Some marketers expect content revenue to have a linear path. You make content, people click on it, and then—BOOM—they immediately buy something or fill out a demo request form. After all, if our search ads work that way, shouldn’t content work that way too?

It doesn’t, but that’s not a bad thing. Content is all about building trust and loyalty with people so that when they’re ready to buy something, you’re their first choice—driving continuous demand and making the sales process much easier.

This is why we invest so much of our marketing budget in content at Contently. The vast majority of people don’t just read an article like this and request a demo. But they do come back and read something a few days later, then sign up for our newsletter or attend a webinar. When the time is right, they request a demo to learn how we can help.

While content conversion doesn’t follow a linear pathway, you can chart these stages to tie your content to revenue.

The 3 stages of content ROI

I’ve found it’s easiest to tackle content marketing ROI when you chunk it into three stages. The best place to start is at the upper half of the funnel, where you can map how your audience turns into sales-ready leads.

1. Audience growth

At this stage, you’re trying to make a damn good impression on your target audience in hopes of converting them to the next stage. You want to build awareness, trust, and an overall positive brand sentiment through helpful, entertaining content.

Most marketers are comfortable with the key metrics at this stage—they’re the ones Google Analytics shows you default: unique visitors, return visitors, time on site, pages/sessions, and scroll depth. Social metrics—shares, comments, likes—come into play here too.

We’ll talk about how to maximize audience growth in a bit, but some content marketers tend to stop here. That’s a mistake because if you want to drive revenue from your content, you need to inspire people to take an action.

To drive more action, you want a strong SEO strategy that’ll bring in the right type of readers. For instance, we focus on ranking for keywords like “best content marketing platforms,” “how to write a white paper,” “enterprise content marketing,” “content marketing for banks,” and “b2b content marketing funnel.” These keywords are likely to attract people who are good customer fits for Contently.

You also shouldn’t be afraid to use paid distribution to reach more folks who fit your ideal customer profile. It’s a great way to grow the top of your content marketing funnel. It’s getting more effective, too, since paid content distribution costs are down 34 percent since March.

2. Content leads

A lot of marketers call anyone who downloads their e-book or attends a webinar a “lead,” but I find that misleading—particularly to your sales team. Just because someone downloads an e-book doesn’t mean they’re ready for a sales call. It’d be like if you downloaded Tinder and immediately got a passive aggressive voicemail from a wedding planner. These things take time.

I prefer to call these folks a “content conversion” or “content lead.” They’ve taken an action that’ll allow us to build a deeper relationship with them. Trust doesn’t magically build after one article. But if someone starts reading your newsletter every week, or attending hour-long webinars, or takes an educational course you made, that person is much more likely to become your customer in the future.

Your job is to make it as easy as possible for people to convert into content leads. Give them a few different options. For instance, we’ll offer free content resources each week on a blue bar across the top of our blog. Right below it, there’s a sticky button to subscribe to our newsletter.

Once a month, we’ll also target each visitor with a prompt to sign up for our newsletter using Sumo, which converts at almost a 3 percent rate.

We also include a content offer unit on the right rail. We’re a tech company, so we don’t need to sell ads, but we can still put that white space to good use.

If you want a B2C example, Marriott does a great job of using smart UX on its popular travel mag, Marriott Bonvoy Traveler, to maximize conversions.

(Disclosure: Marriott is a Contently customer.)

Here, you want to track both the number of content conversions as well as the rate your visitors convert to one of your content offers. Google Analytics conversion goals are a great tool to do this. (Check out Andy Crestodina’s guide for more.) And you need to properly nurturing content leads through a marketing automation platform until they become sales-ready leads.

3. Sales-ready leads

Next, you want to nurture your content leads until they become sales-ready. What is a sales-ready lead? Someone who’s raised their hand and asked to learn more about your product, usually by filling out a form on your website.

At this stage, you want to nurture your content leads with a drip campaign of relevant content. If someone signed up for a webinar on content marketing ROI, follow up with additional articles, case studies, and product videos that cover the topic. Feel free to include a call-to-action to talk to sales. You want to make it easy to convert—but only after you’ve delivered valuable content.

Once those leads hit sales, you can drive a massive amount of additional ROI through a strong sales enablement strategy. That’s the topic of a whole other blog post, which you can read here.

Making your own map

To tie content to revenue, track your conversion rates at each of these three stages and map how content flows downstream until someone becomes a sales-ready lead.

Say we drive 100,000 unique visitors at the audience growth stage. Based on our conversion goals, we know that 1 percent will sign up for a webinar or another content offer, while another 2-3 percent will sign up for our newsletter. This translates to 1,000 webinar sign-ups and 2,000 newsletter sign-ups.

Next, via our marketing automation platform, we look at the rate at which our webinar attendees and newsletter subscribers convert to demo requests. Our model shows that for every 100,000 visitors to our blog, we’ll generate 80 demo requests.

Then, to get all the way to revenue, you just need to understand how much each sales-ready lead is worth to your business. Say that your average deal size is $100,000, and each lead converts to a sale at a 5 percent rate. In that scenario, each demo request adds $5,000 in weighted pipeline, and those 80 demo requests are worth $400,000 to your business.

The compounding returns of the content marketing funnel

The great news about content marketing is that when it’s done well, you’ll see compounding returns over time.

Most marketing is fleeting. Spend $500 on ads today, and you’ll have to spend again tomorrow to see the same results. But spend $500 on a piece of great content today and it will drive continuous traffic and leads for free—by ranking well for search, getting shared on social, engaging website visitors, and increasing newsletter engagement.

As I wrote last month, this phenomenon is called the compounding returns of content. Even as your monthly investment in content remains flat, the results will compound over time. And if your content marketing funnel is set up correctly, that audience growth will translate into sales.

There’s never been a better time to build your audience. Engagement with branded content is up 16 percent right now, and people are eager for insights and thought leadership that will help them overcome new challenges and do their jobs better.

Help them overcome those challenges while following the guidelines here, and you’ll build a content marketing machine that’ll deliver compounding revenue for years to come.

This article is based off my webinar, How to Make the Case for Content Marketing: Compounding Returns and ROI. Watch it on demand here.

The post How to Map Content Marketing to Revenue, in 3 Steps appeared first on Contently.

How Dubin pulled it off is the stuff of marketing legend. His company, Dollar Shave Club, rose from obscurity in 2012 after he created a YouTube video called “Our Blades Are F***ing Great.” The video only cost a few thousand dollars to produce, but it caught mainstream attention. It established Dollar Shave Club as a funny, irreverent, bold, and most importantly, helpful brand.

Brands love to talk about going viral; Dubin actually did it. He created a single piece of content, and suddenly, millions of people knew about his business. Better yet, that awareness led to revenue. Within two days, Dollar Shave Club had more than 12,000 orders. (The response was so overwhelming that it crashed the company website) The company’s annual revenue rose millions year after year. And in 2017, Unilever bought it for $1 billion.

That’s quite the fairy tale, right? Well, Dollar Shave Club’s origin story is a little more complex than it seems at first glance.

The brand’s success was about more than just going viral or getting lucky. Like other companies that have mastered content marketing, Dollar Shave Club had a clear mission, audience research, a unique voice, and high-quality storytelling.

Content marketers in all industries can learn from these examples. You don’t need an unlimited budget or a team of 80 to drive business results (although more resources is always nice.) But what you do need is an understanding of the different components that’ll set your company up for content marketing success.

A model for success

A brand is just the sum of all interactions someone has with a company. Every purchase, TV commercial, customer service call, and tweet contributes to the relationship, whether good or bad. Over the past decade, content marketing has become one of the primary ways brands build those relationships. If you want to drive awareness, trust, and loyalty, great storytelling is much more effective than intrusive ads or overt promotion.

Engaging the right audience starts with a basic question: How are you going to help someone?

As Joe Lazauskas, our director of content strategy, writes:

“The easiest way to build those relationships is to genuinely help people. If you’re B2B, help people get better at their job and move up in their careers. If you’re B2C, help them enjoy personal passions (travel, fitness, wellness, food, sports, etc.) more. If you help someone master their little corner of the universe a little bit better, they’ll trust you.”

Marketers think they have to be perfect at this from the very beginning, but building a brand takes time. If you do things right, you’ll start to see progress.

Just ask Michael Dubin. Dollar Shave Club didn’t happen overnight. “The beginning of the story is about solving a problem for guys,” he told Fortune magazine in 2015.

With that simple sentence, Dubin clearly articulated the blueprint for meaningful content marketing. First, he started with a problem—razors are too expensive and inaccessible. He locked in on a specific audience—guys, specifically people old enough to shave who wanted simplicity over luxury. Then, he found a way to reach them and solve that problem—a subscription service that brought them razors for one dollar per month. That foundation established why the brand existed, which would serve every video, blog post, and marketing asset to follow.

You see, the billion-dollar deal had little to do with Dollar Shave Club’s products. Dubin actually bought razors pre-made from a wholesaler named Dorco. What Unilever really wanted was access to the relationships Dollar Shave Club had fostered through content.

The brand invested heavily after the success of the YouTube video. It started sending customers a monthly print magazine called The Bathroom Minutes with their razors. There was a popular Father’s Day video series. Then came Mel Magazine, a digital publication that specializes in ambitious, longform stories on topics off the beaten path. It’s the only place you can read about people who refuse to drink water or watch documentaries about former Harvard graduates who become medieval fighters.

At the time of the sale in 2017, Dubin had more than 3 million subscribers coming back for more every month.

Building this type of content program is so difficult because it requires the perfect combination of strategy, talent, process, and tools. Contently developed our own Content Maturity Model to show what the different phases of success look like:

Based on all the market research we’ve compiled over the last decade, too many brands are still stuck in content chaos. They may publish a blog sporadically or create marketing assets they hope will drive business results. We know this approach doesn’t work long term. A Contently study found that 98 percent of senior marketers believe that having and following a content strategy is crucial, but only 55 percent actually have a documented strategy.

What’s causing this disconnect? Why is 65 percent of content either unusable or unfindable, according to SiriusDecisions? And why are 75 percent of B2B organizations without a formalized content process?

To help marketers right the ship, we’ve releasing a series of five playbooks over the next few months. They’ll cover:

• Brand Awareness & Thought Leadership
• Lead Generation
• Scale & Alignment
• Sales Enablement
• Retention

For each e-book, we spoke with some of the most insightful content marketers out there to uncover their biggest tips and pain points. By the end of the series, we’ll tell you everything you need to know about building your brand, setting up effective internal processes, and proving the value of content marketing throughout your organization.

Whether you work in B2B or B2C, the goal of these playbooks is to get you out of content chaos and on the path to content mastery. Let’s get started.

This is an excerpt from The Content Marketer’s Playbook: Brand Awareness & Thought Leadership. Click here to read the entire first e-book.

The post How to Build Brand Awareness & Thought Leadership appeared first on Contently.

I also found out that you can learn a lot about marketing while working on the front lines for a big retailer. We were instructed to ask shoppers for email addresses or zip codes as they checked out, and I noticed that many customers seemed taken aback. They were hesitant to give away any type of information, even something as innocuous as a zip code.

This was one of the first times I realized that for consumers, any exchange of information with a brand is a transaction.

No such thing as a free e-book

Just like my customers buying the latest dad fashion, B2B consumers have become wary of giving away their email address for an e-book, checklist, or guide. They know that if they enter their email address, they’re going to end up in a drip feed (or, worse, a sales call queue) for a product they may not need.

That’s not exactly a customer-centric experience.

But can you really blame marketers? They’ve been tasked with building audiences and delivering leads to hungry sales teams. Eighty-five percent of B2B content marketers report that lead generation is the most important KPI for their organization. Can they reliably hit their goals without lead forms?

Drift, a business-centric messaging app, made headlines this summer when it ditched email forms on all premium content, and the digital marketing community reacted in a big way. The announcement became one of the company’s top posts as it burned up the charts in marketing discussion groups. Drift has been perhaps the loudest voice in this movement—spurring others to experiment as well—but companies like MailChimp have been quietly giving away their best content for years.

New or not, these experiments have spurred a much-needed discussion (and a few hot takes) about the ubiquitous email form: how and where it’s used, and what could be gained (or lost) by adjusting the strategy.

The problem

Digital marketers seem to have wised up when it comes to relying on social media distribution platforms. Marketers got fat on free traffic from Facebook and Twitter, only to see the organic reach of those platforms collapse as social networks began to monetize their user base.

Email came back in vogue, and with it a hunger for ever-growing lists.

This could be seen on the front pages of discussion sites like Inbound.org and Growth Hackers, where hundreds of articles bragged about how marketers could growth-hack their way to thousands of email subscribers in a matter of weeks.

But lost in all this was whether the content itself was actually effective. After all, “lead generation” isn’t a measure of content quality.

“If someone gets this big promise on a landing page and converts into a subscriber, but the piece they then open is terrible, why would they want to hear from you again?” said marketing writer, speaker, and podcast host Jay Acunzo. “So many marketers lose sight of treating people like people instead of leads.”

Just because a visitor converts doesn’t mean your content delivered value (not yet, at least). Without value, is that reader likely to buy? Lead forms may drive an increase in email addresses, but they can cause a decrease in the overall quality of leads.

“You may grow your email database faster with gated content, but you’re probably getting a lot of leads that are going to churn right away,” said Luke Kintigh, global content and media strategist at Intel. “It comes down to quality versus quantity.”

Many marketers point to lead scoring as a way to help their sales team focus their energy on high-quality leads and sort out the duds. But lead scoring doesn’t fix another big problem that gated content can present: Some strong leads may bounce from landing pages, wary of giving their email address to yet another brand. Everyone knows what to expect when they fill out a form on a squeeze page, and it’s often not the kind of brand experience marketers idolize.

In his influential post about lead forms, Dave Gerhardt of Drift invokes Apple’s brand experience (a surefire way to get a marketer to listen) at the Apple Store. The company meticulously designed the store to get people inside to play with the latest products. Apple knows a vast majority of visitors aren’t going to buy anything, but it doesn’t matter. The Apple Store has become the most popular shop in nearly every mall it enters, driving an experience central to the brand’s marketing plan. Employees aren’t jumping in front of you, asking you to subscribe or fill out a form to learn more about your interests. They just deliver a great experience and trust that you’ll remember it when you need a new phone, laptop, or tablet.

No amount of ad retargeting can overcome a poor first impression brought on by a bad brand experience.

A shift in motivations

The ungated content movement isn’t about ditching email signups altogether. Email marketing has survived dozens of ballyhooed threats in the past and will likely play a major role in content marketing for years to come.

Ultimately, ungating content shifts the motivation from a promise to satisfaction.

“There’s a ton of research that goes into buying one of Intel’s products, both on the consumer and enterprise side,” Kintigh said. “We know we’ll need multiple touch points. To ask for an email address right away would be going from chapter one to chapter ten of the story.”

An immediate email gate on e-books, webinars, and white papers hooks leads with the promise of delivering on an expectation. Readers don’t know if the piece will actually answer their question, just that the landing page copy and headline were enticing enough to give it a shot.

“Oftentimes users are underwhelmed by the content,” Kintigh added. “And this hurts the chances of returning.”

Measuring success, sans form

Instead of hooking prospects on the anticipation of value, the ungated strategy hooks them with delivered value.

At Intel, Kintigh explained success hinges on building relationships. New readers come in from paid and organic channels, who are then retargeted with increasingly specific content based on previous behavior. From there, forms exist to move subscribers from paid acquisition channels to an owned channel like email.

So the email form hasn’t disappeared, it’s just re-contextualized to be more customer-centric. Rather than force users to give up an address before reading, proponents of this ideology can simply place subscription forms within the piece itself, trusting that readers who find it valuable will opt in to hear more from the brand.

(Editor’s note: This is a strategy that clients such as Microsoft use through Contently’s Document Analytics technology.)

“In the long run, it pays off more than trying to collect email right away from a reader,” Kintigh said. “That hard sell can turn them off.”

Adjusting your strategy this way also requires you to modify success metrics. Top-line audience and marketing-qualified lead (MQL) growth will likely still be the main goal, but ungated content could result in fewer conversions. However, these conversions should align more closely aligned with your desired leads, simply because you eliminate people who are really there to just read a gated piece of content.

What you stand to lose

Any shift in strategy will likely come with positive and negative consequences. An ungated approach takes the power out of the marketer’s hands and puts it squarely in the palms of the consumer. This could result in lower numbers of new contacts as well as a slower timeline for converting readers into email subscribers.

But, again, more leads are only good when those leads are all qualified.

“Many marketers have slipped into gaming systems or get-rich-quick schemes for some kind of false god metric, like leads or subscriptions,” Acunzo said. “When we do that, we lose sight of what content marketing is actually for: solving a problem or fulfilling a desire for your audience.”

So what does an ungated strategy look like in practice? Here are three primary areas for you to consider before experimenting:

1. Retargeting: Just because we’re trusting leads to voluntarily subscribe when they’re good and ready doesn’t mean we’re leaving it completely to chance. Instead, think of it as a “rent-to-own” strategy. To get non-converted readers back to a site, an ungated strategy relies on well-planned retargeting campaigns. Visitors who bounced from a piece of content without subscribing can be retargeted with related topics, bringing them back until they’re ready.
2. Rethinking the form: The risk with ditching gated content is people will just consume all of your work without ever converting. Combat this by making it easy to subscribe, request a demo, sign up for events, and more. You can offer optional lead forms. Just because you’re no longer putting premium content behind a gated form doesn’t mean you need to hide the form altogether.
3. The post-conversion approach: After putting so much consideration into the pre-conversion relationship, it’d be a waste to fall back into standard digital marketing practices after someone subscribes. Have a plan in place to use the data you’ve collected on new subscribers from their previous visits to deliver relevant content focused on their interests. The ungated strategy is customer-centric, from the start of the relationship to the finish.

As a teenage Gap sales associate, I learned that “retail is detail.” I’d translate that for the content marketing world to “content is contextual.” Why take that context away from users by hiding your best work behind a wall?

The post What You Gain (and Lose) With Ungated Content appeared first on Contently.

Today, Chip Wilson’s yoga and fitness apparel company racks up over two billion dollars in annual revenue, largely because it’s come to embody a lifestyle. It’s the stuff of active soccer moms, meditation devotees, and women who only consume organic food and raw juices. You don’t just wear Lululemon. You are Lululemon.

The broad scope of lifestyle brands like Lululemon can present a huge content opportunity. But it can also be difficult to zero in on a mission when your brand appeals to so many different people. Marketers are left answering questions like: Who, specifically, is the target audience? What lifestyle content topics are relevant? And is anything truly off brand?

What is a lifestyle brand?

This desire to embody a brand—or, rather, to find a brand that embodies you—is the mentality that lifestyle companies hope to impart on their customers. “Lifestyle” is a broad category, describing everything from travel to DIY, parenting to single living, cooking to fashion, beauty to sportswear. Lululemon, for example, creates an active, wellness-oriented culture through athletic gear and yoga mats. Lifestyle brands like Lululemon sell their culture, not just their product.

Creating a culture-based mission

Defining a mission statement is the first stop on the path to lifestyle brand status. To get there, brands have to know their customers very well. While B2B companies need to answer the question “What service does my product provide?” lifestyle companies need to ask “What kind of unique culture will my brand embody?”

To do this, companies first need to delve deep into their customers’ psyches. What food do they eat? How do they feel about current events? What are their passions? How do they spend their free time, even when they’re not interacting with the product? In short, who are they, and what kind of person do they want to be? This isn’t news, obviously. Market research and surveys are staples of brand development. However, this knowledge of customer behavior can be used differently by a lifestyle brand: Instead of just informing product development or targeted advertising, it also informs the specific culture that the brand creates through digital and other marketing—and the mission statement that drives it.

The components of a powerful mission statement

The mission statement that guided Lululemon’s rise to success provides a strong template for brands developing their own mission. It’s a statement that guides the brand without feeling unnecessarily restrictive.

A mission statement summarizes crucial information that determines a company’s path forward, so it’s important to get it right. The statement should answer these questions:

• What does the company do or provide?
• Who is the customer?
• How does the brand address the customer’s needs?

Lululemon’s original mission statement reads: “Creating components for people to live longer, healthier, fun lives.” There are a few significant factors at play here.

For one thing, notice that Lululemon’s mission is to “create components,” not “sell gear.” There’s a big difference. “Components” might include activewear, water bottles, and yoga mats, but it might also include healthy living tips, running clubs, yoga classes, green juice recipes, detox programs, and books about meditation.

The fact that Lululemon doesn’t limit its mission to products shows that the company recognizes all the other aspects of being a lifestyle brand. The fact that it creates culture is inherent in its mission.

Think about how the company answers the question “Who is the customer?” As a fitness brand, Lululemon knows that its customers are active, wellness-oriented and health-conscious. From there, it can infer other things about them. They are probably interested in diet and nutrition, travel, self-reflection, community, holistic medicine, and events pertaining to those topics. They are generally well-educated and interested in bonus lifestyle topics such as travel and art. This informs the “components” that the company will create in order to build culture around its products.

And finally, per our mission statement guidelines, how does Lululemon address its customers needs? The answer is through the “components” that help customers “live longer, healthier, fun lives.” These components include yoga gear, classes (so customers can get involved and meet others in the community), ambassadors (so they can learn about Lululemon from someone like themselves), healthy living advice, holistic nutrition tips, wellness ideas, travel, inspirational stories, and news pertaining to active living.

Creating culture through content

Never before has there been such an inclusive and far-reaching opportunity to build a brand’s culture. Social media, email messaging, and video and blog content all support a brand’s culture. As a result, content is one of the most important aspects of a lifestyle brand’s marketing plan. Lululemon’s blog and social media topics include wellness tips, personal accounts by athletes and prominent yogis, information on trending health topics, interesting stories about art and culture, and informational how-tos about a conscious, active lifestyle.

All of these factors informed the Lululemon Manifesto, a collection of branded phrases that convey customers’ lifestyle and values. The manifesto is deeply informed by market research. It contains inspiring, uplifting messaging that appeals to Lululemon’s active, success-driven, health-oriented customers. “Do one thing a day that scares you.” “Friends are more important than money.” “Sweat once a day to regenerate your skin.” “This is not your practice life. This is all there is.”

Drawing the line

With so much room for variety, marketers are often left wondering what is truly off brand. The most direct way to tell is to ask whether or not it violates the company’s mission statement. In this way, the mission statement serves as a hard-and-fast line for deciding what will bring the brand value and what will not.

However, given the broad scope of the lifestyle space, some issues will need to be given close examination on a case-by-case basis. Let’s take the example of healthy recipes within Lululemon’s brand messaging.

Many Lululemon customers are vegetarian, a long-held tradition within the yoga community. However, other customers may go a totally different route with their diets. The recent trend of Paleo eating is popular among some fitness gurus, as are gluten-free and low-carb eating. How, then, should Lululemon handle health and wellness posts pertaining to dietary choices? Should it create a positioning statement detailing where the brand stands on matters of diet?

Probably not. Since it would risk alienating customers if it took a position, the best way to handle the issue is to not take one at all. While many wellness brands offer gluten-free and meat-free dietary advice, Lululemon has largely opted out of this content topic. The brand hasn’t published a food-related post since February 2015, when it included an interview with a popular vegetarian food blogger. Instead of including information about vegetarianism specifically, the blogger’s advice was broader. In other words, while Lululemon acknowledges that eating healthy is important to its customer, it doesn’t tell her how to do it.

Let’s compare this approach to that of Crossfit, the fitness and muscle-building program that’s inspired thousands to take up a Paleo-based eating program. The company’s mission clearly states, “Eat meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch and no sugar.” In its first two words, the statement alienates vegans and vegetarians, discouraging them from partaking in Crossfit’s fitness culture. As a result, the niche has been filled not by Crossfit itself, but by independent bloggers and bodybuilders who can capitalize on the need for veg-friendly culture within the Crossfit community. It falls to the brand itself to determine what cultural choices would be in direct violation of company values, and which are simply limiting its reach to a larger potential audience.

Living the life

Lifestyle companies have a unique opportunity to turn their own customers into walking advertisements for their brand. Through these customers, companies show people what their lives could look like if they took up the culture of the brand. Whether you like Lululemon or not, there’s no question of its relevance within the fitness world. Lululemon’s customers’ clearly identify with the company. In many ways, they structure their lifestyle around the products and digital content put forth by the brand.

Lululemon customers aren’t just consumers, they’re devotees. They themselves are the company’s best advertising tool, and that’s because they embody its culture, rather than simply wearing its product.

The post Why Brands Need a Mission to Create Great Lifestyle Content appeared first on Contently.