This article also appeared in Social Media Today.
I did a content marketing experiment — and failed.
With a little twist, I wanted to demonstrate a content marketing experiment — particularly for smaller companies. And how it could work for your business, too.
The experiment yielded some interesting results, and I thought I would share them.
The Content Theme: Blogger outreach
About six months ago, I decided to practice some focus here on the blog. I’m passionate about most things related to digital marketing, but I decided to create some content around blogger outreach.
Why not? I hadn’t written extensively about the topic in the past, but I had published at least a few relevant posts. So here’s what I did:
So, what happened?
I Got Remarkable Results…
I did get a little more organic search engine traffic on blogger outreach-related queries, but nothing extravagant. But despite how small-scale this experiment was, I still got some pretty remarkable results.
This is the outcome from six months:
… But Still a Miserable Failure
So, how did I fail miserably?
My professional network quickly forgot I’m a PR generalist. Suddenly, everyone thought of me as the blogger outreach specialist.
The result: It took almost 12 months to re-establish my position as a PR generalist.
The insight: Be mindful and choose your content themes carefully.
Thanks for reading. Please consider sharing my public relations blog with other communication and marketing professionals. If you have questions (or want to retain my PR services), please contact me at jerry@spinfactory.com.
PR Resource: Content Themes
Content Themes
Let’s use a fictitious example of an IT company. First, they decide on a Promise Filter for their content strategy:
Promise Filter: We make IT easy to understand.
Then, the IT company breaks their core message down into four business-critical Content Themes:
Q1 Content Theme: We make people understand the Internet of Things (IoT).
Q2 Content Theme: We make people understand business automation.
Q3 Content Theme: We make people understand cloud computing.
Q4 Content Theme: We make people understand managed services.
For each quarterly Content Theme, they produce Content Packages (to build Content Skyscrapers). Each Content Package could contain the following:
Learn more: The Content Themes PR Strategy
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