Industry: IT services
Content: Blog posts, infographic content, social media posts
Highlights: Hundreds of LinkedIn shares, more blog traffic
To be highly effective with content marketing, you need a team that’s ready to jump on a lead and roll out a multi-media campaign. The internet moves fast and social trends are quick to crest, so that’s how you stand out. That’s how you get ahead.
Studies show that marketers know content marketing is important, but often struggle with the logistics to achieve the results they want. According to the 2015 B2B Content Marketing Trends report from the Content Marketing Institute, the two top challenges for brands this year are:
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The ability to produce engaging content
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The ability to produce content consistently
To generate stronger results from their inbound strategies, companies are either building entire teams dedicated to creating branded assets, or outsourcing to content marketing agencies that have the resources to meet these needs.
Goal: Take advantage of trending news
An IT services company that hired Brafton to manage its blog made a special – and timely request: News had recently broken about a data breach. The incident created a window for the company to showcase its unique value propositions, if it acted fast.
The company asked its Brafton team to put together a top-to-bottom content campaign for a two-part blog feature that integrated written content, custom graphic design work and social media promotions to take a stance on the breach.
Strategy: Create a cross-channel marketing campaign about a trending topic
The Brafton team jumped on the opportunity, first scheduling interviews with the client’s experts to learn more details about the breach: Why it happened and how it could have been prevented. This first-person perspective gave the content writers a unique angle to build on top of coverage of the news.
At the same time, a designer created an infographic that broke down the anatomy of a data breach. Once the client approved the graphic, Brafton’s team worked with the client to deconstruct the completed image into five separate info images that could be featured in their written content and social posts. The writer then created unique captions for each info image, using context from the blog post to anchor the visuals in the story.
We put everything together, adding the info images to the written post, with links back to the full infographic, and hit the publish button.
Finally, we promoted the assets on the client’s social media channels (LinkedIn and Twitter) to make sure they got in front of the target audience.
Results: Social media shares, increase in blog visitors
After publishing this campaign across channels, the company saw an increase in social media engagement in addition to a surge of traffic to the blog content on the website.
The results were both immediate and long-term.
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People spent 166% more time on these pages than other pages on the site
A longer dwell time implies the readers were paying attention to the story from start to finish, viewing the graphics and considering the company’s insights on the breach.
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900+ LinkedIn shares to date
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2x as many Tweets as average blog posts
The high volume of social shares suggest people found the unique information valuable, and as a result, wanted to share it with their connections online. Generally, people share content when they want to take credit for finding information and distributing it to their followers.
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25% of all blog visits were driven by this article
Even months after initial publication, this piece is still contributing to the content strategy’s success. It continues to drive around a quarter of all visits to blog section of the site, as readers find ongoing value from the original reporting and proprietary insights
Do something dynamic with a one-team approach
If you want to drive top-tier results with your content marketing strategy, you need to offer readers something they can’t get anywhere else. To create original resources that bring new value to online conversations, you need to marry your unique perspective with an interesting narrative and eye-catching visuals.
This client didn’t stop at covering the news about the breach with a written blog post. It didn’t have to because it had a full content marketing team at its disposal to combine industry expertise with a trending story for an exclusive multimedia asset. Readers took notice and rewarded the project with clicks and shares. People want dynamic information, and the sites that give it to them will come out on top of online conversations.
