When Old School Meets New School

by Elle Ray | Aug 29, 2017 | Content Marketing

Marketing Trends & Fashion Go Through Cycles

I never threw away my suede fringe jacket or my bellbottoms because I love them and they bring back so many good memories. And then, behold, just last year, I wore them again and no one batted an eye. It was time; it was their time to re-emerge. What’s old is new again. It works for clothing, music, furniture and most everything you can think of — including marketing.

High-tech online marketing trends have dominated the conversation for so long now that they’ve become mainstream. And usually when a concept, product or any marketable item becomes ubiquitous, someone’s going to go retro until the next big breakthrough appears.

Hello? Anybody Home?

Most surveys and number-crunchers estimate that about 85 percent of American adults use email. They may not all use it every day, but they’ve got an account and access to the internet. That makes email pretty much ubiquitous — and like the meaning of ubiquitous: it’s everywhere, it’s everywhere!

Let’s keep it on the low side and say that most people with an email account receive an average of 25 messages a day (the actual average was approaching 90 in 2015). So 25 a day is certainly on the low, low side. But consider that number for the sake of argument — that’s still a lot of messages to sludge through on a daily basis.

If you’re like most people, you can’t go a day without checking your email. Miss a day, and your inbox gets so clogged up that it takes an entire day just to trudge through it all. Meanwhile, email has been one of the top marketing trends for so long now that even older, staid brands (think AARP) rely on it. After a while, the Delete button becomes your best asset.

For the Price of a Stamp

Never mind the cost of actually using email for marketing purposes. You can pay hundreds (or even thousands) of dollars for email lists, only to experience many unsubscribes and wasted effort. You can pay a marketing trends company hundreds or thousands of dollars a month to generate ads in social media — the long arm of the inbox that has replaced email for younger adults and teens.

But for just 49 cents, the price of a stamp, you can reach a very special place in the home, business, office or private box of your target market. And odds are that your mailbox competition is pretty low these days. If you think it’s just not cool to use “snail mail” for marketing, check out the music industry blog music 3.0. They refer to hot new snail mail campaigns by the likes of Taylor Swift and lesser-knowns like King Krule and Animal Collective, who are returning to stamped mail for exposure.

Novel, Yet Not a Bad Read

All your customers have a home and an address. Getting mail delivered in a hard copy is just novel enough to stand out from the avalanche of marketing trends people get everywhere else, from their TVs to their email inboxes. The U.S. Postal Service can get pricey if you don’t have a targeted mailing list, but then again, so can random Facebook ads.

With so many barriers to break to actually reach an inbox — think spam filters, ad blockers, algorithms and unsubscribe boxes — it may be time to tap into the old, tried-and-true turf of snail mail. Stand out while you still can, before the post office undergoes a retro resurgence. Jump on this marketing trends bandwagon early. And just as newsletters are making a huge comeback, pull out your headbands and leggings — or your fringe and bellbottoms — and join the march from yesterday to tomorrow.

Need help writing your newsletter or promo material that you’re going to put in a letter or on the back of a postcard? Ray Access is a content marketing firm that delivers targeted words to empower your business. Contact us about your specific project to receive a quote or discuss your needs. We write website copy, blog posts, e-newsletters and more. Everything we do is thoroughly researched, professionally edited and guaranteed original.

The Truth About Content Marketing

by Mark Bloom | Jul 4, 2017 | Content Marketing

Content Marketing Strategy Requires Promotion

First, keep in mind that content marketing works. It brings traffic to your business website and converts visitors into customers. It works over time as you add content and answer questions your customers are asking about your business or your industry. The relevant statistic is:

74 percent of buyers choose the company who first answered their questions.

As writers and producers of website content and blog posts, the team at Ray Access has seen its share of amazing successes. For instance, one client, a tent and party rental company, claimed to have lost money the first year we wrote content for them because they were unprepared for the onslaught of customers — they had to pay their team lots of overtime just to keep up.

Not Every Client Experiences Sudden Growth

Content marketing alone doesn’t always produce immediate results like this client experienced. To ensure success, you need to develop a content marketing strategy. Content marketing needs to be part of the picture, but not the whole picture.

The rules have changed, and the internet no longer provides a blank check. While it’s a level playing field — meaning small companies can compete with larger ones — you now have to do everything you can to get noticed. You have to promote your content and follow good SEO practices.

Outreach and Onsite Marketing

So, when you put together a content marketing strategy, you have to include the practice of promoting your website content. You have to push your blog posts and press releases out into the world. You have to deliver them to the platforms, whether on social media or complementary websites, where your prospective customers are spending their online time.

And still that’s not enough. You have to optimize the content on your website not just for search engines, but also for conversions. If you advertise online, you need carefully constructed landing pages to reinforce your value. Attracting qualified leads is just one job of your website. If those leads don’t find what they’re looking for, they’ll leave and never come back.

What’s Your Content Marketing Strategy?

If you don’t have one, you’re not empowering your website to do its jobs to its fullest capacity. If you haven’t developed personas, do you really know who your customers are or who’s really buying your products or services? A content marketing strategy:

1. Points you in the right direction to gain customers
2. Helps you develop the content those customers are seeking
3. Provides the topics your customers and potential customers need to follow you from awareness to sales
4. Clearly directs readers to purchase your goods or services

You can do all this work in-house, assuming your marketing team can handle the load and has the marketing expertise, or you can hire various third-party vendors to watch your internet back. Without a plan, you’re shooting blanks into a barrel of water instead of arrows into the minds of those you want to attract. Your marketing plan needs a content piece to guide your work.

If you need any help, contact Ray Access. Expert at content development, the principals of Ray Access can help you develop the right content to the right audience at the right time. To find out what it may cost, read How Much Does Website Content Cost?

Ray Access is a content marketing firm that delivers targeted words to empower your business. Contact us about your specific project to receive a quote or discuss your needs. We write website copy, blog posts, e-newsletters and more. Everything we do is thoroughly researched, professionally edited and guaranteed original.

The ROI of Content Marketing

by Mark Bloom | May 16, 2017 | Content Marketing

Justifying the Cost of Marketing Your Business

Let’s start with the basics. Marketing is what you do to promote or sell your products or services. It can include advertising, building brand awareness and market research. Content marketing, on the other hand, is specifically online marketing that employs videos, blogs, and other targeted articles to stimulate interest instead of explicitly promoting your brand.

Measuring the ROI of content marketing, then, is to determine its worth in hard numbers. Is that even possible, given the definition above? Yes, it is — for two very good reasons:

1. Businesses conduct activities for the sole purpose of selling more; therefore, the concept of content marketing would not even exist if it didn’t accomplish that goal.
    
2. Content marketing has to be tied to a specific business goal, which can be measured.

The Goals of Content Marketing

Many companies begin content marketing to deliver “leads, leads and more leads.” So the prize is not just building brand awareness, but establishing a growing base of people who actually want to do business with your company. In this media-savvy market, that means marketing outside the traditional venues of advertising.

Companies are eschewing traditional advertising for content marketing. Nearly 30 percent of marketers report reducing their digital advertising budgets to produce more content. Content marketing reaches people in a way they don’t despise. That, in itself, generates brand acceptance. It’s also the first step toward creating leads.

How Content Marketing Works

Before you can measure the ROI of content marketing, understand the principles behind it. Traditional marketing uses content no one really wants. It’s forced on people as advertising. Content marketing, on the other hand, is content people want. It comes in the form of:

• Desired information — such as How Much Does Website Content Cost?
• Entertaining articles — such as Unique Wedding Invitation Ideas
• Added-value tips — such as Tax Tips for Home Buying

By the way, these are all blog posts written by Ray Access. But the goal here is to educate you, not just promote Ray Access. If you have the time and talent to create your own great content, do it. Once you know how it works and what you need, your business will benefit.

Bear in mind that for online content, the most effective results come from longer blog posts. The typical word count has risen from 808 words in 2014 to 1,054 words in 2016. Longer-form content generates something on the order of nine times more leads than shorter-form content.

The Costs of Content Marketing

To determine the ROI of content marketing, you need to know its costs. If you’re developing your own content in-house, you can accurately measure your monthly costs. You’re paying a managing editor, the person in charge of not only directing the work, but also editing the content so that it aligns with your goals and embodies your business’ personality. You also have costs associated with hosting and publishing.

If you outsource your content creation, you still have hosting and publishing costs. Depending on the size of your company, these costs can vary from about $100 a month all the way up to $32,000 a month. That’s quite a range, but it shows the difference between one blog post a month and a full strategic marketing effort across many platforms.

We’ve written about the cost of website content before. You need both alluring blog posts and effective words on your website for your business to generate ROI. One without the other leads to either low website traffic or high traffic with few conversions, so you need both to determine the ROI of content marketing.

The ROI of Content Marketing

Remember that the goal of content marketing is to increase leads, which adds sales, assuming your website can successfully convert those leads into customers. You can, therefore, measure the number of leads your website delivers. And since you know your costs, you can determine your cost per lead. This is basic business.

One study by the Content Marketing Institute found that content marketing produced a lower cost per lead than paid advertising. For large businesses over a two-year period, the difference was as much as 41 percent — 31 percent for mid-sized businesses. That quickly adds up to dramatic savings.

Proof of Content Marketing’s ROI

Ray Access isn’t the only company touting the ROI of content marketing. Many other concerns have achieved proven results, either for themselves or for their clients. For example:

• Ray Access has always said that content marketing is the least expensive, most effective way to market your business. When you examine the ROI of content marketing, it costs 62 percent less than traditional marketing while generating about three times the volume of leads.
• As more and more consumers rely on online content, your content marketing campaign aligns with this shift in media consumption habits. Nearly 75 percent of all marketers considered online content more valuable than traditional advertising.
• Buyers trust online content that connects with them. It’s becoming part of the normal purchasing process. About 90 percent of B2B buyers reported that online content played at least a moderate role in their purchasing decisions. Meanwhile, 95 percent of B2B buyers consider trustworthy content when they evaluate your company.
• Unlike paid advertising, the benefits of which stop immediately when you stop paying for it, content marketing offers long-term ROI. In fact, 10 percent of blog posts increase in value over time, delivering more organic search traffic.
• Effective website content drives conversions, too. The conversion rate can be six times higher for companies using content marketing than those that don’t.

In savvy hands, content for websites and blog posts can be versatile and reusable as well. Nearly 60 percent of marketers reuse and repurpose their original content two to five times. Ray Access delivers website content and blog posts as ghostwriters, meaning you own it and can reuse it however you wish.

Measuring the ROI of Content Marketing

How will you measure success? You can capture your growing brand awareness through the number of website visits, especially for first-time visitors. You can count the number of email or form-driven contacts. And you know how many of those become customers. Even if you use these simple metrics, you can determine the ROI of your content marketing.

In the future, more complex formulas will be available for measuring your efforts. Of course, also in the future, content marketing is likely to shift to more complex products — beyond effective website content and blog posts, which by then should be as commonplace as storefront signage. Two predictions are:

• “Companies will share more stories of corporate social responsibility, highlighting people and programs focused on sustainability, diversity and inclusion, and community involvement.” —Cara Cannella, senior brand editor
• “We’re going to see an increased investment in storytelling as a core communications strategy. Visionary leaders will form centralized content teams responsible for managing all content across the enterprise, and laggards will simply task their staff with ‘telling more stories’.” —Dan Gottlieb, senior sales executive

On the advice of marketing experts, therefore, you need to build the basics of your content marketing plan before you can calculate the ROI of content marketing. Blog regularly and create engaging content on your social media outlets to generate leads. Make sure your website content converts visitors into customers. If you don’t do that much, the ROI of content marketing for your business will be zero.

Ray Access is a content marketing firm that delivers targeted words to empower your business. Contact us about your specific project to receive a quote or discuss your needs. We write website copy, blog posts, e-newsletters and more. Everything we do is thoroughly researched, professionally edited and guaranteed original.

Does Content Marketing Work? Really?

by Mark Bloom | Apr 17, 2017 | Content Marketing

Answers You Seek Regarding Content Marketing

It’s a question that has been around as long as the Sears catalog: Does content marketing work? If it really, truly worked, every business would devote a significant portion of its marketing and advertising budget to content marketing — instead of, say, Super Bowl ads or Sunday newspaper coupons. And good content writers would be in demand and appreciated for what they do.

The short answer is that content marketing does work and good content writers are in demand. The long answer, however, is a bit more complicated. In this heavily researched blog post, you’ll learn the complex truth about content marketing — so you can stop asking, “Does content marketing work?” and start asking, “How can content marketing work for me?”

Define Your Goals

Any marketing strategy is only successful if it accomplishes its goals. So, when you begin a content marketing campaign, you have to first decide what you hope to achieve. Some marketing firms have general goals for your business, such as generating a personal connection, enhanced visibility, and sustained credibility on the Internet. But Ray Access sees these as social media goals, not content marketing goals.

Ultimately, you want your efforts to pay off in more sales. That’s why you’re willing to invest in the expense of content marketing — which, by the way, costs less than most other marketing strategies. Most businesses want their content marketing to achieve the goals reflected in an article by GaggleAMP:

• Generate consistent content
• Market the content you produce
• Grow your website traffic
• Convert your new visitors into customers

Getting to Profitability

According to The Content Marketing Ninja and ProfitWell.com, your business requires two factors to answer “Does content marketing work?” They are:

1. Amazing quality in your content
2. A marketing strategy

Quality has to do with both the proficiency of your writers and the purpose of the writing. Experts believe that the purpose of content marketing is to educate, inform or entertain. Since you never know what may go viral, you have to first give people a reason to read your content.

Great Content Isn’t Enough

Does content marketing work? For you to answer that question, you have to fully commit to the effort, according to the Search Engine Journal. While creating good content is a start, you must realize you’re going to spend more time promoting than creating.

Indeed, Innovative Marketing Resources (IMR) asserts that great content is only part of the equation; you also need a sales process. Marketing has to lead to sales to be effective. In one terrific analogy, they compare gasoline to content: “Gas to a car is what content is to content marketing.” In other words, you need the car to get anywhere. Pouring gas over four tires and engine parts gets you nowhere, even if you add more gas.

Specific Targets Are Required to Triumph

Remember START. You must learn about the people you want to buy your products or services. As James Ellis has shared: “Whoever knows his audience best, wins.” You have to provide content that your audience wants. It has to be relevant to them in their lives. Even IMR directs content marketers to continue to ask questions about your customers to overcome their objections.

Instead of asking, “Does content marketing work?” ask yourself, “What type of people are in my audience?” There are three different types of people:

1. Freeloaders. There are many people who never pay for anything. They search the web to find answers to their issues so they can do it themselves. Provide them the information they seek, but never expect them to pay for your products or services.
    
2. Try It Yourselfers. Most people fall into this category. They want your information so they can try it themselves. They soon realize they need what you offer, bite the bullet and buy from you. Since your content got them started, they remember you.
    
3. Professional Businesspeople. These people are, surprisingly, quite rare. They value their time enough to know right away what they can and can’t do. They see the worth in buying what you have and don’t hesitate if it can help them reach their own goals.

Does Content Marketing Work?

To succeed at content marketing, you need quality content, but that’s just the place to start. Put that content in front of as many eyeballs as possible — and as many SMART eyeballs as possible. The Freedompreneuer Business Academy believes in spreading content-rich information through multiple channels and platforms, including:

• Blog posts
• Podcasts
• Webinars
• Videos
• Books and ebooks
• Free downloads

James Ellis points out that attraction content doesn’t convert, and conversion content doesn’t attract. You need both: content to attract traffic and then content that can convert that traffic. Ray Access creates blog posts that attract your audience and website content that converts your traffic.

Does content marketing work? It doesn’t matter whom you ask, the answer is yes. But you’ve got to work your strategy. Content marketing only begins with great content. You’ve got to target it, promote it and distribute it.

Ray Access is a content marketing firm that delivers targeted words to empower your business. Contact us about your specific project to receive a quote or discuss your needs. We write website copy, blog posts, e-newsletters and more. Everything we do is thoroughly researched, professionally edited and guaranteed original.