day routine: research on day one, writing on day two, and editing on day three. He also recommends minimizing distractions by using a WordPress editor or just writing in a notebook.

Does that sound tough? It’s not so overwhelming if you look at the results. One of Buffer’s most popular pieces of late is the giant listicle “30 Things to Stop Doing to Yourself,” which received more than 500,000 Facebook likes, 20,000 tweets, and 400 comments. Not bad for a social media company that had no readers three years ago.

When it comes to measuring the success of Buffer’s blog posts, Lee noted that his team uses a variation of Moz’s One Metric score, which combines data from Google Analytics, on-site metrics, and social metrics to determine how successful a piece of content was by comparing it to the average performance of the content that came before it. At Buffer, they factor in unique visitors, social shares, time on page, and comments, and they’re looking to include syndication and conversion numbers.

As always, the way for Buffer to keep driving up those numbers is to listen to what questions its audience is asking, identify what information that audience craves, and devise the best way to deliver it to them.

“They’re incredibly helpful in sharing feedback, and they’re able to see the blog from a perspective that I can’t,” Lee writes. Readers don’t just provide feedback about the content itself, but also about the reader experience on the blog. Buffer sent out a reader survey at the start of 2015, and many respondents requested an easier way to browse the sections of longform articles. So Buffer added a table-of-contents plugin to its site.

This communication between reader and content creator is essential to building a loyal, engaged audience through content marketing. As Buffer has proven, marketing shouldn’t just be about pushing a product—it should foster an open exchange of knowledge between brand and consumer.

Autodesk

While many B2B brands are still trying to get one content hub up and running, Autodesk currently has about 200, including one blog for each of its more than 170 products.

Ali Wunderman, Autodesk’s marketing communications manager, said the company’s content operation “gives our audience more than just a product. It’s a platform for thought leadership so that we can help inform people why we’re doing what we’re doing.”

Among the hundreds of blogs, there are a few standouts.

“While many B2B brands are still trying to get one content hub up and running, Autodesk currently has about 200.”

For example, the Line//Shape//Space blog is aimed at helping and inspiring small businesses and exploring “the future of making things.” Divided into three categories—Ideas & Vision, Success Stories, and Business Advice—the site publishes stories such as “Aha Moments: 5 Biggest Epiphanies Every Startup Should Have,” and “Ready for a Space Elevator? Carbon Nanotube Applications Push the Boundaries of Aerospace, Infrastructure, and Medical Fields.” With a niche publication, Autodesk is not just stimulating the conversation around the future of design technology—it’s also leading it. Line//Shape//Space allows Autodesk to develop an owned audience that can return to the company’s microsite in order to learn how to grow their businesses with forward thinking.

In terms of establishing thought leadership, In the Fold, Autodesk’s corporate blog, features insights, news, and opinions from inside the company, curated by the PR department. A recent post by Autodesk President and CEO Carl Bass addresses a competitor that made some bold statements about Autodesk’s products.

Across the content operation, internal talent—including everyone from engineers to marketers to executives—produces content for the blogs. Some teams hire freelancers and contractors to contribute, and others work with content platforms such as Contently, which provides talent for the Spark 3D printing blog. Wunderman, who manages the Spark blog, currently publishes twice a week, but plans to double that in the near future.

Autodesk has also used gamification to incentivize trial users to make a purchase. As Dawn Wolfe, Autodesk senior digital marketing manager, and Andy Mott, Autodesk senior marketing manager of growth, explained at MarketingSherpa‘s B2B Summit 2012, in order to drive sales for its 3ds Max entertainment software products, the company teamed up with Badgeville’s game mechanics platform to create a gaming platform.

To motivate trial users, Autodesk designed a series of missions that guided users through different 3ds Max features. Users who completed missions were rewarded with points, achievement badges, and a place on a leaderboard among their peers. They were also incentivized to earn more points by sharing their achievements on Facebook and Twitter.

The result? Autodesk saw a 10 percent increase in trial downloads and a 40 percent increase in trial usage. This is an incredibly positive sign: Autodesk’s data suggests those who use a trial more than three times are twice as likely to buy the product. Autodesk also won the 2013 Integrated Marketing Award for its customer-centric approach to marketing. Since then, the company has expanded its gamification strategy to engage users with content about other products. Trial users exploring AutoCAD Design Suite Standard were invited to play the game The Apocalypse Trigger.

As noted on Kapost, Autodesk also crowdsources some of its content creation from its community of users. Its Showcase microsite reads, “There are a million stories. Tell us yours.”

Through this platform, Autodesk encourages its consumers to submit content created with the brand’s products. Members of the community are invited to browse these creations and vote on their favorites, and Autodesk chooses one artist to feature each month. February’s artist of the month, Juan Siquier, described the inspiration and process of creating his 3D sculpture “Mad Hatter,” which he produced using Autodesk’s 3ds Max.

Autodesk’s content marketing strategies of gamification and user-generated content are prime examples of how brands can integrate users into their content conversation and dig into the great pool of stories that their consumers already provide.

What the Experts Are Saying

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“Informing buyers and constituents about your technology solutions isn’t enough to be competitive in the B2B space. Humanization of B2B content is essential to differentiate and create more relevant and meaningful experiences.”

—Lee Odden, CEO of TopRank

“Are B2B marketers starting to enlist their customers and advocates to tell their story? We are seeing this happening. For example, our friends at Socialtext, an enterprise social software provider, are increasingly using their customers as the basis for white papers and webinars.”

—Carter Hostelley, Founder and CEO of Leadtail

“Content marketing hype and discussions will turn to more of the importance of customer experience from acquisition to advocacy—especially for SaaS companies. That will, of course, be dependent on delivering the right content at the right time, to the right person for the best experience.”

—Meagen Eisenberg, VP of Customer Acquisition and Marketing at DocuSign

“Twitter’s business advertising platform has added several ways to grow followers and drive engagement, clicks, or conversions by promoting high-value content. We ran a test campaign for our enterprise storage client this fall to see what the ROI would offer. We were impressed by the variable targeting and performance-based payment options Twitter allows. … [W]e predict Twitter’s advertising platform will grow in popularity for B2B brands in the coming year.”

—Taylor Long, Communications Counsel at McClenahanBruer

“Employee advocacy is picking up steam and will become the next big social mega trend as the C-suite in B2B companies wake up to the importance of social business transformation and looks across the organization to integrate social into core business functions.”

—Susan Emerick, Founder and CEO of Brands Rising

Predictions

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Predictive marketing

Predictive marketing is by far the most hot-button prediction for B2B tech and enterprise marketing in 2015. As Monica Wells notes on B2BMarketing.net, predictive analytics identifies leads from much more data and sources than traditional lead-scoring models, and, as a result, are more predictive of the consumer’s buying intent. Predictive marketing will be a huge game-changer for lead acquisition in the B2B space.

Sam Adler, senior director of demand generation at Zend Technologies, writes, “With the recent announcement of Infer’s $25 million round of funding, it’s glaringly obvious that predictive analytics is a space that a lot of companies have their eye on.” He cites several vendors who are already offering predictive analytics solutions, including Lattice Engines, Mintigo, and Leadspace.

Mobile

According to Demand Gen Report’s study, more than 85 percent of buyers require their preferred content to be optimized for mobile devices, up from 69 percent in the previous year’s survey.

Glenn Taylor notes for Demand Gen Report, “Executives are using mobile devices to research, communicate, and browse the web—as a brand, you need to meet them where they are.”

B2B brands can get boost their mobile strategy by launching an app or setting up a mobile-friendly website and taking advantage of personalized geo-location targeting in order to deliver shortform content that audiences can consume quickly and on the go.

Marketing automation

According to a 2014 study by SiriusDecisions, only 16 percent of North American B2B companies were using marketing automation, but its adoption was increasing at an annual rate of 22 percent. Marketing automation should only increase since, according to Aberdeen Group, brands that use it convert 53 percent more leads into qualified leads. Additionally, Lenskold Group reports that 78 percent of successful marketers claim marketing automation is the asset most responsible for increasing revenue.

According to Jay Famico, SiriusDecisions’ technology practice director, it’s virtually impossible to execute personalized messaging at scale without a marketing automation platform for email marketing, social media distribution, or software integrations. These services will help content marketers manage their time more efficiently while freeing them up to pump out consistent, relevant content to their consumers.

Documented content strategies

If there’s one simple thing B2B marketers need to learn, it’s the three magic words that Copyblogger’s Jerod Morris emphasizes: Write. It. Down.

In its 2014 reports, the CMI found that less than 50 percent of technology and enterprise marketers have a documented content strategy. And yet those who do report their strategies are more effective in all aspects of their marketing strategies, and they also face fewer challenges in these areas. For example, 62 percent of B2B tech marketers who have a content strategy believe their organizations are effective at content marketing, but only 14 percent of those without a documented strategy say the same. Also, only 32 percent of B2B enterprise marketers who have a documented content strategy are worried about an inability to measure content effectiveness.

It seems that in order for B2B marketers to be more successful with their content campaigns, they need to move past the discussion phase, put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard, and clearly record their strategies and goals.

Conclusion

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A well-executed infographic about the benefits of your software might not hold up on a mass scale against a seductive, puppy-filled beer commercial. But for that executive who’s seeking just the right solution for his business, it could mean the difference between five leads and 50 leads in a brand’s marketing funnel. The best thing B2B tech and enterprise marketers can do for their consumers is to share their knowledge and create conversations not just around their products, but also their industries. This way, they can emerge as thought leaders and earn people’s trust to ultimately drive those coveted conversions.

The post State of Content Marketing: B2B Tech appeared first on Contently.

Content marketing success is on the rise, but that isn’t necessarily translating to bigger budgets.

According to Ascend2’s newest Content Marketing Trends Survey, 89 percent of respondents say they’ve had success with content marketing. Despite the good news, less than half of marketers reported that they plan to increase their content budgets—even though they cite lack of resources (53 percent) and budget constraints (40 percent) as two of the most challenging obstacles preventing marketers from reaching their most important objectives.

So, with these limited budgets in mind, what strategies and tactics can marketers employ to engage their audiences? The solution is to identify the strategies that are most effective while also being relatively easy to create.

The below chart from Ascend2’s report visualizes which content formats provide that sweet spot, proving effective while not very difficult to create. The bigger the gap between blue and orange, the better. As you can see, the most viable way to give your content marketing a boost seem to be focusing on articles, case studies, visual aids, and eNewsletters. These forms are the Goldilocks of content: not too difficult, and just the right amount of effectiveness.

Videos, white papers, and webinars, on the other hand, fall on the other side of the spectrum. They’re a lot of work, take time and resources to do well, and if they’re not promoted correctly, can fall flat and deliver a disastrous ROI. Bottom line: They’re only worth doing if you’re prepared to invest in them.

Take a look at Ascend2’s chart for more insight on doing your content right.

The post The Most Effective and Difficult Types of Content Marketing, in One Chart appeared first on Contently.

Here ’round Contently way, we’re still working on a refined ROI formula for content—one that can be applied across an entire organization. For a formula to scale it needs to take into account dozens of inputs—from how content affects outbound sales efforts, to what stories are most effective at pushing prospects into contract, to how share of voice affects a brand’s bottom line. That said, we’ve managed to do a decent job tying the content we produce here directly to our sales funnel. Every deal is different, especially in a B2B company of our size, but I want to take a look at one new customer to illustrate a little bit about how our content directly drives sales and ROI.

The story concludes in March, with a contract signed by a new Contently client—a company that we’ll call McDuck Enterprises. But it begins a month earlier, with a simple article. Using a powerful if often misused tool called Marketo, we’re able to work backwards and track the whole customer journey—from the first time they found out about us, to the day they signed on the dotted line, and beyond. And what do you know: Content played a part almost every step of the way.

First contact

Our initial contact was the senior marketing manager at McDuck Enterprises—let’s call her Webigail Vanderquack (Webby for short). Webby first encountered Contently on February 16, when she read an article we’d written on the 12 best content marketing blogs of 2014. She went on to check out almost all of the blogs on the list, and then return to The Content Strategist to read a story on how brands can build owned audiences.

Cost of these two articles: $700

More touchpoints

Ten days later, on February 25, Webby was back, again reading two articles:

12 Startup Blogs That Are Killing the Game

These 4 Companies Prove Content Marketing Is Essential to Startups

What’s interesting about the first four articles Webby read is that they were all over two months old, and none of them mentions Contently. This illustrates two really important tenets of content marketing:

1) No self promotion or product placement! The key is to establish a reader’s trust—the fact that you wrote the article in the first place is product placement enough.

2) The articles weren’t new, which shows the compounding return of publishing consistently. Contently commissioned and paid for those articles months ago, and yet they continue to drive interest from potential clients. The marketing cost of these is basically zero.

Those two articles cost another $700, bringing the tab up to $1,400.

Down the funnel

Two days later, our content marketing really started to bear fruit.

On February 25, Webby decided she wanted to talk to us about what we do, so she went to Contently’s homepage and filled out a lead form. When that happens, red lights and buzzers start to go off in the windowless cave where we keep our sales team (not really), and one of our sales strategists reaches out to Webby, setting up a call for the next week.

On March 2, in the hours leading up to that call, Webby checked out our homepage, a couple examples of work we’ve done for clients, and a couple of case studies (which cost us around $450 each to produce). She also looked at the portfolio of one of our writers, Ritika Puri, who had not coincidentally authored the story on startup blogs.

By the time she got on the phone with Luke and Ali from our sales team, Webby mainly wanted to talk about McDuck Enterprises’ content goal: launching a content hub for its B2B customers. It didn’t take long for her to decide we were a good potential partner—two days later, she brought in two other members of her team for a demo.

The final push

At this point, Webby moved from being a prospect to being an opportunity —that is, there was a reasonable likelihood of her becoming a customer. But she still wasn’t convinced.

Webby’s main question: Why shouldn’t she use her budget to hire two writers in-house, as opposed to spending it on a vendor like Contently. Luckily, Ali and Luke had an answer—you guessed it, another story. In this case, “Build vs Buy,” an examination we’d done about the pros and cons of hiring in-house vs. partnering with a vendor.

Cost: $350

Webby called back the next day and asked for proposal. After spending a few hours on the phone negotiating with Luke and Ali, McDuck Enterprises came onboard. The total value of the contract: $82,000.

Between the time she came in the door and the time she was ready to sign a contract, Webby read five articles and two case studies. She visited seven pages of our website, and spent a total of about five hours on the phone with our sales team. Attribution is tricky, and there’s no set standard, but here’s a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation:

We decided to attribute 50 percent of the revenue to content and 50 percent to sales, since the first touchpoint came from an article (for outbound leads, sales would get a higher percentage of the credit).

Sales revenue: $41,000

Sales cost: $6,500 (this is basically the cost of the sales team’s time and commission)

Sales ROI: 6.3x

Content revenue: $41,000

Content cost: $2,650

Content ROI: 15.5x

We can also break down the content ROI a bit further by attaching a value to each article. (Note: We give the first and last touch points more value, usually 20 percent of the total.) Here’s how it breaks down:

• “12 Best Content Marketing Blogs”: $8,200 (23x ROI)
• “Build vs. Buy”: $8,200 (23x ROI)
• “12 Startup Blogs Killing the Game”: $3,280 (9.4x ROI)
• “How Brands Use Influencers to Build Owned Audiences”: $3,280 (9.4x ROI)
• “These 4 Companies Prove Content Marketing Is Essential to Startups”: $3,280 (9.4x ROI)
• Case Study #1: $3,280 (7.3x ROI)
• Case Study #2: $3,280 (7.3x ROI)

Now for the caveats.

One important thing to note is that this just looks at a single deal—some of our clients spend a lot more time in our marketing funnel, and spend a lot more time looking at content before they buy… and some spend less. It’s also true that a single story can (and does) impact multiple deals. Another very important note is that I haven’t addressed the cost of our content marketing as a whole, which includes, among other things: stories that don’t impact the sales funnel, my own inflated salary, and the cost of the software we use to manage the process—that’s a story for another day (soon).

But by taking these basic calculations and applying them out across our entire publishing operation and sales funnel, we’re able to get a pretty accurate picture of just how much revenue our content is driving. And it’s a lot.

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The company capitalizes on the efforts of its sellers, offering the “Etsy Guide to SEO” with tips and tutorials for users to optimize their Etsy store, bringing in more traffic. The strategy is genius, because it places the effort in the hands of the user, strengthening the overall optimization for Etsy as a whole with minimal effort on the corporate side.

The result is a whole sub-culture of Etsy strategists, the sales force using the platform to sell their own handmade goods who relentlessly discuss and analyze ways to generate more traffic for their Etsy stores. A search on Google for “Etsy strategy” brings up hundreds of forums, discussion groups and blogs offering the latest inside techniques for building traffic on Etsy.

Easy on the Content

The term content strategy is an interesting one in relation to Etsy. Realistically, Etsy’s traffic strategy isn’t fundamentally grounded in blog content, as most major internet presences are.

Etsy has a blog, but beyond this, its content strategy primarily consists of on-site SEO, such as circular in-site links using searchable keywords to drive visitors to certain areas of the site.

The Etsy forum, another genius user-generated content strategy, houses the usual site outage reports as well as provides a built-in area for sellers to discuss sales and traffic strategies. Again, this content contributes to the overall SEO value of the Etsy website as a whole, and forum posts are generally naturally packed with relevant keywords.

Relying so heavily on forum content to drive SEO is an interesting risk in the post-PANDA web era, as little discussion has been made among industry analysts about the impact of Google’s PANDA update on forum content. That said, Etsy has plenty of other avenues through which it’s building organic inbound links: Through sellers’ blog posts on their personal blogs, aimed at driving traffic to their own Etsy stores and forums found elsewhere on the web.

The Risks Work

Risks associated with forum content include the natural tendency to write as one speaks, resulting in less “professional” content, and the collective nature of a forum as a place where hundreds — or thousands — of authors share their brief musings about a topic.

Etsy balances this well, however, with a high-quality blog periodically featuring various sellers, taking an in-depth look at some of the more unique offerings found on Etsy, and of course the crafty how-tos.

The Community Speaks

That said, Etsy’s blog is also populated with a multitude of voices, albeit moderated and professionalized by a team of editors, who also contribute regularly to balance out the cacophony. Sellers can pitch story ideas to editors, an appealing opportunity to those who are driven to attract more attention to their Etsy offerings.

The nature of Etsy’s business model is such that it allows a mass effort to contribute to the overall pie in terms of content and SEO.

Unlike a general forum, where contributors are motivated merely by the sound of their own keyboards, Etsy users have something to gain by being an active community participant on a personal and financial level.

The result is a win-win solution that has helped catapult Etsy, a site that started as something of an online flea market, to a major web enterprise. The business model allows the masses to earn recognition and profit financially in the hand-crafted goods vertical, one that otherwise has multiple barriers to entry, including high production costs.

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