Content marketers aren’t doing a good enough job proving their success.
Sure, organic traffic can be a great indication of your content’s success on Google and other search engines, but it’s not the end-all, final indication of successful content marketing.
In fact, according to Content Marketing Institute & Marketing Prof’s recent B2B and B2C industry benchmark studies, 74% of B2B organizations and 69% of B2C organizations are moderately or minimally successful in their content marketing. (If you want links to those studies, you’ll find them below!)
Let’s take a second to better analyze what makes content marketing successful, and then dive into a software tool that can help content marketers be more effective.
What is successful content marketing?
I love questions like this, because they’re easy to answer. It’s nearly always, “it depends.” And rightfully so.
Ultimately, this depends on who you’re asking, what their role is, and what content they’re creating. However, the top content marketing publications like the Content Marketing Institute, MarketingProfs, and even HubSpot point to one primary KPI to determine content marketing success: conversions.
Without conversions, you’re just blogging or creating content aimlessly, hoping that your audience will engage. These non-conversion focused marketers are under the impressions that ‘if you build it, they will come.’
Let me tell you firsthand — this mentality is dangerous. It can get your agency fired, it can render your content ineffective, and it’s a huge waste of your time.
Successful content marketing contributes to conversions.
These conversions can be in the form of blog comments, subscribers to your blog, leads, and potential customers. (Check out the following reports from the Content Marketing Institute detailing B2C Content Marketing & the B2B Content Marketing here.)
Thankfully, Revenue River has a history of being on The Cutting Edge of all things digital marketing. I’ve been able to utilize software tools out there that help content marketers focus on conversions. That tool is called Atomic Reach.
What is Atomic Reach?
Atomic Reach is a software tool that uses algorithmic data and artificial intelligence to help marketers identify and act upon trends in their content.
Put simply, Atomic Reach can help you create an effective content creation recipe that you can follow for continued content marketing growth. It’ll help you understand if your content is effective in engaging your target audience, and if it isn’t, how you can create effective content.
Don’t blame Content Marketers
Marketers often gets a bad rap because we want to create all kinds of content, and rightfully so - creating content has been proven to increase website traffic and conversions. But only when done right.
All too often, content creators have the ‘if you build it they will come’ mentality, churning out easily written but low-quality posts. In this case, hard work doesn’t directly translate into results. If you’re not creating content that is valuable, you might as well not create any content.
It’s not really the fault of the content marketer, here. Back in the day of Don Draper, tracking marketing and advertising efforts was virtually impossible. With the modern digital marketing toolset, we can track blog views, social media clicks, reach growth, and other non-essentials. This is what makes Atomic Reach great; it brings us out of those minor metrics and back into the KPI that matters most: conversions.
How Atomic Reach helps
I’ve found that you can use Atomic Reach in a number of ways. Use it to increase your blog performance, optimize your email copy, improve the timing of your social media posts, and more.
It can be easy for content marketers to get overwhelmed by all that this tool can do, so my advice is to take it one step at a time. Start with blogs, then slowly look to improve website copy, and then add more and more to Atomic Reach.
With that said, I’ve shared some of my favorite ways to utilize Atomic Reach below.
With Atomic Reach, you can….
Track your content performance based on conversions
If your blog plays a role in your sales process, you can specifically track what trends in your content are contributing to conversions. This can help you identify if short paragraphs are more likely to generate conversions than longer paragraphs, or if emotional content is more likely to generate a lead than more bland writing.
Quantify your content with an Atomic Score
One of the key features of Atomic Reach is how they can quantify high-quality content. They utilize key data points obtained by crawling your on-site content to grade everything based off of the major linguistic characteristics in your writing. This grade is then presented as a score from 1-100.
Understand how content should be created through a conversion recipe
Atomic Reach is extremely helpful for our clients because it sheds light into how many words need to be in the article, how long paragraphs need to be, and many other variables.
Create content based off your conversion recipe in the Context Engine
One of my favorite aspects of Atomic Reach is the content editing tool. The Context Engine helps you see how much emotion you should include, how long your article should be, or how you can speak to a different audience - directly from Atomic Reach’s editing tool.
Tell what times your social media posts should be shared
Connect your social accounts for information specific to when you should share content for the best results. Take less time performing statistical analyses to understand when you should share posts, and focus more time on creating high-quality content.
How to tell if you need Atomic Reach
If your content marketing strategy isn’t generating any results, my first piece of advice would be to wait a short while to see if it needs more time. If, after 6 months or so, you’re not seeing any organic traffic growth or leads generated from your blogging efforts, you should consider using Atomic Reach.
For everything else, consider reaching out our team at Revenue River. We can help you diagnose your content problems and utilize Atomic Reach to make improvements to your content marketing strategy.
