Content Strategy and SEO for Lead Gen: Strategy Pt. 1

Review of CXL Course “Content strategy and SEO for lead generation”, Lesson 1, Part 1

I was finally able to begin the “Content Strategy and SEO for Lead Generation” course taught by Andy Crestodina, the CMO and co-founder of Orbit Media. Since my core proficiencies lie within paid search and social, I am really excited to begin learning more about a channel I don’t have extensive experience or expertise in. Given the fact that CXL is a leader in inbound marketing and lead generation, I’m looking forward to getting those battle tested strategies that can help level up my content marketing skillset. Let’s get into what I learned in week one!

Post Outline: Preview, Notes, TL;DR Review

Preview — My Impressions Before Watching

For Review Comparison Purposes

Brains over budget. Durability over speed. The opposite of advertising. We don’t buy advertising, we earn it.

If you click through this link to the CXL content strategy course and click on the course 1 accordion dropdown, I’m sure those words will stand out to anyone who reads them. We’re diving into the world of earned media, where the long game is all that matters.

I will be looking to come out of this lesson with a solid understanding of what a successful content strategy looks like, and how I can apply those insights directly to any marketing team I’m driving demand for. I also initially noted that I wanted to learn more about tracking and analyzing the success of a campaign, but I later noticed that the topic of “Analyze, Measure and Improve” is sectioned out into a separate course.

Notes — Major Points Discussed and Learned in Lessons

The Purpose of Content Marketing

The lesson begins by teaching about the authority building purpose and value of content. People link to content, not sales pages. But as an owner or marketer, you’re after qualified leads. If you take a look at the segmented goal or ecomm performance reports for blog visitors, you’ll most likely see the opposite of qualified conversion rates or behavior metrics. What gives?

Andy points out in both lesson 1 & lesson 2 that the end goal of inbound marketing is to attract search visitors who enter your site with high levels of intent. To attract those visitors, we need to rank high enough for quality searches. That’s where content comes in, because it takes content to rank and get the necessary domain authority that then allows for our sales pages to rank as well.

In other words, content marketing will get you the link worthy content you need for higher domain authority. That will then allow you to strategically pursue high ranking for your sales and service pages via on-page SEO techniques taught in lesson 2. Once your sales and service pages start ranking, that’s when the consistently level of high intent organic visitors start to fill your funnel.

Content Marketing Mission Statement

B2B marketing blogs tend to be a little bit all over the place. Some have a select few categories relevant to their industries, some publish content that’s segmented by their target audience (renters and owners, investors and founders, etc.), and others post with no clear theme or strategy.

Andy advises that every content marketer do one thing to fix these issues, create a content marketing mission statement. It’s a great way for you to help your visitors understand what they can expect from the blog, and what you should be posting. It’s very simple, Andy offers the following template for creating one:

Here’s a few examples of companies I created mission statements for as an exercise. Note that the order of the sentence can be shifted around, it’s the component parts that really matter.

Crov .com (Drop shipping solutions)

• Drop shippers get tips and news to help grow their business.
• Tips and news to help drop shippers grow their business.

Heskiers .com (Massage tool used by professionals, athletes and everyday individuals)

• Where anyone can find simple tips and solutions to common causes of body pain that will improve the quality of life.
• Practical guides and advice for anyone looking to cure body pain without medication, surgery, or medical specialists.

Vertagear .com (Gaming chair company)

• Where streamers get esports news & streaming tips to help build their channel following.

It’s a super simple exercise that can help give your content calendar the purpose and clarity it needs to connect with target audiences about issues that will resonate most with their interests and needs.

But just in case some marketers weren’t convinced, because apparently there are a high percentage of blogs on the internet without mission statements, Andy included some a survey from the Content Marketing Institute that linked content marketing effectiveness with a simple documented mission statement.

The takeaway is that marketers who document their mission statement are 3x more likely to succeed, so do it!

Content Strategy

Content strategy isn’t about quantity, it’s about quality. In the lesson, we’re offered a shocking insight from a 2015 Moz+Buzzsumo content analysis of 1 million articles that showed 75% of 100k random posts having 0 external links and 39 or fewer shares! I have included that chart below. But I wondered how these insights might have changed in the half decade since that article was published, and found a similar article by backlinko that analyzed 912 million blog posts and featured even more shocking results. The report was last updated on February 10, 2019, and shows that the number of published content that gets 0 external links has risen from 75% to 94%! That’s a disturbing increase in “island articles” that received no love from the interwebs. But worry not, there’s still hope for those of us who follow Andy’s advice and the exemplary lead that CXL has modeled!

2015

2019

Specifically, the strategy for producing highly shareable and linkable content involves creating bold, original content that can be reformatted and repurposed in collaboration with others in your industry — think CXL. But similar to my experience with the last course, I feel like the content was too rich to be forced into one blog post, so I’ll be going through my notes on creating a content strategy, along with lesson 2, in next week’s post.

Review — TL;DR Review of the Lessons

Andy is a man who knows what he’s talking about, and it shows not only in his authoritative and informative teaching style, but also in the strategies he models for us. I feel like I was given a roadmap for content strategy that has been iterated over several times in practice, meaning I can take what I learned and apply it tomorrow because Andy has worked out the bugs through the imperfect process of experience.