Content Marketing
Image credit: Martin Thomas
Ever since I first read about content marketing I have had some skepticism that we could use content marketing to drive traffic. I thought that driving traffic successfully had more to do with the skill of the marketer and copywriter, and wasn’t something that just anybody could do.
My first experiments with content marketing were invariably unsuccessful, only fueling my skepticism. My thoughts are that this initial lack of success was my methodology, for I neglected two important parts:
- tailoring content to the audience
- promoting the content where the intended audience will find it
Tailoring content to the audience is relatively difficult in the case of Oplerno courses. There are many different groups of people who might be interested in a course and beyond that, the actual audience itself can differ from course to course. So, tailoring my content and message requires some customization and specificity from course to course.
Promoting the content in a place that the audience can be found is easier. If we know who the audience is, it’s relatively easy to find them.
To make the process of creation easier I used a list I had found on CopyBlogger, a company teaching content marketing. They advise breaking down the creation of content into 4 days, which I found an ideal way to reduce the amount of time spent writing each day.
Day 1. Create a mind map
Day 2. Fill in the details
Day 3. Edit, massage and tweak
Day 4. Publish and promote
The choice of how you present your information can vary. I like Buzzfeed-style lists, which seem to appeal to the most people and can easily be used as a template for a longer article. I also chose ‘click-bait’ titles when publishing on Buzzfeed. When posting the same content to Medium, however, I chose a more traditional title.
Buzzfeed allows external contributors and gives excellent statistics on the metrics which are important if you are going for “viral” content. What it lacks are aspects like the amount of time a visitor spent on the page, or even whether somebody read it or bounced.
Based on the experience of these articles on Medium, albeit in a slightly different form, I’m going to assume that 50–60% of people who visited the site actually read the content. According to Google Analytics an average of 1/10 of the people who visited the actual course webpage on enroll.oplerno.com came from this endeavour, approximately the number of people who came from Twitter or Facebook.
So how did it do?
Initially I thought it didn’t go as well as I had hoped, 5 days after posting the statistics looked like this:
A few days later the graph looked like this:
So how many signed up?
Eh… Hmmm… None, in fact only 3 of the 2.5k visitors visited the site. And I can tell you why: No CTA! It lacked a clear Call To Action. Something like this button below can make all the difference.
And I continue to promote it.
Thanks to Dan Kirk for helping with this piece.
By Daniël W. Crompton (@webhat), Director of Technology at Oplerno — a global institution empowering real-world practitioners, adjunct lecturers, professors, and aspiring instructors to offer affordable, accessible, high-quality education to students from all corners of the globe.
