What do you get when you combine Jell-O, Doritos, and Spiderman?
Three things.
Billions of dollars spent on marketing, some fine content, and a nasty snack.
Huge companies like these have the people and resources to experiment.
And even if there's little impact, it barely makes a dent in their profits.
Now, for people like you and I, we probably can't afford a SuperBowl commercial
or make a blockbuster film.
But it doesn't mean you can't create impactful content marketing campaigns.
So in this tutorial, I'm going to show you what content marketing looks like and
how you can use it to grow your business.
Stay tuned.
[music]
What's up marketers?
Sam Oh here with Ahrefs, the SEO tool that helps you grow your search traffic, research
your competitors, and dominate your niche.
Now, content marketing is more than just blogging or creating videos for YouTube.
According to CMI,
content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable,
relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience —
and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.
Now, let's break these down into some key points.
You need to create content and distribute it.
In terms of content attributes, it should be valuable, relevant, and consistent.
On top of that, you should know exactly who you're targeting so you can attract and retain them.
Most importantly, the content should drive profitable customer action.
Now, content marketing isn't exactly new.
It's been around for centuries.
For example, in 1904, a relatively unknown brand, named Jell-O, created their first recipe book.
And of course, the main ingredient for every recipe was their jelly product, making their
content relevant to their business.
They went door-to-door distributing free copies
and this contributed to over a million dollars in sales by 1906.
With inflation, that's nearly 30 million dollars today.
Now, in 1964, Hasbro created a line of military-themed dolls and action figures called G.I. Joe.
The toy didn't do so well and was eventually discontinued in 1978.
Then in 1982, Hasbro partnered with Marvel creating a new series of comic books, called
"G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero," which brought the action figures back to life.
When high-quality content and stories integrate your products, it influences purchasing decisions.
And that's content marketing in a box.
But successful content marketing ideas for your business don't exactly fit in a box.
Every business is unique and there are other external factors that can impact your campaigns.
So to heighten your chances of executing a successful content marketing strategy you can
use a 4-prong strategy that I call "The CART formula."
C is for content.
The content requires you to think of a topic and format you'll use.
For example, will it be a blog post, video, commercial, infographic, or whatever.
A is for audience.
Having a clearly defined audience is going to help you refine that format
as well as your distribution strategy.
For example, a personal finance guide would likely resonate with married couples, aged 25 and older.
Probably not as much for teenagers that are still dependant on their parents.
R is for relevance.
Content marketing isn't about virality.
It's about driving profitable customer action.
So keeping your content relevant to your products will ensure it's serving your business.
Finally is timing.
Being in the right place at the right time can increase your chances of success.
Generally speaking, the more criteria it fits, the better your campaign will do.
For example, a CART is better than just a CAR.
Let's look at a few examples of companies doing content marketing that I don't think
were crazy expensive to execute.
I'll break them down through my lens, and give you ideas on how you can replicate them.
The first example is a YouTube series called "Will it Blend."
This series was a wildly successful brand campaign where Tom Dickson, founder of Blendtec,
was able to showcase the power of his blender.
The content was simple, yet brilliant.
Create videos of putting random objects into a blender, and see if it'll blend to dust.
They took the boring topic of blending and made it exciting.
The videos entice curiosity, disbelief, and a lot of dust.
And it's pretty clear that they nailed relevance.
Their product is the star of the show.
And without it, the videos wouldn't have had the effect they did.
The place where they fell short in my opinion was the audience aspect.
If you look at their YouTube videos, you'll see that their "will it blend" videos all have
a crazy number of views.
But then they tried creating helpful recipe tutorials to go after a more relevant audience.
And you'll see that they barely got viewed in comparison.
Their current audience isn't there to learn recipes.
They've subscribed to watch them destroy things.
As for timing, blending is an evergreen topic.
But they've done something clever to leverage timing.
You'll see here that the iPhone 6 Plus was released on September 19, 2014.
4 days later, they blended it.
Amazon Prime day was on July 16, 2018.
So to "celebrate," they blended an Amazon Echo just 3 days before.
While the novelty of blending objects has clearly died down, you'll see the number of searches
for the brand itself stayed strong for quite a while after.
Now, I wish that I could give you tips on manufacturing virality, but I'd be doing you
a disservice by trying.
Reason being, I don't think it can be done consistently.
So let's move on to a more repeatable example,
and that's Superdrug's "Perceptions of Perfection" campaign.
Superdrug is a company that sells health, beauty, and skincare products.
In June 2015, they launched their "Perceptions of Perfection" campaign.
Their content was actually crowd-sourced.
They asked female graphic designers from 18 different countries to retouch a photo of a woman
to "make her more attractive."
As you can see, cultural perceptions of "beauty" were quite different depending on culture.
And that was their point.
Beauty can't be judged objectively.The topic was controversial, personal and emotional.
To me, it seems like they were targeting women around the same age as the person used in the photo.
And with 18 perceptions of beauty, I'm sure they were able to impact a diverse audience.
Relevance was there too because the campaign attracts their target demographic and builds
both brand awareness and trust.
And the timing couldn't have been more perfect.
This was right around the time that the body positivity movement was gaining traction.
And it only continued to explode since then.
This campaign has racked up over 837 links from unique websites and over 34,000 social shares.
But this campaign wasn't completely unique.
About a year before, a freelance journalist sent an unaltered photo of herself to 40
photoshop experts from around the world.
It blew up and she was featured in numerous large publications and also gave a TEDX talk
on her experiment.
So let's talk about finding replicable topics you can apply to your content marketing.
You can use a tool like Ahrefs' Content Explorer which lets you search through over a billion pages
of content and filter and sort by metrics that matter to you.
So I'll enter a topic like "beauty."
And you'll see over 10 million pages that have this word in the title or body.
Now, let's narrow down the results to only pages that have at least 100 links from unique websites.
And we'll set one more filter to show pages that also have at least 1,000 social shares.
After about a minute of skimming the article titles, I was able to find some great ideas
to draw inspiration from like:
"See Why We Have an Absolutely Ridiculous Standard of Beauty in Just 37 Seconds,"
and "The Beauty of Human Skin in Every Color."
The next content marketing example is from Tasty's YouTube channel.
Tasty is a YouTube channel with recipes and other food-related content run by Buzzfeed.
And I'm sure you've seen their creatives on either YouTube or Facebook at some point.
They popularized this super-simple format of video recipes done in just a couple of minutes.
And the audience they hit hard was anyone who cooks at home, specifically busy moms
and dads that want to make something easy and delicious fast.
Buzzfeed monetizes through several channels like branded content, ads, and affiliate commissions.
So relevance in this case comes down to creating interesting videos people want to watch and then
have those people share it so they can get more ad impressions.
Now, something I really like about the Tasty YouTube channel is that they don't clickbait
you into their videos.
In fact, a good portion of their most popular videos are clearly targeting keywords like,
"how to cook perfect eggs every time."
"how to make perfect chocolate chip cookies,"
and "how to cook with cast iron," which all
get searched on a regular basis.
This allows them to get consistent traffic to these videos since they're evergreen topics.
Their videos on YouTube alone have racked up over three and a half billion views.
Plus, they're getting millions of new views everyday and about 100,000 subscribers
every week to week and a half.
Now, Tasty's success on YouTube comes down to three things:
They publish great content consistently.
They use eye-catching thumbnails.
And they use a unique video format that serves a need in a timely manner.
So something that I love about their strategy is that they started off by targeting keywords
that get searched.
And now that they have a targeted audience of around 16.6 million foodies, they can
create new types of content like this series on making really big food.
To find keywords that get searched on YouTube, you can use a tool like Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer.
Set the search engine to YouTube and enter a broad keyword related to your niche.
So let's look up "recipe" and "recipes."
Next, I'll go to the phrase match report, where we can see over 260,000 keyword ideas
containing one of these words.
Alternatively, you can use different phrases like specific ingredients.
So let's switch this up to "shrimp," "tomato," "rice," and "chicken."
Now, this time, I'll use the Include search box and search for a modifier like "how to."
And now we have even more great ideas assuming we had a YouTube channel with recipes.
The next example is an Auto Loan Calculator by cars.com.
Cars.com is a website that connects sellers with buyers.
They created a simple auto loan calculator, which has collected over 18,000 backlinks
from over 570 unique websites.
And this has helped them rank for competitive keywords in Google like "car payment calculator,"
"car loan calculator," and "auto loan calculator," which collectively bring in over a hundred
thousand visits from Google each month.
Their content is a tool.
It calculates car payments over the life of your loan.
Just fill in the form like so, and you'll see your estimated monthly payment amounts.
Now, the best part about this calculator is that it's super-relevant to their business.
If you scroll down a touch, you'll see a heading that says, "Search for Cars by Price Up to..."
and whatever value you entered.
Then enter your zip code, click the search button, and it'll take you to their listings
of available cars.
And just like that, they've turned search visitors into potential buyers.
The timing here is two-fold.
First, the topic of car loans is evergreen.
People are always in the market for a car.
And naturally, cars are pretty expensive, so most will have to get a loan.
But since most people are likely finding this page through search engines, it adds an additional
layer to timing.
They're reaching potential buyers right in the exact moments that they've searched for
keywords like "car loan calculator."
Someone searching for that is likely in the process of buying a car or seeing how much
car they can afford.
Tools are a great way to help potential buyers.
And since they're already on your site, you have the opportunity to control the experience
that comes after.
A great way to find tools that are worth creating is to search in Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer
for broad keywords related to your niche.
So if I had a health and fitness website, I might enter phrases like "body building,"
"fitness," "health," and "weight loss."
Next, I'll go to the All keywords report.
And to find tools, I'll just click the Include filter, select the Any word tab, and type in
words like "tool" and "calculator."
And now we have a bunch of content ideas along with all keyword metrics like Search Volume,
Keyword Difficulty, and CPC values.
Now, I wouldn't recommend just recreating the exact same tool as everyone else.
Instead, look for issues with the current results and see how you can improve the experience for users.
And if you hope to get discovered through search engines, you'll need to get backlinks
to that page so you can rank high.
To do this, I recommend watching our video on replicating your competitors' links.
I'll leave a link in the description.
The final example is one close to my heart, and that's Ahrefs' content marketing strategy.
Yes, a bit of a shameless self-plug, but I'm not sharing this with you because I think
we're the best at content marketing.
But I do know a little more details on the impact it's had on our company's growth.
At Ahrefs, our content for the most part is created as blog posts and videos.
And the topics we cover today are data studies
and evergreen tutorials on how to do SEO and marketing.
Now, the reason why we chose these two formats is because they appeal to our audience,
who are SEOs and website owners who want to get more traffic to their site.
And our #1 promotion method is to rank our pages high on both Google and YouTube.
This has led to traffic for both our blog and YouTube channel.
Now, while we can't attribute 100% of our growth to our marketing efforts alone,
we've been growing around 50% year on year.
And aside from a great product, I like to think our content contributes because of relevance.
Nearly all of our content is on topics where we can naturally plug our products as a solution
to a problem, making our tools the star of the show.
As for timing, you may have noticed that we never publish content on news-related topics
like Google Algorithm updates.
While doing this might lead to spikes in traffic,
it's not in-line with our overall content marketing strategy.
We're a pretty lean team, so we focus on publishing evergreen content and keeping those pieces
always up to date.
So the way we choose topics for YouTube and Google are similar.
First, we start with keyword research.
For YouTube, I'd use Keywords Explorer, select YouTube as the search engine, and type in
broad queries like "seo," "keyword research," and "link building."
Then I'll go to the Phrase match report to see other keyword ideas that contain these words.
From here, it's just a matter of picking keywords with search volume that are relevant to our business,
and then optimizing them for YouTube search.
I'll leave a link to our video on doing YouTube SEO and YouTube keyword research in the description
which goes into the step-by-step process.
As for our blog, we follow a similar process where we enter a few seed keywords, go to
the Phrase match report, and then analyze the SERP for standout keywords.
Since Keywords Explorer shows the estimated search traffic for the top ranking pages,
we use "traffic potential" as a way to better gauge whether a page is worth creating.
We have quite a few detailed tutorials on doing keyword research, so I'll link those up
in the description too.
Now, all of the content marketing examples that I've shared with you don't require multi-million
dollar budgets.
In fact, if you're doing the work alone or with a partner, some won't require any money
other than your time.
Remember that content marketing is a long play and as you successfully execute for your
audience, you should see traffic, brand awareness, and revenue grow in tandem.
Now, I know that there are a ton of examples of great businesses doing great content marketing.
So let me know of any examples or companies that you love in the comments.
And if you enjoyed this video, make sure to like, share, and subscribe for more actionable
marketing tutorials.
So keep grinding away, and I'll see you in the next tutorial.