The almost 50% of businesses aiming to increase their content marketing spending this year indicate how integral and valuable it is to organizations.
With that said, just because businesses are pouring funds into content marketing doesn’t automatically mean it’s effective. For one, just because you’re embarking on a content marketing strategy doesn’t mean you’ll be successful at it. You have to execute correctly.
In fact, when content marketing is executed the right way, the average ROI is $984,000.
The reasons for this success are clear. Insightful, inspired content marketing builds trust with your audience, answers questions about your products and services, and helps develop a strong brand identity and voice.
There’s no denying that content marketing is part of almost any successful business plan. Sure–a few businesses out there can get by on word of mouth alone. But if your goals are loftier than merely staying out of the red, you need to foray into the content marketing space.
Although growth opportunities are plentiful with content marketing, it presents challenges for any business leader, entrepreneur, salesperson, or influencer. We’ll explore these obstacles further in the next section.
Content marketing will do an incredible amount of good for your business. And getting your feet wet in its many facets will undoubtedly prove valuable. Unless it’s your direct job, though, you can’t let content marketing sap your time and resources, which it’s entirely capable of doing.
Think about everything you have to do in your day-to-day. Your list of responsibilities is likely already chockful. The thought of throwing content marketing on top of everything else probably has you sweating.
Of course, some of you are likely excellent multi-taskers and could donate a small portion of your day to producing content. Unfortunately, that tiny morsel of your time really isn’t enough.
As a discipline and skill, content marketing is exceptionally difficult to master. A business owner, for instance, needs to focus on things like networking and big-picture brand development. They can’t waste hours editing a video or nitpicking the grammar or voice used in a blog.
Being part of your content marketing strategy is useful and highly recommended. As a decision-maker within your organization, you need to have a broader idea of the messaging and tactics being used. But the specific tasks themselves? Getting stuck in the trenches on elements such as tech, subscriptions, interfaces, editing isn’t a wise use of your daily schedule. Especially when operations, sales, and vision are more crucial to your role.
As a leader, sometimes the hardest thing to do is let go. After all, it’s that DIY spirit that’s likely put you in your current position. In some way or another, every entrepreneur lives by the do-it-yourself mantra. And such a mentality deserves kudos and is an aspirational trait.
There then comes the point, unfortunately, where the DIY spirit is an anchor holding you back.
Key decision-makers must let go, trust other experts, and establish repeatable systems that allow others to do the work successfully.
You become more of an employee than a business leader when you’re doing all the grafting and nitty-gritty. Whereas delegation and outsourcing strategically and with ROI top of mind puts you in that upper leadership echelon. When perched on the mountaintop, you have the perspective to see the business as a whole and be the force of nature you were meant to be.
Speaking to the above notion is the 53% of company owners who believe they’ll experience 20% business growth by delegating a mere 10% of their workload.
The math adds up at first glance. Because effective delegation and outsourcing of your content marketing strategy allow productive work to get done while you work on leadership tasks that drive growth. You’re putting in less effort to get more done. That’s efficiency personified.
We’ll zone into the careful language used in the previous paragraph–we used the word “effective” with delegation and outsourcing. It’s not enough to give the work to somebody else. You have to ensure the delegatee has the correct set of skills to get the job done right.
While hiring an in-house content marketing expert has its advantages, it’s not always the most financially sound approach. Payscale shows that employing a content marketer costs over $50,000 in annual salary.
Compare that to what it costs to outsource to a content marketing company with much more wiggle room regarding prices to get similar results.
In fairness, as companies grow, hiring an in-house content marketing team to streamline your digital strategy makes sense. Even then, however, working alongside an agency helps augment your planning and execution, bolstering your in-house team’s performance.
Finding the right content marketing agency to work with can be difficult. You need to find the price point and scope of services to match your company’s current and projected status. Plus, you need content marketers who are great at what they do with a proven track record and stellar reputation.
It might seem like this affordable, skillful person is the rarest of unicorns. But you’ve come to the right place by reading this article since Bear Wade has been helping companies such as yours with profitable, financially feasible content marketing initiatives. We excel at producing campaigns that save (and earn) both time and money, your two most precious commodities.
What’s more, we’re willing to back up our talk by explaining our method in great detail, so you’ll know what to expect by partnering with us.
We don’t only preach time efficiency to our clients; we practice it ourselves at Bear Wade.
That’s why our strategy revolves around making one piece of content and publishing it across all your marketing channels.
However, it’s not all so cut and dry or literal. Given the nuances involved in each online marketing channel, you can’t post exact duplicate content.
For instance, Twitter has a very short character limit, whereas Facebook allows for longer posts. A blog is typically much longer than both. Also, Instagram doesn’t allow you to post clickable links in captions. And we aren’t even considering video content–an entirely different beast.
So, it’s not so much that we create your content once, then republish it everywhere you have a brand presence. Instead, we take the heart and message of one piece of content, then repurpose it to meet the specifications of each given channel, based on its audience and features.
Below, we’ll explore this strategy further and explain the positive impact it’ll have on your organization.
Out the gate, we assess the role of each channel in your target customer’s journey since your audience’s expectations vary at different touchpoints.
We then structure your team and workflow, creating sustainable systems for post-production processes, channel-specific creatives, and everything in between.
It starts with mapping out your content assets that support marketing tactics and goals for organic and paid campaigns. Then we plan the content distribution on all your channels, keeping in mind that not everything you publish will work on all mediums.
As we said above, however, all content–for the most part–can be repurposed to be relevant across all marketing platforms.
This level of planning ensures seamless and mistake-free throughout the distribution and production processes.
No one audience is the same. Consumers engage differently with brands based on personal experiences and a company’s offerings.
As such, we don’t necessarily buy into templated best practices for factors such as content formats, distribution timing, audience formats, etc.
Even if so-called best practices apply to your industry, we firmly believe there’s no plug-and-play method of execution you can base on generalizations.
So, we individualize and customize research methods based on each of your channels and its adhering audience. And here’s how we do it:
There’s also the need for primary research to go with your analytics. Understanding your audience’s interests, demographics, desires, and self-reported behaviors shapes successful campaigns. How can this valuable information be obtained? Through these following approaches:
This level of research allows for fine-tuned content that speaks directly to your audience, no matter the channel.
With all the information gathered from the research and analytics, there’s a clear direction for repurposing your content.
You might find that your audience prefers live content versus produced pieces. They might engage more with videos than blogs–or vice versa.
Or, your target consumer might rely more on Facebook instead of Google. Perhaps, your audience will prove to be email or mobile app-focused.
Audiences might see your content across multiple channels, but we won’t veer away from the core message. It won’t necessarily be duplicate content (because most of the time, it can’t be). But it’ll still be consistent enough to build trust and establish recall through repetition.
On the above note, research shows that brand trust increases by 55% when a person engages with a company’s message across 6 separate channels versus only 1.
Content marketing offers a distinctive advantage over traditional mediums like television or billboards. Namely, once you publish something, you aren’t stuck with it forever. Strategies don’t have to be permanent and remain fluid and open to change based on the results they generate.
Now, provided something is gangbusters right out the gate, you might not need to revise too much–but even then, it’s best not to get complacent. And if something isn’t working at all? It’s far from the end of the world because course correction and optimization are just a round of research and a brainstorming session away.
At Bear Wade, we treat every piece of published content as a test, monitoring them and keeping a close eye on your audience’s response. We distribute, measure, and improve until we land on something that speaks to your target consumer across all channels and leads to conversions.
When you’re outsourcing to our team, it means we’re performing much of the legwork. We’ve already established the difference delegation can make to your business in driving profits. And it also saves money because you don’t need to spend on an in-house team.
Then there’s the matter of the nuts and bolts of content production. Whether it’s video editing, posting on a website, social media, podcast platform, or YouTube, there’s a monetary price involved. You need the equipment and software to streamline the processes (e.g., marketing automation platforms, video recording/editing tech).
And of course, there’s the time you’ll save from creating once before publishing everywhere.
Keep in mind, we collaborate with our clients to ensure they get the most out of our campaigns. By maximizing one piece of content, we’re minimizing the time you spend working with us, so you can get back to more leadership-based duties.
You’ll save additional money by working with one company (Bear Wade) to handle all your content marketing needs because you’re consolidating production and distribution. Since we’re taking on everything, you won’t need to pay other companies to help with different facets, which would be far too costly.
You’re a busy person as an entrepreneur or business leader. Your day consists of high-value, growth-related tasks that don’t allow you to write blogs, produce videos, or develop individual pieces of content.
But you need content marketing if you’re intent on growing your organization. Hiring someone in-house doesn’t always make sense, especially for smaller companies. So, your best option is outsourcing to a company like Bear Wade. We do everything in our power to maximize every dollar you spend, saving you time and money.
Get started with us today to learn more about our “make it once, publish everywhere” method and what it can do for your business.
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We’re in a day and age where it’s never been easier to create a video and post it online.
Really, you don’t need to go back that far to a time when the above notion was laughable. It used to be that video recording required a camera (not connected to your phone), which was only available to those lucky few who could afford it.
We’re in a day and age where it’s never been easier to create a video and post it online.
Really, you don’t need to go back that far to a time when the above notion was laughable. It used to be that video recording required a camera (not connected to your phone), which was only available to those lucky few who could afford it.
