Can You Measure The ROI Of Blogging? Sarah Colley Reports: Yes. But It’s Complicated
You know you should be publishing blog articles, but how do you prove the investment is worth the reward? Next week’s guest curator Sarah Colley recently published this article to dive into what can be measured and why.
Hint: Content marketers have to be willing to live with some intangibles, but there are some metrics that can be tracked to prove the effort pays off, and setting up Google Analytics properly (she offers instructions) can help your case.
[Insert Activity Here]-led Growth
Speaking of growth marketing, it seems everyone has a new growth strategy they’re pushing these days. In the past week, each of these articles found my inbox and caught my interest, so I thought I’d share them with you.
1) Hal Koss explains Community-Led Growth. The premise is that companies are prioritizing building a community as a core action instead of simply adding on community as an afterthought.
2) Lenny Rachitsky provides examples of companies doing well with Content-Driven Growth. He breaks it into five strategies (User-Generated SEO-Optimized; Editorially-Generated SEO-Optimized; Data-Generated SEO-Optimized; User-Generated Virality-Optimized; and Editorially-Generated Virality-Optimized) and provides interview responses from leaders at companies who execute these well.
A Growth Marketer Is A Marketing Manager, Kind Of
Camille Trent at MarketerHire gets real about what the title Growth Marketer actually means, which titles are used with it interchangeably, and what nuances should factor in.
“Growth marketers put stock in the validity of your product or service, and find the best way to reach your desired audience — using data-backed insights, iterative testing, and statistical modeling.”
She also provides some things to consider if you’re considering hiring one.
24 CMOs On How They Spend On Demand Gen
Check out what these CMOs prioritize when it comes to their demand gen budgets. This is both an article and a podcast.
Spoiler: The top 3 are
At the start of January, Contently surveyed 1,072 Americans to find out their content marketing preferences. Their 2021 Contently Report: What Buyers Want From Content Marketing is now available.
Interesting findings:
“According to our research, 69 percent of respondents are subscribed to multiple brand newsletters. About 21 percent aren’t subscribed to any.”
“A clear majority of U.S. adults (63 percent) now trust brands more than traditional media outlets. In isolation, this is good news for marketers. But it also may be bad news for the civic health of the country.”
The main takeaway?
“The companies that stand out find unique ways to add value to people’s lives. They connect with a distinct voice and emphasize helpful guidance over promotional tactics.”
Discovered via UpContent.
Related: Check out this opinion piece that calls influencer marketing a $10 billion placebo (because people also don’t trust influencers as much as real people).
In this article, Latane Conant, CMO at 6Sense, masterfully relates telling your brand’s story to the experience of wine tasting. I won’t be surprised when a record number of marketing teams plan offsite wine tasting events to more fully embrace the analogy.
Paradox Found: When NOT To Target Your Ideal Client Persona
Rand Fishkin breaks down the very fine art of creating content for experts who have the ability to influence the persona you want to reach.
Read that again.
Complicated, right?
But completely genius.
Think back to my Girl Scout cookie story. The pickleball players had the ability to share our content (in this case, cookies). It was important that we reach them so they could amplify our messaging.
Now imagine that all of them had health concerns and couldn’t buy cookies, but they KNEW a bunch of people who would. See where I’m going here?
This article is worth bookmarking, y’all.
13 Marketing Roles That Are... Crucial?
This list is intended to provide someone building out a marketing team an idea of what role to hire for first, but there are 13 different roles from 13 different experts.
I feel like a Branding Expert makes the most sense, because all subsequent hires can look to the vision they’ve set.
To my marketing leader readers, who did you hire first?
Sayantan Dasgupta thinks they are, and provides 10 reasons in this article. Do you agree?
I read a post on LinkedIn the other day (disappointed I didn’t save it, now) that made more sense to me than proclaiming things dead. The basic premise was that when we get to the point in marketing that we call something dead, it’s usually because the original version of that particular strategy, tactic, whatever, has been twisted into something less than savory. Is that the case with MQLs?
Ahrefs Customers Say These Are The 7 Best Marketing Newsletters
My favorite part of this news: The Weekly SEO by Andrew Charlton made the list. He is a master of using Curated (just published issue 111) and was featured in a hype video we made last year.
Congratulations, Andrew!
