How To Scale Your Content Marketing Writing
By Karen Barr
Do you know how to scale your content marketing?
Marketing is effective for nurturing customers and attracting new ones. Business owners are excited when they see results but then make one mistake.
They hire too many people and scale too quickly.
In this article, we’ll review how to scale your content marketing efforts correctly. By doing so, you’ll save money and increase your overall profits.
The Marketing Plan of Larry
Let’s look at a case study.
I had a client named *Larry who owned a high-end luggage brick-and-mortar store in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The store had opened 20 years prior and was experiencing a downturn in sales and profits.
Larry had a beautifully designed website and e-commerce store. A professional photographer was contracted to shoot each new luggage collection, and the pictures were stunning.
Most of his customers came from local foot traffic. Tourists visited to upgrade their luggage before going on the next cruise. Some were frantic about purchasing as airlines lost their luggage.
Larry did not have a digital marketing plan. Sales started to decline.
A Blog for Larry
Larry contacted me to write bi-weekly SEO blog posts about travel for his blog. After writing two posts, he was happy with the magazine-quality articles and felt the voice captured his brand. All my posts had links to the e-commerce store to guide customers in buying.
It took Google a while to recognize the keywords in the posts. Competition is tough! So, getting to the top of any page is challenging.
It took Google about three months to find the luggage store’s blog and crawl and index the pages. Google Analytics revealed that Google was the top source of traffic to the blog.
Soon, the e-commerce sales grew by 10 percent, yet there was still a long way to go.
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A Closer Look At SEO
After seeing how SEO-rich blog posts worked to bring new customers and sales to the store, I was asked to rewrite the website copy and luggage descriptions.
Over the next few weeks, I researched keywords and rewrote the copy. I also checked my SEO against Yoast, the WordPress plug-in. The plug-in gave me a greenlight score, indicating perfect SEO scores for each revamped page of the website.
The website upgrade worked, and soon, Google Analytics showed even more visitors to the website.
Email Marketing Set Up
I set up the store with a mailing list on Mailchimp. Larry’s granddaughter set out to call the list of customers the store had acquired over the years. While there were names and phone numbers, she needed to obtain emails. These were entered into the customer files on Mailchimp.
I also added a pop-up on the company’s website asking visitors to sign up for the newsletter. There was a further incentive: Customers who signed up for the newsletter were offered 10 percent off the purchase of luggage and accessories.
With the combined effort of phone calls to customers and new customers signing up for the newsletter, the store had an email customer base of nearly 400 customers within three months.
While Larry was happy about the growing list, he wasn’t quite ready to pay for weekly newsletters to be sent.
Initial Social Media Marketing
The store had a Facebook account with about 1000 followers and 250 on Twitter. Staff posted content in a half-hazard fashion, meaning they posted whenever they wanted to. Essentially, the store functioned without a social media plan.
When they did happen, posts were snapshots of the luggage and the people working there. While this gave customers a behind-the-scenes look, the photography was not professional. This was a shame because the photographer had taken so many incredible shots.
Additionally, the team did not place links in the social media posts to bring customers back to the website to purchase. Nor did they link to any of the blog posts.
When I pointed this out to Larry, he said he would tell the staff. While they started using professional photography in their Facebook and Twitter posts, the website links were not added, and social media posts remained intermittent.
Larry had more to learn about how to scale a content marketing plan.
Expanding the Marketing Team
One day, about six months after I met Larry, he excitedly informed me that he was expanding the team. He had hired two new contractors: a Social Media Manager from California and an Email Marketing Manager from Ohio.
At first, I did not know what to say.
Then, I told him I wished he had spoken to me about this. I could have taken on the work for him.
A content writer and strategist can write email marketing and social media copy. In fact, this can be done relatively easily by repurposing blog posts. As the old saying goes, “Why reinvent the wheel?”
He asked me to use my marketing strategy to set up weekly content development themes. We agreed all marketing efforts would revolve around the blog post and the weekly luggage items and accessories the company wished to focus on for the week.
To Many Chefs in the Soup
Hiring too many people to handle your marketing plan can harm your business and bottom line.
This is what happened to Larry.
After three months, Larry told me he had enough blog posts and wanted to focus on social media and email marketing. He admitted the two new contractors were costing him a lot of money.
Larry mentioned the number of hours they were billing him, and this seemed illogical to me.
I asked Larry to let me show him the latest Google Analytics before he made any decisions, and he agreed.
Re-evaluating the Content Marketing Plan
Google Analytics proved that Google was still driving customers to the website. This was due to the new SEO text on the website and the keyword blog posts.
We took a closer look at social media. Google Analytics showed Facebook brought some traffic to the website, but Twitter did not. The social media manager used professional photography, greatly enhancing the store’s high-end image. Posts were consistently placed on both social media platforms morning, noon, and night.
The text was brief and not very informative. It did not follow the brand voice. Very few links were present in the posts. Customers were not brought back to the website. All they could do was hit the like button.
Next, I analyzed the email marketing posts sent weekly through Mailchimp. Unfortunately, open rates were very low. The emails were beautifully designed using a simple template, the store brand colours, and professional photography.
The customers had not been nurtured. The crucial Welcome Email Series had been left out.
Most of the emails were all about selling. Very few led the customers back to the blog I had taken such care to write. The customer list was not receiving this valuable information that would educate, inform and delight them. It was hard-core sales.
The New Marketing Plan
Larry carefully considered everything. He realized he didn’t need three people to do the job. Instead, he understood he needed one writer and content marketing strategist for consistent, high-quality work in one brand voice.
A few days later, Larry asked me to take over all the marketing. We implemented a new plan.
Blog posts were bumped up to three times per week. These were repurposed into email marketing and social media posts. By repurposing my blog posts, I significantly reduced the hours spent on marketing. Additionally, I used the power of batching my work.
In Conclusion
By now, you’ve learn how to scale your content marketing plan?
Setting up a marketing plan involves combining blog posts, email marketing, and social media in one cohesive campaign. This sends the same message to customers across all channels and continues to be written in your company’s brand voice.
And what happened to Larry? Two years after we revamped his marketing plan, he sold his company for a hefty profit. Today, he is relaxing in the sun in South Florida.
*Larry’s name was changed in this article so he can enjoy his peace and retirement.
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