Our Content Marketing Strategy & Results

Episode 6

Show notes

Since we debuted The Bam Creative Show on the 31st of July, we've been following our new Content Marketing Strategy and wanted to share it with you all, as well as some of the results just so you can see how effective Content Marketing can be. 

We also jam-packed this episode with tips on how you can create your own Content Marketing Strategy, tips on how to create content, repurposing content on other platforms and finding the right pillar of content.

Episode highlights:

• 00:56 What is Content Marketing?
• 01:27 The 3 pillars of content
• 02:08 The benefits of content marketing
• 05:29 Brands that have an awesome content marketing strategy
• 08:36 How we re-purpose our content to create 40 pieces of additional content
• 09:29 Using content marketing for reputation management
• 10:30 How to choose your pillar of content to create content
• 14:20 Choosing a pillar of content to connect with your audience
• 17:06 Test your pillars of content to know what works and what doesn't
• 18:08 Measuring the ROI of Content Marketing
• 23:22 Our publishing calendar and results
• 28:00 Our chosen and future platforms

We've covered our content marketing strategy in more detail in the extended post below with additional content.

Got questions? 

We want to hear from you! If you have any questions about this episode, email us: podcast@bam.com.au or tweet us @bamcreative.

Our Content Marketing Case Study & Results

If you haven’t heard of Content Marketing yet, you’ve seen it. In fact, you’re reading it right now.

Content Marketing is a marketing strategy that allows businesses to create organic content that their target audience would find interesting, to build brand awareness. The key is to create content of value, so a majority of this content is not promotional in nature. It’s an excellent brand awareness tool, but can also help to increase leads and sales when it is used for a promotional purpose.

In a recent study by The Content Marketing Institute, they found that 63% of Australian marketers struggled to keep up with content marketing due to lack of time.

We had the same problem. 

Our (99) problems

Problem 1

Bam Creative has been actively writing articles for years on this very website, mainly focused on the inner workings of websites and happenings of the www.

"Write what you know", as the famous saying goes.

The problem was that a lot of our clients and prospective clients don’t actually know (or want to know) a lot about that, which is why they’re knocking on our door in the first place. It’s fair to say that our content was resonating with our peers, but not creating a valuable resource of information for our clients.

Problem 2

Each team member was tasked with writing an article on any topic that they were comfortable with. There are many issues with this, the biggest issue being that since we're always busy, it was becoming impossible for people to find the time and the editors to secure a finished article. 

Even though these problems are 97 short of 99 problems, for the sake of keeping this article brief and to the point, these were our two biggest problems that needed to be addressed.

Things needed to change.

What we did next

Brand workshop & market research

Before we even started with content brainstorming sessions and mind maps of content ideas, we went all the way back to the beginning and ran our own brand workshop.

We needed to understand:

• who we are and why we’re in this business (finding our WHY, if you want to get all Simon Sinek about it)
• what our strengths and weaknesses are
• the state of our industry
• who our prospective clients are and understand their needs

Defining our mission

With a re-invigorated understanding of who we wanted to serve and how we could do it, we were able to define the mission of our content marketing strategy. This mission guides us when creating every piece of content, and the target audience plays a significant role.

One of the biggest revelations came out through our workshop. Bam Creative was born in 2002, at a time when creating websites seemed like a job for the nerdy few and almost impossible for anyone to easily create a website. It became common practice to charge through the nose until a few companies turned the industry on its head and gave the power back to the consumer. 

In the same way these products put the power in the hands of the consumer, therefore empowering them, we wanted to do the same: create content of value. And what is that value? Content that empowers our prospective clients with our knowledge and expertise and asking for nothing in return but their attention.  

Creating content ideas: 10 questions

Creating content ideas is sometimes difficult for our clients and even ourselves.

For us, we take inspiration from the questions we receive from our propsective and current clients and see if others would find value from our answers. 

With our target audience in mind, we run through the following 10 questions (as Josh Josh mentioned in the episode) from direct response copywriter and marketer, Dan Kennedy:

1. What keeps them awake at night, indigestion boiling up their esophagus, eyes open, staring at the ceiling?
2. What are they afraid of?
3. What are they angry about? Who are they angry at?
4. What are their top three daily frustrations?
5. What trends are occurring and will occur in their business or lives?
6. What do they secretly, ardently desire most?
7. Is there a built-in bias to the way they make decisions? (Example: engineers = exceptionally analytical.)
8. Do they have their own language?
9. Who else is selling something similar to them, and how?
10. Who else has tried selling them something similar, and how has that effort failed?

Choosing our pillar

Depending on your content marketing strategy and your audience, each of these pillars of content can be used at the same time, or one can be used to create content on the other platforms.

There are 3 pillars of content which you can choose from:

1. Audio: podcasts, interviews, music
2. Visual: photography, video, illustrations, infographics
3. Written: blog posts, articles, quotes, slides

For example:

• You can create a YouTube video, write a post about it on your blog and take the audio from the video to make a podcast
• You can record an interview and transcribe it for your blog. Bonus points if you managed to capture it on video.

Whatever you decide, it’s always worth going for the method that you’re most comfortable with as this will inspire you to create the content. The issue we were having with our team is that, as designers and developers, writing wasn’t exactly our strong suit but no one wanted to be on camera either.

They didn’t mind the prospect of a podcast. In fact, they were actually pretty excited about it.

In our industry, podcasting is ramping up like never before. Podcast listeners worldwide are growing massively. The podcast series, Serial, is credited for the resurgence in podcasting and many brands are following suit.

During our brand workshop and market research, we discovered that our target audience likes listening to podcasts but also consumes video and written content.

Podcasting is easy and inexpensive, all you really need is your phone or even an affordable mic and the free Audacity software.

With no time to waste, we turned on the mic, put a phone on a tripod, hit record and taped our first ever episode: Do you even need a website?

The team

In the past, it was difficult to create a steady stream of content without defined roles or expectations. Moving forward, we created clearly defined roles with expectations, which would make it easy for everyone to understand their responsibilities.

Our new team comprises of:

• Content creators: the people who are actually creating the content
• Editors: editing content on all platforms
• Visual and audio creation: creating video and audio clips from our content
• Designers: creating graphics for our content
• Publishers: the people publishing the content to the site and other platforms
• Schedulers: the people assessing the pieces of content and scheduling them
• Content distributors: the team members sharing content on social media

From 1 piece of content to 40

Our core content is located on our website, allowing us to completely control the narrative of our brand and message. That content is then split up into 40+ additional pieces of content, to be scheduled and distributed to different social media platforms, guided by our content publishing calendar.  That content is then evaluated by the public, with likes, shares, comments and direct messages.

In this episode, we discussed how social media marketing was slightly different to content marketing.  This is because the content we create from a single episode is posted to social media platforms, it only forms a part of the larger social media marketing strategy.

So you can see how this works, we’ve posted our publishing calendar below:

The smaller pieces of content are simply created by taking the most important or valuable pieces of information from an episode, and creating:

• Video clips
• Quotes
• Sound clips
• Slideshows

This allows our audience to consume bite-sized pieces of content, that they otherwise not have time for when watching or listening to a whole episode, or even reading this blog post.

The publishing calendar only shows content for a single episode. We publish one episode each week, and sometimes there are more pieces of content from each episode, depending on the nuggets of wisdom we feel are worth clipping and sharing. In a single month, we may have up to 160 pieces of content going out from 4 episodes alone. Nuts!

The results

In the 4 weeks that we have been distributing these pieces of content, we noticed a significant change in traffic through to our website from some of the bigger platforms.

• Traffic from Facebook grew 222%
• Traffic from Instagram grew 1800% (that is a real percent, we have confirmed)
• Traffic from LinkedIn grew by 32.5%
• Traffic from Twitter stayed relatively the same (sad face emoji)

Next steps

Now that we have a bit of data, we’re going to be rolling out our content to various other platforms and will be continuing to monitor their performance, making changes to our format as well as our publishing calendar.