The Compounding Effect of Content Marketing
The magic trick that will give you 50% of your success with content marketing
Welcome back to another issue of the newsletter.
I don’t have a paid version (and I don’t plan to any time soon), but if you find the newsletter useful and want to support it, you can forward it to someone who would benefit from it.
Founders are impatient. It’s natural.
They nod their heads when you tell them it will take 3/6/12 months for the newly minted content strategy to start generating results.
But they want the results now.
Even better, yesterday.
And that’s why, even when they seemingly commit to the strategy that the team has put in place, they remain on the lookout for shortcuts.
Anyone who’s ever worked in content marketing will remember having at least one of these conversations:
Convincing your CEO that it’s better to publish focused articles dedicated to capturing traffic along established (and sometimes boring) long-tail keywords, instead of riffing on the latest tech acquisition for a quick
dopaminetraffic bump.Convincing your board that you can’t just cut 80% of content production and only publish the articles that drive signups. (Don’t blame poor old Pareto – I’m sure he had no idea what he was going to do to us...)
All of this show that executives still misunderstand content marketing deeply.
However, if you’re surprised by this, maybe you should rethink your choices.
And let’s be clear about one thing:
You can’t blame your boss (and/or your board) that they don’t understand content marketing.
As a marketer (especially, if you’re a manager of a content program), it’s your job to zoom out from the trees and show them the forest.
Including a clear plan for how you’re going to conquer the territory (let’s stop the metaphor here – we’re not cutting down any trees).
Otherwise, you’ll keep gettin asked ”Why are we not writing about the latest tech IPO?” and ”Why publish 10 blog posts if most are not going to convert any paying customers?”
When traffic isn’t a vanity metric
Let me tell you a secret.
Your CEO doesn’t care about traffic.
What they really want is a pipeline of people who i) know the brand, ii) are interested in trying the product, and (most importantly) iii) want to pay them money to use the product for a long long time.
When they set a KPI to track organic traffic, they’re using a mental shortcut – an approximation for the 3 things above they want.
Of course, shortcuts are a tricky thing, that can lead you right to the edge of a cliff:
And that’s how you end up with SaaS brands writing about ways to kill time and military time. (No, it’s not relevant to their business audience…)
However, let’s say you have it all figured out:
you have put together a focused and targeted keyword strategy to write on topics which are relevant to your target audience
you’re optimizing internal linking and on-page SEO and appearing for the relevant keywords in the top places on the search engines
you have the correct flows in place to convert readers to the next step in their journey – as subscribers, trial users, and customers
Hopefully all this is leading to a situation where you are getting relevant traffic and a good portion of it is converting.
Now what?
How do you keep growing?
If we think about content marketing as a big funnel (even though you shouldn’t), which has a certain conversion rate at each step, the natural way to continue growing is by adding more at the top – i.e. growing your core relevant traffic.
And that’s when traffic is no longer a vanity metric.
So how do you do that?
Introducing the law of content marketing compounding
In a typical long-tail strategy, the keywords you’re going after don’t have the potential to drive thousands of visits. They have a limited potential and that’s exactly why you’re going after them – theoretically they’re easier to rank for.
What you’re banking on is that after you produce and distribute high-quality content on any given topic, content that fulfills the intent of searchers, your content will start rising to the top of Google and with that some traffic will start to come to your website.
Typically, it should look something like this:
Over time, you’re hoping at steadily getting a hundred visitors a month from this particular piece of content. Maybe a couple hundred if you’re in a less competitive niche.
Sure, you’re not going to build the next Slack on a few hundred visits a month.
But now with this piece of content done and your time and attention free, you can add another one:
It looks a little bit better.
Over time, as you’re adding more and more pieces, you’re looking to get starts to resemble a hockey stick:
The important thing here is that content marketing is not pay-to-play – even if you stopped producing and publishing new content, you will continue to enjoy the benefits of what’s already out there. And if it’s good, the performance might even improve over time.
This is where the compounding effect comes from.
The 8th wonder of the world
Albert Einstein once said that compounding is the 8th wonder of the world.
Technically, he was speaking about interest and we already know how useful compounding is in investing:
(If you’re not very visual (or not great at reading graphs), this one is essentially telling us that over time, the bulk of the wealth you generate will come from the compounding of returns, not from the savings you put into your account.)
The same applies with content marketing.
Unlike most channels – paid, community, lifecycle – where you’re only getting benefits from actively engaging (and spending $$$), content (and maybe brand) take much longer to get started but generate (passive) benefits over a long period of time.
No, not completely passive.
(Nothing is truly passive – even your portfolio needs to be analyzed regularly and rebalanced from time to time.)
Have you missed the content marketing boat?
Many founders think there’s no point in engaging in content marketing anymore because they’re too late to the party and it’s so hard, there’s no way to get good ROI from it.
Especially if you’re operating in an ultra-competitive and saturated category such as martech.
Sure, getting started in 2011 would have been better...
But maybe you were in school back then.
So, the next best option is to start today.
(I realize I keep using the same proverb. Yes, I do like it that much.)
And bank your chances on a strategy that can give you real results.
And that’s where compounding becomes your friend.