This is the final part of a four-part video series of a conversation I had with Justin Champion, digital nomad and author of Inbound Content. If you missed any of the previous interviews, you can find the video and transcription for part 1 here, part 2 here, and part 3 here. In part four we talk about the timeframe for content marketings results, how content marketing is like a puzzle, and the impact changing technology might have on the future of both content and marketing as a whole.
You can watch the video here or (if video isn’t your thing) read the transcription below.
Todd: What are some of the outcomes business leaders and owners can expect if they build a mission, create a culture, buy into inbound marketing, and start to put resources behind content? Whether its creation and distribution of content. Can you talk about the time frame to see your returns, some of the impacts that they may see, how it really can change and drive their business forward?
Justin: So generally, whenever you see a business who is successful with content marketing initiatives it's usually really slow in the beginning and then it starts to take off. Once it catches, once you start getting traffic, you start getting visibility with things that you're creating. That's why it’s a marathon and not a sprint. It can be really hard to do that training upfront. And a lot of times that's why I said website authority is one of the most important things you can do. If you don't have high website authority it is going to take you much longer to get traffic and visibility.
I think the first thing if you're somebody who, right out the gate, if you know you want to do this and start trying to figure out “what can I do to acquire inbound links,” you can maybe reach out to people in your network, try to get links back to your site. Guest blogging on other websites is probably the best way to do it. If you can get a mention on a big website that has a higher authority, maybe something like it's a news outlet, it might take you time to figure out how to get in there but really try to build your website authority up with inbound links.
Now once you start doing that, that's why I recommend creating one piece of premium content first and focusing on trying to promote and get that out there. So that you can be building other content and you have something that you can start promoting. I would say if you started focusing on creating a piece of content, maybe the first premium piece of content in tandem also working on building inbound links, you could start seeing some success from that in three to six months. I would say within three months you might see an initial shift but you want to be hungry, you want to get out there and find any way possible to promote that and get attention to it. And in the near term you'll start seeing the progression where it starts getting bigger and bigger over time and then you're just going to keep adding on to it.
That's why it's just important to think about the journey so that you're not only building but you're also allowing for the experience. People who don't do that, maybe they are successful with getting traffic but the traffic is only the conversions or people downloading or giving you their information on their site. So, it's more than just getting traffic, it is about the experience and making sure that you're not trying to be too salesy with having somebody purchase or give you their information. But you're making it so that they can easily give you their information whether it's like having a form that follows you on the page but that's not distracting from the experience. There's a lot of things that go into it. But I would generally say anywhere from three to six months you can see an initial traction, and then usually after the first year if you start creating content you'll start seeing results.
Todd: Excellent. What about content overload? We're all busy. We're all slammed with messages all the time. What is your recommendation for companies and business leaders to think about their strategy and their content marketing in a way that helps them kind of cut through that and rise to the top? Or at least maybe not to the top, but at least rise to the top of the attention of their target audience.
Justin: Yeah so, the number one thing, and this really helps executive teams gets excited about the investment right: Generally, people whenever you ask them for something, the bigger the ask the more work that's going to go into it. They might not want to try it out because the experiment could just take too much work and time. If you were to say, "Hey let’s do an experiment, we're going to create an e-book," that's not necessarily the best way to go about it. I like to approach the situation like, “let's think about our content marketing plan like a puzzle.” There's 52 weeks in a year. Let’s say you were to create a blog post every single week, you have a 52-piece puzzle that you're putting together. Can you use these pieces to create a bigger picture? Maybe there's 10 blog posts that you're going to write over the course of a couple of months and you can use that content and strategically repurpose it into a specific packaged offer. So, what I would say is if you have 52 weeks in a year, if you're already blogging right now think about what you could be doing if you were using those blogs as puzzle pieces to build package offers so that you're being as efficient with your time as possible.
So, from the strategy side you're not saying, "Hey, we're going to spend all our time and resources that's going to take us weeks to create this." It’s like, “No, we're going to start small. We're going to get some quick wind by creating some blog content that's going to be helpful and we're going to recycle this blog content to create packaged offers.” So, it's a lot more exciting and manageable for people as opposed to them thinking they have to create a 50-page resource from scratch.
Todd: Gotcha. Excellent. Great ideas. Well just a couple of final things. Real quick Justin, what do you see on the horizon in terms of technology changing? I hear a lot about things like artificial intelligence, lots of changes coming to marketing. How do you see the next five years? It's hard to predict what's going to happen tomorrow much less five years, but what do you see on the horizon for content marketing and things people should be aware of?
Justin: I think what's happened even in the past decade is that things have gotten way more specific. Now with social media and people having their own profiles, you went from mass media where you were sending a message out to everybody to now where you're trying to get so targeted you're trying to advertise to a specific individual. So, I think personalization is going to keep getting more important. Having something like smart content, where if somebody's already engaged with you maybe they've downloaded something, you're essentially serving them content. So, if they come back to your site they're getting an experience that's personalized to them and not just the standard content that exists on a website. I think personalization is one.
I would say that bots are another thing that I'm curious to see what happens with; where you can create some sort of engaging resource that helps this person identify what they're looking for or where they need to be connected to. And I think bots are not only going to help with serving content and serving a good experience, but I think it's going to make organizations a lot more efficient because they won't have to have a team of people managing this process. They would essentially have a team of people creating a process that can help manage their audience.
I would say personalization and bots are going be some of the big things to come out in the next couple of years.
Todd: Excellent. I know in our book we talked with some thought leaders and asked them that same question and the big one that came back was there's going to be a lot of changes in technology and we can't always predict them. But what we do know is that it's going to become very personalized. We know that will be the outcome. It'll be closer to that promise of kind of one-to-one marketing and one-to-one selling. That's where the technology is going to be taking us. So, very interesting.
Well Justin, thanks for today. Great insights on content and Justin, author of "Inbound Content" check it out on BarnesNoble.com. And I'm Todd Hockenberry with the book “Inbound Organization.” Thanks.