Results-Driven Content Marketing

What is Content Marketing?

"Content" equals value. There are 3 kinds of value:

1. Information: Think whitepapers or webinars.

2. Financial: Think coupons.

3. Entertainment and Utility: Think gamer apps and "E*Trade Baby" TV spots as well as free versions of software tools.

1. Information Value

Blogs, tweets, online resource centers, whitepapers, ebooks, webinars, et al., are the meat and potatoes of online B2B marketing, and I, along with my advertisers, have utilized all of them for years.

The results:

I've seen response rates on offers for whitepapers and webinars as high as 2 percent and even approaching 3 percent. These offers come in the form of ads within Web Digest For Marketers or in dedicated solo emails sent to my subscribers.

Naturally, not every click-through results in a bona fide lead or prospect. But, at bottom, enough must convert to sales because the advertisers return year after year.

Furthermore, the content used in my newsletter is repurposed into 66 Internet Marketing categories at the Web Digest For Marketers website. This is done for SEO purposes. At the time of this writing, Yahoo! shows more than 2,000 inbound links.

These links help boost traffic to my website, which, in turn, results in more new subscribers. More new subscribers are apt to click on those whitepaper and webinar offers from my advertisers, which also appear on my website. Call this a virtuous circle of content marketing.

2. Financial Incentives

Coupons are the obvious example here. But, let's use more modern examples of offering value for attention and taking action. There are good examples of large advertisers "bribing" Facebook users to "Like" them. This has become known as "Like-gating."

Two examples:

• If you "Like" Country Crock margarine, you will receive a coupon for 40 cents off a tub of margarine. As of this writing, the page has more than 441,000 "Likes."
• Shoe and clothing retailer Rockport offers its "Like" fans 10% off plus free shipping on their first purchases. It has collected more than 33,000 "Likes."

3. Entertainment and Utility

Everyone likes the E*Trade Baby TV spots. On YouTube, one of their most popular spots has been viewed more than 1.5 million times.

Remember the Old Spice Guy campaign? Well, the company made more than 10 spots. But, on Old Spice's official YouTube channel, they collectively got about 70 million views at time of writing. Can you imagine what P&G would have had to pay for an additional 70 million views?

Free Games: Gaming is one consumer category where the marketer has historically employed the practice of giving a sample of the product away, knowing that a certain percentage of users will pay for the full-featured version.

Angry Birds has been downloaded more than 250 million times, according to its owner, Rovio Mobile, with more than 4 million paid users on the iPhone platform alone. You can imagine that most or all of those who paid for the full-featured version started out with the freebie.

Just like game developers, companies that provide software such as Social Media dashboards are no strangers to the "freemium" model where they give a portion of the service away knowing a small percentage will convert to the full-featured paid version.

What's Next?

The ante will keep going up for marketers. Whether the value is information, financial incentive, entertainment or utility, marketers will need to keep sweetening the offers in order to compete with an ever increasingly saturated media environment.

The days of self-aggrandizing ads are over. When you see such monstrosities now, they seem out of step and a throwback to a different time when some clever words strung together would suffice.

Nowadays, marketers (both B2B and B2C) have to put some skin in the game and really offer something of value if they want to get your attention.