Content Marketing and Return on Investment

It can be difficult to calculate how much return on investment (ROI) your business is getting from your content marketing strategy. If done well, content marketing has a higher-than-average marketing ROI. This Forbes article contains an interview with Julie Fleischer, former Director of Content Strategy and Integration at Kraft Foods. Fleischer claims that Kraft’s content marketing gives the company a ROI that is, “among the highest of all of our marketing efforts.” So where do you start to improve your business’s content marketing strategy?

The first step is to determine your current content marketing ROI with these 3 components:

Cost

First you need to determine how much money is being spent on your current content marketing strategy. Depending on the size of your company and the amount of content it produces, you will either need a full audit or a smaller sample of the total content. Use average costs to get a rough estimate of content spending.

Utilization

You also need to figure out how much of the content that’s made is actually being used. Any created content that goes unused is a complete waste. Calculated a rough percentage of content utilization.

Performance

For the content that is created and used, you also need to determine how well it is performing. There are many factors to check, such as page views, likes, social shares, etc. But you also have to link these results back to the business’s content history. See which types of content marketing worked best for your company and review how the strategy developed over time as groundwork for moving forward. It’s important to continue checking performance regularly as you change your strategy.

Make sure your business holds marketing accountable for their ROI. Often a company will send out employees to produce content without fully keeping track of the investment. Request verified results that are measured and reported. Don’t let your content marketing go unsupervised.

How to Improve Your Content Marketing

Now that you know more about how your content marketing has worked up until now, it’s time to start improving it.

Reach Out to Early-Stage Buyers

Much of the marketing we see around us is overly promotional. For buyers who are not yet familiar with your brand, pushy advertisements tend to get tuned out. You need to find a way to make your brand noticeable, likable, and trusted enough that people will want to buy your product or use your services. Here are some things to take into account when setting up your online marketing:

Branded Conversations

Search the online conversations about your product category. What percentage of them mentions a specific brand? What percentage mentions your brand? If that percentage is much different than your market share in your category, it means your competitors are taking away potential prospects right from the beginning.

Unbranded Search Traffic

How many people are searching for your product category online? What percentage of these prospects end up at your website rather than a competitor’s? You can’t only promote your brand within your own website. You must branch out to other sources in order to draw people in.

Website Traffic

Be aware of the quality and quantity of traffic that flows through the websites you use for advertising and the cost of using them. High-traffic sites are great for spreading your brand quickly, but may come with a hefty price. Smaller sites with less traffic can be much cheaper for advertisement fees. Keep track of these costs as you determine where to show your ads.

Organic vs. Paid Traffic

Many companies pay for fake traffic in order to make their sites look more trustworthy and popular. Organic content marketing allows you to reach out to potential and existing customers, start conversations, spread the word about your brand, and gain additional reach without paying for fake viewers. In the long run, it’s always better to earn your customer’s trust and attention rather than buying it.

Unused Content

Again, any content that is created for your company that goes unused is a complete waste of resources. Keep a close eye on the percentage of content that goes unused and reduce that number as much as possible.

Banner Advertisements

You see banner advertisements everywhere you go online, but how effective are they really? Banner ads are actually shown to underperform when compared to almost any other kind of content marketing. Make sure that they are part of a broader marketing strategy. Think carefully about where you place them in order to get the most out of the investment.

Engaging Your Customers

There are several ways that you can monitor how well you are engaging your customers online. Resources such as Google Analytics allow you to easily keep track of various aspects of website viewership.

Bounce Rate

How many people who visit your site stay there for an extended period of time and click on several different pages within the site? The percentage of viewers who leave your site after viewing only one page is known as the bounce rate. As you alter your content marketing strategy, pay close attention to how each change affects the bounce rate, so you can focus on the changes that are beneficial.

Repeat Visits

Pay attention to repeat visits and extended time spent with your brand. By looking at repeat visits, you can measure the value of brand awareness and track how your content marketing affects loyal customers.

Subscribers

Calculate the value per subscriber. Determine the cost and payoff of bringing customers into the brand fold, and learn how to market towards these customers.

In summary, keep track of your content marketing strategy. Pay attention to where the money is going. Pay close attention to the cost of your content, and make sure that the content actually being used. Check on the performance of each type of content and constantly try to improve. Use a resource such as Google Analytics to help see what’s going on with your website traffic as you make changes.

Try to draw in organic traffic by starting conversations, spreading your brand name, and instilling loyalty in your customers. When trying to develop your business’s content marketing strategy, keep these factors in mind, and make improvements wherever possible for a greater ROI.

If you want more suggestions for developing your website, check out VMA’s other blogs. This one goes over how to keep your content fresh and up-to-date, or “evergreen.”

Social Media and the Unfiltered Internet

Do you remember The Dress? The one that no one could decide whether it was gold and white or blue and black. The one that was being talked about all over the place in 2015. Did you know that the original post for the dress was a Facebook post that got fewer than 20 likes? It was only later, when it was posted to Tumblr and Twitter, that the dress picture because the phenomenon of The Dress.

Filtered Internet Content

The Internet is a huge place that’s expanding every day. In fact, we can only see a tiny portion of it. And that portion is further shrunken by the social media platforms that we use to browse for entertainment or work. The general population adds to these sites constantly, providing an ever-expanding source of content. The question arises though: is there too much content?

Even if you browse social media sites all day every day, you won’t be able to see even a small fraction of their content. This poses a problem for the companies running these sites. They want people to stick around and continue to browse the site, because the more viewers they have, the more money they get from advertising. If a viewer’s feed is too bogged down by uninteresting or irrelevant content, they are more likely to stop going to that site altogether.

This problem has caused most social media sites to start filtering content in one way or another. For example, Facebook decides what to show on your feed based on many underlying factors, such as your sex, age, marital status, and the types of websites and links you tend to visit. In general this is a good thing, since it makes our feeds more interesting and pertinent to us. However, it also causes a sizable underlying layer of social media that gets lost and unseen in the shuffle.

Hidden Content

This hidden content is public and recognized by search engines, but it only reaches a tiny audience and is difficult to find if you’re looking for it. To give you an idea of how much content is hidden, here’s a study from 2009 that showed that 53% of YouTube videos had under 500 views!

Hidden content (besides the spam) often feels more honest, since it doesn’t contain the repetitive formulas of mainstream traffic that keeps those posts more visible to search engines. It also tends to be more amateurish, of low quality, be too short or too long, and have titles that are difficult to find in a search. In general, the hidden content feels more candid, intimate, and human.

If you’re interested in sifting through this forgotten content, several resources have popped up to help you. These include Oviews for unwatched YouTube videos, SadTweets for unseen Twitter tweets, and Forgotify for unheard songs on Spotify.

Using the Unfiltered Internet

As with every resource, some people have actually found a way to get money from the underbelly content of the unfiltered Internet. Some companies search through public photos that people post online looking for recognizable brands. They then sell the photos to the brand’s company for demographic information or advertisement.

Some of the unpopular content is eventually discovered and becomes extremely popular for a time. When content goes viral like this, the original poster very rarely profits from their fame, and sometimes it can even cause them harm. Imagine having a video you posted go viral to the point where you get hundreds of notifications per hour. It would get old quickly and make it impossible to actually find the notifications that you want to see. This is what happened to the girl who originally posted about The Dress. Her phone kept crashing from the influx of notifications. In the aftermath, BuzzFeed posted about a party they were throwing to celebrate The Dress as their largest post ever. It’s impossible to know exactly how much money BuzzFeed made off of that post, but it is known that the original poster didn’t really benefit.

What is interesting (and disconcerting) is that the biggest post on one of the most popular social media sites was taken from another site, which was also taken from another site, without the permission or knowledge of the act from the original poster. No one was compensated for this string of events, and the post was eventually taken down due to copyright infringement.

The Internet is becoming more and more centralized and controlled by corporations trying to subsist on other people’s content. Some of these companies last a long time, while others disappear and are quickly replaced by something else. The future of these companies and social media in general is unclear. It’s similarly hard to tell what will happen to the enormous amount of unseen content that makes up the majority of the unfiltered Internet as it continues to expand every second.

Check out Virtual Market Advantage’s other blogs here for more posts about SEO, social media, and various other topics!

Get your links indexed Fast!

If you want to know how to get your links indexed fast, you probably know a thing or two already about Search Engine Optimization. To make sure we are all on the same page, here are a few things you should have already done:

Indexed your website in Google's Webmaster Tools
Built a link pointing back to your website

If you've made it this far, Congratulations! If not, go back and do those two things.

Now, when you log in to your Google Webmaster Tools Search Console, you can click on the "Links to Your Site" menu option on the left in order to view the links pointing back to your site.

When you click on Links to Your Site, if your link building has been a success, you will see something like this:

That's a bunch of links - And it really is easy to get tons more quickly!

What's the secret?

HIRE AN INDEXING SERVICE!

Spend money on my business? Never! I know I know...I used to be just like you. I would work all day making backlinks that would not show up in Webmaster Tools. So Frustrating! I used to feel like I was on some wild goose chase. I could easily build dofollow links, but for some reason they never showed up as pointing back to my site. I grew even more frustrated as I employed more advanced link building techniques such as Scrapebox and GSA Ser. Why was I failing?!

Mainly because Indexing is a difficult and complicated process. It is a completely different level of SEO tasks. If you're like me, then you barely have time to make links, let alone spend your time pinging and sending social signals. So if you want to get your links indexed fast, you should use who I use:

INDEXIFICATION

HERE'S EXACTLY WHAT YOU GET

Add Unlimited Campaigns & Unlimited URLs per Campaign
Add 1.5 Million Links a month = 50K Links daily
Auto Shorten and Rewrite Links using a 301 redirect
Schedule Links for up to 30 days ahead
100% Guaranteed Links Crawling Rate
High Links Indexing Rate
Realtime Live Crawl Tracking & Stats on All Your Links
100% Automation - Submit Your Links and Forget!
Full Remote API Access for even more Automation
3rd Party Linkbuilding Services Integration
Automated Link Checking & Reporting Dead Links
Free Lifetime 24/7 Customer Service & Support

VMA has been using Indexification for the last couple years. The price is excellent - starting at $17.97 (which gives you more then enough links for any beginner to novice), and we thoroughly recommend it. Best of all, Indexification integrates with all of these 3rd party software applications:

• Scrapebox
• GSA Search Engine Ranker
• SEnuke XCr
• No Hands SEO
• Magic Submitter
• Ultimate Demon
• Backlink Monitor
• AIO Wiki Poster
• SE Demon
• Article Kevo
• Licorne AIO
• Wiki Robot
• Sweet Submitter
• SB Bomber 2
• 301 Nuke
• 301 Redirector
• Ultimate BookmarkR

If you are creating thousands of Profile Links, Wiki Links, Social Bookmarks, Article Links, Forum Links, Blog Comments, Web 2.0 Properties, and so on and so forth...you really need to index these links! You can make as many backlinks as you want, but if you don't index your links, you will never get them to show up in Webmasters Tools.

Adding new Links for Indexing is incredibly easy - you just paste them in a form. By default, the links are set to Drip Feed within 7 days, but you can customize that as well. Indexification specializes in providing 100% crawling rate and high indexing rate of your backlinks!

If you are serious about Link Building, Indexification is a must. We use it for every link we create. Have you ever tried Indexification? Let us know how it worked for you!

Spam Bot Traffic: What Is It and What Can I Do About It?

If you have a website and social media campaign for your business, chances are high that you’ve encountered spam bot traffic. Spam bots are programs that have been created to follow, befriend, comment on, or otherwise contact as many people or websites as possible as quickly as possible. Usually they are used in an attempt to bring more traffic back to their own site. Fake followers from spam bots are not actively looking at your site. They are not customers, and they can even be detrimental to your business.

Why is Spam Bot Traffic a Problem?

You might wonder how exactly spam bots affect your website and your business. The major problems have to do with reduced communication, security, server load, and faulty analytics data.

One of the most obvious problems is the flood of bogus comments onto your website or social media page. Comments sections are supposed to be a place where viewers can contact a business directly and set up a flow of conversation. A good comments section can genuinely benefit a website. However, if a comments section is overflowing with spam that advertises different sites, it cripples the ability to keep conversations going and takes attention away from the original site.

Spam bot traffic has gotten to be such a huge problem that many websites are opting to turn off their comments sections and user registrations entirely. Some are also forced to spend valuable time and even pay money to try to protect their websites from such attacks. Even large blogging sites such as CopyBlogger.com have opted to remove their comments sections, stating that only about 4% of the comments they were receiving were not spam.

If the spam bots get bad enough, your website can be greatly harmed. Too much spam can slow down your website, which affects how many people are willing to peruse it. Depending on what kind of outbound links the spam bots add to your site, it can even get flagged and ignored by Google, making it difficult for real viewers to find you. You might also lose your website to hackers who take it over themselves.

Spam bots also inflate your website’s statistics, making it difficult to use tools such as Google Analytics. If spam bot traffic is flooding your site, you can’t use statistical information to accurately give you useful information, such as who your viewers are, so you can focus more on those demographics.

How to Identify Spam Bot Traffic

There are two major types of spam bots that can affect your website. One kind is more visible, posting comments, advertising themselves, and directing traffic to their own sites. The other kind is harder to see and is designed to give a website more views or fake followers without adding any benefit to the original site.

A surge in traffic on your website might indicate spam bots. It might also just be legitimate, beneficial traffic. If you see a surge in traffic, consider whether or not you’ve done something recently that warrants an increase in viewership. If not, you probably have a spam bot problem. You can use Google Analytics to help identify malicious traffic by looking at the sources of the traffic before and after the surge. If the traffic is coming from a major website or social network, it’s probably legitimate. If it’s direct traffic, it’s probably from spam bots.

There are some warnings that can help identify spam bots individually. They spew out an excessive amount of comments on lots of websites. They also try to push their own links on viewers, even if they have nothing in common with the website they are posted on. However, being able to identify individual spam bots is not particularly useful, since hundreds or even thousands of them might affect your site at a time.

How to Reduce Spam Bot Traffic

There are several ways you can attempt to reduce or eliminate spam bot traffic on your website and social media pages. The most effective methods are to shut down communications, like CopyBlogger.com did when they shut down their comments section. Most websites allow you to shut off comments and turn off user registrations altogether. However, this is an extreme response, and many people want to keep communication with their viewers open.

Website can also offer options that allow for more restriction for commenting and registration. For example, WordPress has .htaccess files that restrict bots and several plugins that add CAPTCHAs, limit login attempts, and blacklist spam IP addresses. Also, Google Analytics allows you to filter the data, which can remove some of the effects of spam bots. For example, if a lot of spam is coming from a particular country, you can have the analytics ignore that area. Some websites, such as Facebook, are somewhat better than others at removing and restricting spam accounts without hassle to you.

Spam bot traffic is a huge problem online and will continue to be an issue for the foreseeable future. Not only do they slow down websites, but they can reduce beneficial communication and even be a security risk. If your websites or social media pages are plagued by spam bots, make sure you check for resources specific to those sites that might help reduce the problem. Don’t let spam bots ruin your site!