Loading...
Answers
MenuIt looks like content marketing shouldn't work. Which one of my assumptions is wrong?
Answers
Unfortunately all the numbers are off. Content builds on itself in an accumulative fashion. Much of it is unquantifiable, but the success comes as breakthrough success after building your authority over time (atleast 18 months of consistent publishing content.)
Those 1000 monthly visitors should be growing consistently every month over time. If it is not growing you are not producing valuable enough evergreen content.
The list should be growing your traffic, not just sales...it should be a referral machine.
Are you engaging your audience when they interact with your content across various social channels? Is your content being linked to and shared organically? If not, you aren't really doing effective content marketing.
Are you constantly testing your emails and landing pages for improvements to conversion rates, analyzing which content is producing the most signups, sales, etc... If that is not growing exponentially you are doing something wrong.
Are you advertising your best content using native ad platforms like stumbleupon, outbrain, taboola, yahoo gemini? Why not? If your content is not valuable enough to drive signups and sales when you promote it, you are doing content marketing wrong.
Are you adapting your content into multiple media types and syndicating it? (i.e. a blog post can be shortened into bullets for a slideshare presentation, which can be used a slideshow video on youtube, and an audio reading of your post can be on soundcloud, syndicated as a podcast, etc...
Are you doing blogger outreach to generate interest in your content? Are you guest blogging to leverage other peoples audiences?
Content marketing is an accumulative effort, which when done right builds on itself accumulatively and snowballs into breakthrough success (i.e. look at moz.com and copyblogger.com both massive startups which started with simple content marketing.
I hope this helps.
I have landing-page content marketing opt-ins that routinely perform from 30 to 40% (http://cl.ly/image/1i3z1K3z1K3b) and one of my clients has a site-wide opt-in converting from 6 to 10% of site visitors.
The key to numbers like that are a strong match between your site traffic's intent and the opt-in offer. As an example, any time I guest on a podcast, my answer to "how can people find out more about you?" is to send them to http://positioningcrashcourse.com (which is not about me at all, but is a premium content resource that serves as the mouth of my funnel). That's the page that converts as well as 40% and normally converts at 30 to 35%.
I call this "getting your own traffic", and it converts at very high numbers relative to paid traffic or even organic search traffic.
So if you approach traffic generation in this way (or another way that sends warmed up, qualified traffic to a landing page), your 2% traffic --> list number is potentially way off.
The other reason why you're seeing so many others talk about content marketing as the holy grail is because it _is_ the holy grail... of building trust and demonstrating expertise.
It is not the best way to drive short-term sales tho.
But if you have a more medium to long term view, content marketing is a great way to attract leads and nurture them towards being ready to buy.
If you're an author (who is by definition sloughing off content all the time), this is a viable strategy because you're in it for the long haul with your audience, and time is on your side (see "Your First 10,000 Copies" for more details). If you're trying to drive e-book sales for minimal cost, it probably is not a great strategy.
You have the variables right. The values are all going to depend on your funnel design and effectiveness. You look like you are using an e-book as your lead magnet to get people to register. I would suggest you would only want to give them that e-book if they provide their email address, which drives your initial lead opt-in. From there it's your job to have more offers for them in order to make sales. You would have a thank you page offer for activation and then you'd have backend offers for higher dollar services or products now that you have activated some of the customers. You can also get more complex with different email campaigns and branches depending on their behavior in the funnel.
One thing to keep in mind is that 1,000 visits is not very much traffic. Your other numbers are probably off slightly, especially since you can upsell people who do buy in order to generate more revenue, but more importantly, in order to make money with content, you'll need to generate a lot more than 1,000 visitors per month.
The controversial answer is ... content marketing might not be right for every business model. Some businesses with a high LTV (lifetime value) client might kill for 1.8 sales per month, whereas those in the "widgets", stack high, sell low, business would struggle to make ends meet.
That said, and assuming yours is a business where the LTV is considerable, there's more work that can be done to improve those figures. I see conversions from visit to opt-in of 20-50% for our highly-targeted and compelling offers. If you were to replicate the lower end of this, you would see 200 people joining your list. If your sales conversion held true, you'd be making 18 sales per month - would that prove profitable?
Content marketing is a largely iterative approach, and works best when it meets the following criteria:
1. Offers are targeted at one particular and very specific buyer persona. The prospect MUST recognise themselves in the situation you're discussing.
2. Performance and conversions are tracked, split-tested, and optimised over time. This is the only guaranteed way to improve performance over time.
3. You repeat the process. Unsurprisingly, those companies with more landing pages, offers, and email follow-up's convert exponentially more business.
My experience is limited to the world of B2B, but the above holds true for most cases I've encountered. I hope it helps.
Related Questions
-
What strategies and tactics have people used to successfully launch and market apps to college students?
As far as targeting a single high school, I don't know. But, in terms of platforms this audience uses, Tumbler, Instagram, Snap Chat & Vine would be good targets.VP
-
Need a good lead generation strategy for chiropractors for getting new patients. Ideas?
I think Facebook is great for really targeting your audience and you’re on the right track. But I think you can have a better funnel than that. I find, for getting better conversion today, it is better to get your Facebook traffic off of Facebook as fast as you can to your offer and into your funnel. It is more effective for driving actual sales. If you’re just looking for social branding etc. then your funnel might be ok. A very effect strategy is to create either a video or report that you give away to your audience in exchange for an email. It should be something that helps solve or bring to light the problems patients are suffering from and how to go about solving them. Then mention how having a great Chiropractor can solve all of that and can be the most effective way to get ride of the pain. I would also have some things in there that would help them in other ways. Then I would send them to an event or webinar with your top Chiropractor and you in an interview / reveal-all type webinar to educate your lead and manage their fears of going to a Chiropractor. You could tell them that the first step is making an appointment for an assessment. You should make it easy for them to find the best and most effective Chiropractor in their area. You might have a discount on the assessment only available to them for being on the webinar to get them to sign up at the end of the webinar. By the way, once this is recorded, you can make this evergreen so you don't have to do a webinar all the time. As long as you are reaching more and new people with your Facebook campaign you won’t have to change the video all the time. Once you have people signed up to make an appointment, make sure they are also putting a deposit of a 100 dollars or something down. This will increase your show rate for the Chiropractors. Then give them a voucher for that Chiropractor, for more than you’re asking for at the deposit for services, to use with that Chiropractor. Allowing you to prevent cancelations etc. so that their getting their money back in the form of a voucher for services which, by the way, is not a discount and shouldn’t diminishing your Chiropractors Rates. This strategy I have used in several markets that has produced more prequalified leads and patients / customers. Remember to test, track and know your metrics. You’re going to need to make some tweaks in the beginning, but this can be very effective for you. So to recap: 1. Setup a landing page with your offer in exchange for an offer. You can build this in software like Leadpages.net or Megaphoneapp.com 2. Make your offer downloadable if an ebook or white paper or present your video after. I recommend using Wistia instead of YouTube for playback as you will be able to have heat maps of your video to know where your fall off points are. You can also make this page with the software mentioned above. 3. Use an email autoresponder to engage your lead and email them about the event you’re doing after they had time to read or download your materials. Or, if a video, I would just pitch them at the end with a link below the video to automatically register. 4. Put on a webinar with your guest using either GoToWebinar or Google hangouts if you know how to set that up. 5. Make sure you have your appointment getting page with your the down payment created. You can use several different type of scheduling services so you can automatically deliver the lead/ appointment to the chiropractor. To Note: The reason I don’t send the visitor to the webinar first is because it is better to get the visitor predisposed to your information before asking them to commit to a webinar and when you do it the way I played out, you will have a much better show rate. This is it in a nutshell. Obviously there is more to it. If you need another funnel idea I am hear to help. I have used other effective strategies in the past to also make money on the front end to make your advertising free. It just depends on what you want to do and how advanced you want to get. Hope this helps give you some ideas. :) If you need help implementing something like this just let me know.MH
-
What's the average CAC value or range for a Marketplace client?
I think you're looking at this the wrong way. Your customer acquisition cost is not something you should benchmark against other businesses. Without knowing more, like your short and long-term goals, it's impossible to answer. Two companies with similar business models may have different answers to this question. A venture-backed startup trying to keep up with aggressive revenue goals may be able to stomach an astronomical CAC. A bootstrapped startup that is not seeking venture money may aim for slower growth and much lower CAC. I suggest setting up a call with a marketing or finance expert to determine what CAC is appropriate for your company and how to get there.TL
-
What is the best country to start an online marketing and design business in?
I have registered over 20 companies in the last decade and from my experience I can tell you that every country serves a different purpose. I run a small gambling company that I have registered in Malta due to the legality of online gambling there. I have another company registered in Delaware, whilst my main company is registered in the Netherlands. If your business is only online I would advise you to register it in Europe or if you must in the United States in Delaware/Nevada. Credibility wise I would say that registering your company in Singapore or Malta or Costa Rica, will not benefit you much opposed to say Delaware or The Netherlands. I am available for a call if you need anymore help. I am currently doing a promotion for a one time free 15 minute phone call so just send me a message for the discount code.GS
-
What are the best ways to generate traffic or ways to reach to the customers you are looking for as a startup?
It really comes down to 2 major buckets. 1) CONTENT / INBOUND MARKETING Some people consider this option free, but it's not. Time is money, and it requires an major investment to do it right. The options are: - Company blog - Guest post on other blogs - Engage on social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) - Press - Videos on YouTube - Create a free App (web or mobile) etc ... This strategy is all about create amazing content/information/tools for your customers. Think about their major questions they have for your industry, and answer them. Even consider teaching them everything you know about your industry. Doing so will attract them, and make you look like an authority. I've done this with my past 2 companies Flowtown (300K U/V), and Clarity (40K U/V) blogs. Each of the items mentioned above have a unique strategy and tactic .. so best to pic the one you'd be most excited about creating, and do just that one with all your resources. 2) PAID MARKETING Paid means using advertising to introduce your company to potential customers. Some options you have: - Google Adwords - Facebook Ads - Twitter Ads - Bing Ads - Banner Ads etc ... The only way I would suggest paid marketing is if you truly understand your customer LTV (Lifetime Value). If you don't know that, then you could be wasting money attracting views to your startup that aren't profitable. So be sure to have a product / service that makes profit, then you can test different paid marketing channels. My rule of thumb, is it'll cost your $200 to get 1 new paying customer (on avg.), so unless you're making $600 profit from a new customer, don't both for now. If you need to discuss further, you know how to find me.DM
the startups.com platform
Copyright © 2025 Startups.com. All rights reserved.