Nobody cares about your blog.
But that doesn’t mean content marketing is dead. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Hear me out — I promise this post is not as insulting as the title might sound.
I’m not saying you lack brand advocates or affinity with your audience. Your customers care that you solve problems for them. Sometimes those problems are solved via your products, sometimes via written content. That does matter to people.
What they don’t care about is your “blog” — ie this content engine you’ve created to “engage” your audience.
Unless you belong to the small subset of marketers working on media brands, like actual media brands, not a brand with a media outlet, your audience doesn’t come to your blog to peruse.
And yet that’s how we have historically organized our content engines. That’s how we’ve thought about our newsletters, our blog homepages, our funnels, our editorial calendars.
Stop wasting your time trying to foster “engagement.” That’s why nearly every corporate blog falls flat.
You can do better.
There are two genres of mediocre content marketing in 2018:
- Inane, parroted posts obviously written to a keyword universe that lack real value, and
- Highly editorialized “brand journalism.” These blogs (often dubbed online magazines) are really fun to work on. They tend to generate industry press, but from a marketing perspective they nonetheless fall flat.
I don’t need to speak much about #1 because it’s been discussed ad nauseum amongst the content community. Since you’re reading this, I’d hazard a guess that you believe in quality content, not highly optimized nonsense written by someone whose expertise in the subject comes exclusively from Google, not real life experience.
Fuck copycat content that does not deserve to exist in the world. We have enough noise.
What’s less commonly criticized: brand efforts to create journalism-adjacent media outlets that are high-quality, but rooted in brand, not customer centricity.
A Cautionary Tale, Courtesy of Casper
Casper’s now defunct blog, Van Winkle’s, sought to be an editorial media hub surrounding sleep. From where I stand, the editorial outlet’s sole purpose was to support Casper’s constant attempt to be more than a mattress maker in the eyes of the world. They’re a sleep brand, you guys, and they’ll shove it down your throats until you agree.
Van Winkle’s launched in 2015, garnered industry accolades including a Webby nomination, then shuttered a year later.
Van Winkle’s might have looked like a salacious brand play from the outside, but from a marketing perspective? It was a failure.
Jeff Koyen, who headed the project, told Digiday,
“Generally speaking, being an independent brand publication is not going to work. At the end of the day, brands are performance marketers. If you don’t deliver business results, they will let you go.”
What’s particularly funny to me is that Casper doesn’t seem to have learned their lesson. They’re stubbornly sticking to this same lackluster tactic with a new “wellness” publication called Woolly Magazine.
Woolly is high quality content. They partnered with McSweeney’s to build a print magazine that’s almost New Yorker in nature.
As a piece of media, it’s impressive.
But high quality content isn’t the same thing as effective marketing.
Woolly Magazine gets the attention of VCs and industry publications and looks interesting at first glance but I’ll hypothesize that it doesn’t. Matter. To Casper’s customers.
And if it doesn’t matter to your customers, it won’t work. Which is why despite buzz, despite lots of growth signaling, despite accolades from influential outlets, Van Winkle’s shut down.
Casper is spending their time and money shouting about their brand. Sure, in a beautifully written, subtle way, but Woolly Magazine is nonetheless insular thinking to indulge Casper’s own brand whims. And that’s why their content strategy falls flat.
2018’s most impactful marketers don’t get caught up in the (albeit tempting) distraction of an over-editorialized content engine. They don’t make the mistake of conflating content marketing and media.
They think about content far differently: it’s just another way to solve problems for customers. That’s what builds brand advocacy, drives conversions, fosters trust.
“Blog” is really a misnomer if you’re on board with this strategy.
Instead of thinking of your content engine like media — like a blog — start thinking about it as a library of resources.
Resource Libraries > Blogs
Here’s a real-world, personal example for you.
A year ago, we totally redesigned our own blog. The redesign was part of a brand-wide “leveling up;” this wasn’t just a fresh coat of paint to feel more modern (though, honesty moment: we needed a fresh coat of paint). We were rethinking our brand identity across the board, applying design thinking to every aspect of Tortuga.
We started by redesigning our line of travel backpacks, then our online store. When we got to the blog, we had somewhat of an identity crisis. Over the two years since I joined the team, we had slowly morphed into something that didn’t resemble a blog anymore, not at all.
It was a library of resources, and that required an entirely different approach.
Timeliness was no longer relevant, and newness didn’t matter when it came to a post’s performance. And in terms of topics, our customers weren’t that interested in the story-driven pieces we wrote for “engagement.” They weren’t that interested in being engaged by us. They just wanted our help to make their travels easier and more enjoyable.
They weren’t perusing the site, they were searching for a destination or a recommendation.
They came to us to get a specific travel problem solved or a packing question answered — not out of boredom or habit.
I’d bet your customers have similar behavior.
What About SaaS?
Every example I’ve given thus far relates to ecommerce, and more specifically the direct-to-consumer landscape. But this thought process applies to enterprise, too.
I’ll give you an example in the form of a project I worked on with RJMetrics a few years ago. On this specific project, I was a consultant in charge of PPC and worked closely with the organic and content teams to build a holistic customer acquisition strategy.
After several months of testing campaigns, we noticed that our blog wasn’t getting traction. It wasn’t working in the midfunnel, it wasn’t landing on SERPs, and it certainly wasn’t driving paid leads. Our annual benchmark report and microsites, on the other hand, were responsible for the majority of leads via both paid and organic channels.
The reason the benchmark report worked and the blog didn’t? The former answered the finite set of problems that RJMetrics’ customers wanted us to solve for them. Prospects would start a demo of the product, come away with a bunch of data, then think, now what. I know my average churn rate… but is that a good churn rate?
The blog looked interesting from the outside, but the benchmark report solved a real problem. And that’s what mattered.
We thus pivoted away from traditional blog posts. Instead, we focused our energy (and spend) on building a truly comprehensive benchmark report updated annually. If we had a webinar or a guest blogging opportunity, we’d pull out one metric from that benchmark report, repackage the content to fit the new channel, and add context as needed.
Janessa Lantz, who headed the content arm of this project, named this the “barbell strategy.”
One side of the barbell is your focus: the finite set of problems you plan to solve for your customers. For RJMetrics, that One Big Thing was the annual benchmark report, solving the problem “is my performance good or bad?”. Start with your own One Big Thing, then adapt the format to whichever channels make sense for your business.
Which brings us to the other side of the barbell: how that problem-solving translates to your media mix and marketing strategy. Don’t start with the media mix. I know that sounds counterintuitive — it’s certainly opposite to the way I learned marketing.
At Tortuga, our One Big Thing is the logistical advice our customers need when planning for a trip. I don’t know many people who casually look up logistics to be engaged or entertained. You research logistics when you need to research logistics. We help our customers figure out what to bring and how to pack it: the best gear, which airport to fly into, the clothes to bring for a specific climate. We don’t write story-driven pieces that attempt to tap into the emotion or nostalgia of travel, as tempting as that might be.
It’s not quite as “fun” to work on problem-solving instead of editorial pieces.
But we aren’t in this game to wax poetic.
We’re in it to serve our customers and to grow our businesses.
It’s tough to do that when every post we publish does this:
That’s what happens when we write something brand-first (versus customer-first), that’s meant to be “engaging.” It might be high-quality, it might even take the customer into account, but that doesn’t make it a resource.
A resource is comprehensive, expert, relevant, and solves a finite problem. It makes your customers’ lives easier. It’s evergreen and reference-worthy. My personal gut check: if I had this problem, would I bookmark this post?
A resource does this:
A resource is what Google typically wants on its SERPs. So when you start publishing resources consistently, your content library does this:
That graph shows Tortuga’s blog traffic from January 2016 to May 2018. Our blog revenue graphs boast even faster growth.
I won’t lie: I’m really freaking proud of that.
So apart from your suite of content, what else needs to change? I think there are three big things: your metrics, your expectations, and your blog’s homepage.
Measure the Right Things
I’ll forever defend incremental, sustainable, aggregate growth. I don’t think content marketers should sprint frenetically towards the elusive hockey stick. It doesn’t make sense and it stresses everyone out.
So can we all take a breath and be happy with linear growth in content marketing? Because I am. I don’t pay attention to MoM or YoY % change anymore. Not for traffic, not for revenue. I might calculate it out of pure interest on a particularly good month, but I’m sure as hell not optimizing for it. I don’t even report the metric to our CEO.
Here are the metrics I think you should watch instead:
- Midfunnel revenue by post and by category. Yeah, I said midfunnel — not first touch, though first touch can be interesting, too. Definitely not last touch. If you’re still using last touch, pretend I just gave you a very judgy side eye. Because I did. Midfunnel attribution is crucial in content marketing and nobody wants to pay attention to it. Personally, I look at all-time midfunnel revenue by post / category and slice each into monthly or quarterly cohorts.
- Hit rate for the percentage of posts that maintain traction after three months. This should increase dramatically as you publish fewer “blog posts” and more resources. I find it particularly interesting to look at hit rate by category; for us, destination packing lists have the lowest hit rate, and gear reviews the highest. That doesn’t mean destination posts are not important for us — they are — but we have become more selective in which ones we write.
- Revenue per visit, conversion rate from reader to eventual purchaser, and average time to purchase from first visit. I look at this post-by-post, and I also find it helpful to aggregate by category. Use midfunnel revenue and transactions for these calculations, per the first bullet point.
Shift Your Expectations
When your posts are twice as comprehensive as they used to be, you might not be able to maintain as frequent of a cadence. Don’t be put off by that; quality is far more important than frequency.
Wil Reynolds, the founder of Seer Interactive, backs up the strategy of publishing fewer pieces in a tweet he sent during my MozCon presentation on this topic:
My hypothesis: if you’re publishing legitimately useful content, your customers won’t notice a decreased cadence.
And speaking of more comprehensive posts: I’d be remiss if I didn’t urge you to give your team the time, brainspace, and bandwidth to create high-quality resources. You’re trying to build something comprehensive. Don’t rush or half-ass a resource. Expect that each piece will take several times as long to write as whatever you were doing before. That is a good thing.
Move Away From a Reverse Chronological Homepage
When newness doesn’t matter, a feed of your most recent posts is irrelevant. Don’t waste your homepage on it. Only a tiny minority of sites should be reverse chronological.
Your blog’s homepage is for two things:
- Orienting readers, to show who you are and what you do, i.e. introducing people to the finite set of problems you’re solving via your content, and
- Helping people quickly and easily find what they need.
We’re big fans of orienting copy at Tortuga. Our blog homepage features a highly prominent line above the fold: what to bring and how to pack it. In essence, that’s the TL;DR of the blog. That’s the set of problems we solve.
Equally important is the UX side of things: helping people find what they need quickly and easily.
Navigation and search are crucial here, of course. Consider additional means, like a “start here” section of your most popular content. If your taxonomy is your Dewy Decimal system, the homepage is the front desk helping you orient yourself.
I want to challenge you to be more customer centric with your content.
The job of the content marketing team is to figure out how to help our customers via the written word.
Our job is not to engage or to entertain. Our job is to solve problems. Problems customers want us to solve.
That’s it.
If you have questions or want to debate the value of brand journalism, hit me up on Twitter. Even if you’re on Casper’s content team and want to yell at me.
This post is adapted from a presentation I gave on the MozCon 2018 stage.
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