Content Marketing: Your Burning Questions Answered

Picture the scene. You’re at a conference, and a business contact is talking to you about their latest content marketing campaign. They’re telling you about how great it is, and how it has delivered their business a steady stream of leads.

You’ve heard the phrase ‘content marketing’ a lot, and know it’s something your business should be doing, but you’re hesitant. You don’t want to embark on your content marketing journey without getting all the facts.

You have some questions. Well, lucky you, we’re here to answer them.

Here are the top content marketing campaign questions that we get asked by clients, and we’re sharing them with you.

Q: What’s the return on investment?

This is the biggest question we face as marketers—the ‘so what?’. How is your content marketing campaign going to affect the bottom line?

Ultimately a strategic approach towards content marketing will win you more leads. We take this approach at JTN. It’s how you’re reading this blog (ooh, meta).

It’s also important to remember that different content marketing campaigns will have different objectives. Yours could be to raise awareness of your business with those high up in the sales funnel. These require a more intermediary measure of ROI—particularly for businesses with a long sales cycle—such as website visits, document downloads, or interactions on social media.

For businesses targeting an audience nearer conversion, success is measured by the number of leads and how much that lead is worth. Essentially, the value of new clients retained as a result of your campaign, divided by your marketing costs, is your ROI. We’ve given some practical examples in our blog, ‘How to calculate return on investment from content marketing’

Q: Isn’t a content marketing campaign just fluff?

Entirely the opposite. Imagine you’re buying a new laptop and you have two choices. One is a business with loads of expert content; a multitude of blogs with tech tips and tricks, a guide to the latest laptops on the market, and a tutorial on setting up your new purchase—they really know their stuff. The other last posted a blog in 2009.

Who are you more likely to trust? The first one, right?

This is the power of content marketing. Content marketing campaigns position you as an expert in your field, and give your business authority, which means your prospects are more likely to choose you over your competition.

But it doesn’t stop there. Besides acting as a brand ambassador for people who are actively searching for your services, your content also has the power to attract what we at JTN call ‘right-fit’ leads. By producing and promoting content that answers their burning questions, or provides a solution to their problem, you can attract people who are in the market for your services.

Q: How will we implement this?

One common ailment content marketing campaigns suffer from is that they simply get put on a shelf and never looked at again.

The best way to stop this from happening is to assign a project driver. This person is responsible for pushing the project forward and following up with team members, and vendors, to ensure the work is done on time and to the highest standard.

If that sounds a bit scary then don’t worry, they don’t have to do all the work themselves, they are simply the lead. Other members of the team should be assigned elements of the project to work on too.

A designated project driver armed with achievable deadlines ensures the campaign is ready to be implemented and carried forward with momentum.

Q: What will it cost?

Theoretically, you can produce content for nothing more than the cost of your copywriter’s time. However, content marketing does not operate on a ‘build it and they will come’ basis. You need to invest in the promotion of your content to get it in front of your target audience. The budget for your campaign is entirely up to you—most platforms allow you to start with as little as $1.

The platform you use to promote your content will also impact how much your campaign costs. LinkedIn is generally more expensive, because of the ability to target business leaders, whereas a video view through Google AdWords promotion can cost as little as a few cents.

The beauty of promoting content online is that it is entirely flexible from day-to-day and can be scaled up or down depending on your business’ budget.

At JTN, we know marketing. In fact, our content marketing strategy is the reason you’re here. If you’d like to know more about what we do or how we do it, get in touch with our account manager, Eve, at eve@jtn.agency.  

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