By Adam Turner
Creating and maintaining a buzz-worthy content marketing strategy that builds lasting relationships with enthusiastic customers should be at the top of every company’s marketing strategy goals sheet.
And yet, how many times have you posted an article or a video, or rolled out a social media campaign, only to have the sound crickets parroted back at you?
You’re not alone (and you’re not defective). There’s a lot of noise out there, a lot of clamoring for attention. Throwing tons of money at Facebook or Google ads may or may not be a good solution — depending on how solid the foundation is
At our inaugural Digital Summit NYC event, Venngage’s CGO (and frequent DS all-star speaker), Nadya Khoja laid out a low-cost, high impact framework of four key things you need to focus on when trying to increase engagement through your organic content efforts. Khoja calls it the GRAP framework.
You can catch the whole presentation here:
And if you’re a content skimmer, the high points from Nadya’s presentation and GRAP framework are here:
Goals
“The first part of the GRAP framework is goals, specifically how to establish different goals for various types of content that you’re creating,” she said.
Google continues to serve as the most important driver of new visitors to your website, so your content marketing goals should be targeted towards the platform. Khoja emphasizes that each piece of content you publish should be pointing to a goal of higher domain authority, more traffic, and/or more conversions.
So how do you do that?
Research + Authority
Domain authority is the ranking system Google uses for websites. The main ways to increase a website’s authority is by earning higher quality press, and through domain sites linking back to your content. That is why Venngage creates what they call viral and editorial content.
Khoja gives the example of her article, “14 Visual Content Marketing Statistics that You Need to Know for 2019,” as the kind of post that Entrepreneur or Mashable, both high-ranking domain websites, would link to on their pages because of her expertise and research-based, data-driven approach in that story.
At the same time, a group implementing content marketing should also be posting what Venngage calls “actionable and how-to content” to drive up non-referral traffic to its website.
To create this kind of content, it’s important to consider what the audience has mentioned they’re struggling with and then write articles to help them overcome those struggles. These articles can be loaded with quality, related keywords that help Google’s algorithm recommend the how-to article when people search for related topics.
Even then, Google still won’t rank a fledgling website that uses broad keywords like “leadership” highly. In your research AND your content creation you should always be trying to grab authority in more specific subcategories (e.g. like “management skills” instead of “leadership”) — to increase ownership of topic niches that align with your ideal and most passionate customers.
Promotion
The last element of the GRAP framework to success in content marketing is promotion. A common mistake that many companies and organizations make is to spend more time creating new content than promoting the content they’ve already created.
In fact, Khoja’s analysis of works by other content marketers shows that only 500 out of 5,000 articles — just 10 percent — of the content on their website generates most of their traffic. The rule she gives her team at Venngage to solve this problem is if content takes a day to make, they should spend two to three days promoting it.
Ultimately, the goal of any good content marketer is to create max value for the customers (present and future) that you serve, and the long-term growth of your company. By setting clear goals for your content, conducting the research you need to claim your audience niche and share of domain authority with Google, and extensively promoting your content, you’re on the road to spinning more of your content into gold.
If you want to dive even deeper, check out the other Content Marketing videos here on digitalsummit.com — even better — join us at an upcoming DS event and learn directly from our experts. See the full Digital Summit conference schedule here.
Adam Turner is a member of the Digital Summit content team