If you’ve followed Newfangled closely over the last 18 months or so, you’ve noticed our business undergoing quite an evolution. One from a company focused primarily on website development for agencies, to one now focused on consulting on holistic digital marketing programs for agencies. Those programs tend to include some combination of the following consultative engagements: website information architecture and design, content strategy, contact strategy, Salesforce integration, and marketing automation.
Our work today allows us to observe far more trends and patterns with our agencies’ digital marketing endeavors, which has allowed us to continue to mold and shape our services to better elevate the expertise of our clients. And throughout the last year and a half, it’s safe to say that one of the most common patterns we’ve observed is the dependency of the success of the outbound digital marketing strategy on the success of the inbound digital marketing strategy.
Put more simply, your content strategy has the power to wreck or advance your email marketing strategy.
Your Content Strategy Has The Power to Wreck or Advance Your Email Marketing
If you’re thinking regularly about how to best market your firm, getting a grip on your content strategy has got to be where you begin. And that means that for the most part, you’re being incredibly generous with your expertise. Willingly and regularly giving it away for free on your website. Do that, and one of the biggest and fastest benefits you’ll see is increased success with your outbound campaigns.
To me, and I think to most people, this sounds obvious, right? Taking the time to consistently publish educational content that’s relevant to your prospects is clearly going to elevate the messaging of your emails, which will lead to more engagement on those messages and ultimately more conversations and opportunity generated from those channels. But so many of the firms I meet have chosen to begin their marketing efforts with email, without cracking the content strategy code first. They’re so eager to get in touch with their prospects and feel like they’re marketing, they cut corners on the hardest part. As a result, their emails are highly promotional or the content they do send out is incredibly generic and uninteresting.
Our consultative engagements are designed to combat this phenomenon by starting with content strategy as the foundation of everything. Once our clients understand how to effectively share their perspective on the challenges most relevant to their prospects (and most relevant to their areas of expertise), the rest of their marketing becomes incredibly more successful.
The Proof
I can prove it to you. We recently pulled data of our highest performing clients taking advantage of only our outbound marketing consulting and compared those metrics to those of our clients receiving coaching on not only their marketing automation strategies, but also their content strategies. Clients prioritizing both content and automation strategies:
- Published 58% more thought leadership every month
- Increased unique visitors to their site by more than 63%
- Increased the number of visitors attributable to organic, non-branded search by 45%
- Increased their website conversion rate by 33%, in large part due to the fact that they were publishing nearly 10% more gated content
- Received 30% more leads through their website every month
- Sent 72% more email throughout the month and enjoyed a 10% higher open rate on those messages
That last point is critical. Clients investing in a smart content strategy deployed nearly 3x the number of emails compared to those who are focused on outbound marketing automation strategy alone, all the while increasing their engagement on those campaigns. That’s because without doing the necessary work to advance your own expertise through the development of your content, you simply run out of interesting insights to share via email with your prospects. But an active content strategy means you always have fresh, interesting material for your outbound activity.
The right content plan can significantly influence the success of your digital marketing. It’s not easy to do, but it is possible. And we can help.
If you’re interested in learning more, let’s talk.