What our Top 5 Posts Teach us About Content Marketing

One of my January projects every year is to look back at some of our marketing and analytics data and see what worked and what we should do more of.  I looked at our Top 5 blog posts for 2017 and it was an interesting mix. Here are the posts and what I learned.

The Importance of Investigation

This is a post from July 2015 and it is the gift that keeps on giving. This is important to remember and is at the core of any content marketing.  It is not about immediate results like PPC advertising but it is about what is called "long tail" payoff.  It generates a bit of traffic forever. It was our top post in 2016 as well as 2017 and I suspect that it will continue to be a regular generator of traffic with very little effort on our part.  It is not specifically about our company or our products but it generates visits relevant to our industry and helps people find out about us.  It helps establish us as a "thought leader" and gets regular hits every week. [Read the Article]

Shoes.com Bankruptcy

This was a post from January 2017 and it was specifically created to chase a breaking news story. It got a flurry of activity in the first month after tweeting and posting it on our Facebook page but dropped off pretty quickly as the story left the headlines. Chasing current news stories or "learning moments" can be a good strategy if you have something relevant to say.  People like reading editorials.  The only challenge with this content marketing technique is finding the time at the right time.

Domain Registration Email Scam

Posted in May and supported with a tweet and posting on Facebook, this post has the highest bounce rate of the Top 5.  Wilf posted this because we regularly get calls from customers about emails like this.  Obviously other people are checking up on these emails because it gets hits every month.  It is not directly related to our business but is useful and informative for our customers and anyone who owns a domain name.  Most industries have these related topics and chances are your business has experts already answering questions like these.  Share the information and gain traffic!

Branding & Logo Design

From February 2017, this is one of the more overtly commercial of our blog posts.  It was created at about the same time that in Vancouver, BC where we have an office, there was a bunch of discussion around a new logo created for the city. We were jumping on the bandwagon but it also gave us a platform to share our process designing a logo for a customer. Our goal was to be topical and create durable content that shows our expertise and informs prospective clients.

SiteCM Weekly Highlights Email

This was targeted at users of SiteCM CMS and Blog Platform to let them know about a new feature.  It was posted in May and promoted in our monthly client email and Facebook.  It had the lowest bounce rate of all of the top 5 posts. Despite being posted at the same time as the Domain scam post that came in at #3, it only got 2/3 of the traffic because it has a more limited audience. 

Content Marketing Tips

Here is what I took away from our Top 5 Posts of 2017

1. The more useful a post is, the longer lifespan it will have.  Our top post got the same number of visits in a year as the other top 5 posts combined because it is the most informative of all of the posts.
     
2. It's not about you. It is about your audience.  Make posts about what they want to learn not what you want to sell.
     
3. Be timely and topical.  The Shoes.com bankruptcy post had a limited lifespan but was very productive while the story was in the news and had a good average time on page.  While you have the audience you can use other parts of the page to entice them to learn more.
    
4. More content = More traffic.  Google can't index what isn't there so invest regularly in creating content. The great thing about content marketing is that it doesn't have to happen all at once.  30 minutes a week is enough to get started.  

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