How Small Marketing Teams Can Achieve Big Content Wins

How Small Marketing Teams Can Achieve Big Content Wins

Author: Jacob Warwick / Source: MarketingProfs Content marketing can be one of the most effective strategies for organizations that wan

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Content marketing can be one of the most effective strategies for organizations that want to build engaged audiences and garner long-term marketing wins, but the intricacies of content marketing can be intimidating, particularly if you’re working with a small or underbudgeted team.

However, whether you’re focused on building a content strategy, creating and distributing content, or measuring content performance, even one-person teams can successfully implement content marketing.

How? Setting expectations, contracting with outside help, and staying the course with your content strategy can help you achieve big content wins even with small teams.

1. Set expectations (and benchmarks)

Content marketing is ultimately a long-term strategy. Though some content can garner early brand-awareness and audience-building wins, you don’t typically see the same immediate results or measurable returns that you would with pay-per-click advertising or email marketing, for example.

For small organizations that have limited brand awareness or audiences, content marketing can take 6-18 months to bear fruit. For these organizations, the key to creating big wins is to think months ahead and to set realistic performance expectations as part of their content strategy.

Start by assessing your current content marketing performance to create a benchmark for your ongoing efforts.

To collect insight on your website, mobile, and social channels, use Google Analytics, Simply Measured, Mixpanel, or other analytics platforms.

Also use tools such as Ahrefs, Moz, and SEMrush to monitor keyword rankings, SEO, and general search visibility metrics; moreover, to benchmark email effectiveness, look at data from your email service or automation providers, such as Marketo, MailChimp, and VerticalResponse.

After assessing the performance of your current marketing channels, collect these metrics in a spreadsheet. Those metrics could include the following:

  • Web traffic, time on site, bounce rate, unique visitors, return visitors, etc.
  • Social traffic, shares, comments, mentions, and other engagement metrics.
  • Email audience growth, open rate, bounce rate, CTA clicks, etc.
  • Keyword rank, organic traffic, etc.

If your team hasn’t invested in marketing, email, or analytics software, you will have to log your metrics manually by grabbing social information from the social platforms themselves, collect blog information from WordPress or other CMS, and so on.

Setting benchmarks is important to understand what type of results you can realistically expect from your content marketing and for identifying high-performing content down the…

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