Marketers Ruin Everything

Everyone’s into content marketing these days! No matter what content you’re into there’s articles out there for it.

As long as something is popular there’s going to be a horde of marketers working to oversaturate the niche with content.

If you want people to pay attention to the content you’re producing you have to work really hard to break through.

If you’re just publishing willy nilly without any strategy behind what you’re doing, you’re going to get lost in the shuffle.

In my view, this is the hardest part about content marketing. Creating the content itself is the easy part!

At BuzzSumo, we have access to a ton of data. We realized there was no one else out there producing really in depth research reports in this space, so we decided to go for it.

When we’re working on these reports we’re really thinking about what problems our audience is struggling with on the day to day and what specific questions are running through their minds.

For example, we had data on what the average number of shares per article was broken down by industry.

Most marketers don’t have a good benchmark for how their content is doing when stacked against the bulk of the market.

We wanted to give people some hard evidence that they could share with their teams, whether it was good or bad news.  
If you’re interested, (and I think you are) the medium number of shares across the board was just 4!

If you want to be in the top 10% you’re shooting to get around 65 shares per piece of content. Content marketing really is a winner takes all kind of world.  
I recommend businesses develop a unique edge to their content that distinguishes them from their competitors.

If your audience can get copycat content from somewhere else, then that’s just not good enough.



 
We wanted to build our brand and authority in our space so it made sense for us to produce longer form content.

It’s a bit like running a marathon and not as many people are willing to do the work to produce content that’s over 2,000 words.

This thins out the competition significantly and we could get away with producing less content on a regular basis.

We’d typically put out one piece of content a month. These would be our in-depth research reports and our hope would be to become the story of the day.

If we were putting out content every day we’d get lost in the churn of social media, but by going high value we’ve been able to capture significant attention.

Well researched content like reference guides or tutorials tend to get the most links, and that was a big goal for us.
 

Amplifying Your Reach

Every piece of content you write for your blog needs an amplification strategy.

With our research reports we’d focus on the topics we believed would be most helpful to our audience.

We then would reach out to influencers who our audience respects and build relationships with them.

We’d engage with them on social media and offline, and developed the relationships over six months to a year.

This is an ongoing process that happens simultaneously as we’re developing content.

Before we’re getting ready to distribute a piece of content we’d reach out to several influencers and show them early drafts of the reports to get their comments. Then we’d go and incorporate some of those comments into the reports.  
This would encourage them to share our content with their own networks and amplify our reach.

Ideally we’d ask them all to do this on the day we publish so we’d gather as much steam as possible from the get go.  
In addition to our influencer campaigns, we’d also supplement our pieces with some paid advertising on Facebook and Twitter, and reach out to journalists as well.

Don’t discount the power of the right journalist sharing your content.

One journalist sharing our recent report on headlines led to several thousand shares alone.
 

Where We’re Going We Don’t Need Gates

Our approach is to let our content speak for itself and we don’t gate it behind an email opt-in.

We believe our content should be as accessible as possible and those who find value in it will naturally want to join our list.

Hopefully this has been insightful and helpful for you and I can look forward to seeing some excellent content from you soon.
 

Action Steps

  1. Create long form content that’s based on research like a reference guide, case study or tutorial.
  2. Develop relationships with influencers who can add value to your work.
  3. Get all your influencers to share the content upon its release.
  4. Supplement with paid ads where it makes sense and pitch your content to friendly journalists who cover your space.

 

Result You Will Achieve

Long form content that builds your brand and authority, getting shares and backlinks.

Mentor: Steve Rayson

Steve is an entrepreneur, investor and Former Director of BuzzSumo. BuzzSumo is a social search tool designed to support content marketers, journalists and anyone interested in finding great content and understanding influencer amplification.

 
This article is based on an EHQ interview with the mentor.