The Lean Content Marketing Handbook

The Lean Content Marketing Handbook for SMBs
Foreword
Some people say content marketing is only for companies with deep pockets, and that short of
creating Star Wars, youll struggle to make an impact. We disagree.
Over the past three years, weve seen many SMBs nd success with content marketing, and thats
why this handbook exists: to be a guide to success for those who are looking to nd ROI by
making their content marketing lean.
But the important point is: were not alone in that belief. To write this guide, we asked some of the
worlds top experts on content marketing what would be their #1 piece of advice to SMBs. Wed
like to thank them for their awesome contributions:
A lot of the lean content marketing best practices that we describe in this guide were rst debated
during the #leancontent meetups we hosted rst at our San Francisco ofces and then in New
York City. So wed also like to thank all the attendees and the awesome speakers who enriched the
discussion.
Finally, because we practice what we preach, the Lean Content Marketing Handbook for SMB is a
mix of original content, curated content and repurposed content from the Scoop.it blog - itself a
collaborative work with dozens of various contributors from our community. Wed like to take this
opportunity to thank them all as well.
The Scoop.it team
Scoop.it 2015
Table of Contents
Lean Content: why 2015 will be the year SMBs embrace content marketing. .......................................4
Strategize ..................................................................................................................................................7
Aligning your companys business objectives with your content marketing goals ......................................8
Defining your editorial line and content types ................................................................................................9
Planning your resources ................................................................................................................................12
Build the foundations of your content strategy .....................................................................................14

Social Media, on its own, is out. Content hubs are in. ..................................................................................15
Building and integrating your content hub to your website .........................................................................20
Social media, as a part of a strategy, is still in. ............................................................................................26
Landing pages & Inbound Marketing ............................................................................................................28
Email Marketing & Marketing Automation ....................................................................................................29
Lean Content: publish content at scale with limited resources ............................................................31

How to create good content ..........................................................................................................................34
Outsourcing ....................................................................................................................................................36
Content Curation .............................................................................................................................................37
Contribution ....................................................................................................................................................44
Repurposing content ......................................................................................................................................49
Distribute .................................................................................................................................................52
Synchronize your channels ............................................................................................................................53
Leverage existing channels ..........................................................................................................................61
Paid Content Distribution ...............................................................................................................................68
Convert through content .........................................................................................................................70

Turning readers into contacts ........................................................................................................................71
Content for lead generation & landing pages ...............................................................................................75
Content for lead nurturing and social selling ................................................................................................77
Measure ROI ............................................................................................................................................78

Measure the output: content volume and quality .........................................................................................79
Use content analytics to understand the performance of your content ......................................................80
Use Google Analytics to measure progress on brand awareness ................................................................81
Measuring thought leadership through pingbacks and social mentions ....................................................82
Track conversions through Google Analytics ................................................................................................83
Create a benchmark with a Google Adwords campaign ...............................................................................85
Track your SEO progress through tools like Moz or SEMRush .....................................................................86
Conclusion ...............................................................................................................................................87
Scoop.it 2015
Lean Content: why

2015 will be the year
SMBs embrace
content marketing.
Scoop.it 2015
The roller coaster of SMB marketers. And why 2015 is the best
time ever.
Before the Internet, the powerful traditional media (TV, newspaper, radio) were beyond the reach of
most small and mid-sized businesses: their marketing had to stay small or niche.
The Internet opened the game: now, the movers & shakers with agility and decent skills can
compete against larger companies in the war for audience and attention.
Once this knowledge became mainstream, though, winning attention once again became
extremely challenging for SMBs: the web 2.0 created an ocean of noise where only the most
powerful could stand out, both by becoming online media and by dominating online advertising,
and subsequently pushing up again the barrier to entry.
A new trend is arising however and 2015 is the time for SMBs to reap its benets. This is Lean
Content, or the practice of developing an online presence with positive ROI by means of clever
publishing.
This guide presents, in explicit, actionable steps, how SMBs can effectively deploy an affordable
Lean Content marketing strategy that yields measurable benets today.
Why do SMBs need to become media?

We believe its now obvious to all, but lets spell it out again: becoming a media is a must; thats
the only response to the challenges of online presence today.
What are the two overarching objectives of online marketing? Brand Awareness and Revenue.
Simple. And what are the means to these ends? A collection of tactics that recognize the fact that
your customer journey is no longer linear (from an identied need straight to your shop) but is a
long and complex mix of personal research, social inuence and serendipitous discovery. In order
to win your customers, you need to accompany them along this journey:
You need to be searchable (this is SEO, or organic trafc from search engines)
You need to demonstrate thought leadership on values that matter to your audience
You need to feed the conversation with your community and its inuencers (engagement)
You need to nurture your leads throughout each of their many steps through the buying cycle
All of these require you to regularly publish relevant, high quality content. You need to become a
media. Content is the fuel of your online marketing strategy.
Scoop.it 2015
How is 2015 the right time for SMB online marketing? Lean
Content
Becoming a media might sound frightening, overwhelming for an SMB. But on the contrary, it has
never been easier. How is that? Three main reasons:
An effective online media is a niche media that addresses very specic personas on very
specic subjects; the audience has never been so fragmented. So if you know exactly who to
target and if you deploy a smart organization and a very specic editorial line, you will not be
overshadowed by more powerful players that are, by essence, more generalist.
Then, technology helps you. A rich spectrum of SaaS based software solutions exists that help
businesses with all steps of online marketing. These solutions are more affordable than ever and
can help you effectively save time and increase your impact (warning: be pragmatic and do not
over arm; complexity can kill you; use SMB dedicated tools).
Finally, you can leverage the abundance of content out there to your benet. You can scale up
your content with curated content: existing Internet content that you select, enrich and add to your
editorial line. When done with care and ethic, content curation is a legitimate and super efcient
element of a content strategy; it measurably contributes to the ROI of your online marketing, as
conrmed by many SMBs.
Smart SMBs are becoming media now; their clever publishing strategies are yielding business
benets: increased brand awareness and leads.
Wanna play? Its time!
Please follow the guide.
Scoop.it 2015
Strategize
Scoop.it 2015
Aligning your companys business objectives with your content marketing

goals
Late last year, we published a report on how SMBs measured the ROI of their content marketing
strategy. While audience engagement is the most commonly measured KPI, SMBs dene their
objectives in terms of brand awareness development, then thought leadership development and
lead generation.
When dening your content marketing strategy, its important to differentiate nal objectives (the
outcome making your company better off) from other intermediary indicators.
Lets take engagement for instance. What does it really bring to your company?
Content and social media marketers are keen to drive engagement but it may not necessarily be
a viable strategy. In fact, it comes at a cost. - Mark Schaefer
Mark Schaefer has a great point: we often confuse the means with the end. In a blog post that I
wrote last year, I explained why I thought social media publishing was dead as we know it. One of
these points was that the impact our content has is the combination of volume, quality and
engagement. As Mark explains, engagement is only one variable in that equation.
So how can you convert your social media activity to make it count towards your goals? More
generally speaking, have you dened the objectives of your content marketing and what can they
be?
Now that were thinking in more of a content-focused mindset, consider this: over the next three
months, what does your business want to accomplish? Think of this goal as the overall mindset of
your company, not just your marketing team. Do you want to be mentioned in 20% more blogs this
quarter? Or do you need to grow sales next year by 15%? All actions you take should ultimately
lead to something that will help accomplish this goal.
To really have an impact, you should go beyond engagement and dene objectives that matter to
your business. Well cover how to measure ROI and success in reaching these objectives in the
Measure ROI section of this guide.
Scoop.it 2015
Defining your editorial line and content types

So now that weve claried the difference between the means (engagement, trafc) and the end
(develop the brand, grow sales), should you prioritize one of these possible objectives?
Our answer to this question is no, you shouldnt. Because ultimately, you will address them all
even though it might be a matter of learning to walk before you can learn to run.
To explain this, its critical to consider (i) who you will be publishing content for (ii) what stages of
the buying process theyre in and (iii) what is your overarching message that sets you apart to
these people you target.
Who are the people youll be talking to? What do you know that they dont? Where are they in the
sales cycle? What types of content will these buyer personas respond to?
Lets say, for example, your audience is your current customers and you want to educate them on
how to make the most of your product. What are the most commonly asked questions about your
product? These are the things your content should address. To provide another example, say
youre a service provider who wants to reach potential clients. What types of questions are people
asking themselves when looking for a new [insert your service here] provider? Be the resource
they are looking for.
Finally, make sure your content is not just about you: what is your message and what are your
values? Dening them will give you a specic angle when publishing content: your editorial line. In
the example above, what do you want people looking for a new provider to pay attention to when
doing research.
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The following table gives an interesting way to map your buyer personas with the various stages
theyre in and plan the content you need:
list as many personas youd like to target in the columns (but be realistic: dont list too
many);
then think about what content can help them move from one buyer stage to the next.
Buying stage
Persona 1
Persona 2
...
Persona N
For each of these buyer personas, dene the content

that will help them move from one stage to the next:
Strangers (unaware of your
company)
Visitors (came to your site)
Contacts (gave you their email
address)
Leads (expressed interest to buy
your product)
Customers (bought your product)
Ambassadors (love your product)
For example, say youve identied your target buyer as a female between the ages of 30 and 50
who lives at home with pets and children, and youre using content marketing to promote your line
of household cleaners. When this female is in the unaware stage of your company or product,
keep your content broad. Write about concepts like The Dirtiest Kid Activities or How to Remove
Red Wine Stains from Carpet; general things that she might be searching for in situations when
your product would be helpful.
In the visitor and contact stage, or the beginning of the awareness phase, its time to get a little
more specic. Theyre aware you exist, but still might not be convinced. This would be the time to
talk about the great things your product can do, like 5 Things You Didnt Know You Could Do with
[product].
Finally, in the customer and ambassador stages, the time has come for you to involve your
community in your content creation. On one hand, youve got happy customers who may be willing
to write their experiences or opinions. On the other hand, youve got the responsibility of making
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sure these people stick around, so provide them with content talking about new features or deals,
or tips if applicable.
Listing all your content ideas in the above table will give you a great start to dening your content
that you can now develop and plan ahead in your content calendar.
Note that while the result might look overwhelming, its useful to consider whether the required
content will be more useful if created or curated. Remember that third-party content is 4x to 7x
more credible than vendor-originated content so curating some of the content in the above table
will not only be less stressful and faster but it might be the best thing you can do to convince your
prospects.
Going back to our original question on the objectives of your content strategy, you can see that
while brand awareness will be the main objective at the top of the funnel, you will also want to
include lead generation as you progress to create and curate content for the bottom of your
funnel.
In the following section, well cover how you can actually build solid foundations for your content
strategy that are compatible with all the objectives you will eventually have, including brand
awareness, thought leadership and lead generation.
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Planning your resources

Content Marketing is a winning strategy for SMBs because it can be done in lean way but that
doesnt mean free. You should budget some time and prepare some resource allocation that are
compatible with your companys capabilities and goals.
A good way to think about this is to consider the following 3 buckets:
Cost of producing content:

time spent by you or your team members creating content and if youre outsourcing
some of your content:
time spent creating briefs and managing external resources
costs of outsourcing content to these external resources.
Time spent curating content: as well see content curation is essential to your content
marketing mix so you should plan to budget some time from you or your team members to
source, curate and publish third-party content.
Software and tools: license cost of your content marketing software solution.
with an optional 4th bucket if you choose to have this strategy:
Content distribution and advertising costs: should you engage in paid content distribution.
So what are the things to consider when planning your resources?

If your concern is ROI, you can perform quick estimates on your content creation costs using the
typical metrics below that weve observed across our clients and agency partners1:
Type of content
Cost to produce
Time to produce
Blog
2-4 man hours or $80-200
1-3 days
Infographic
$2,000-$10,000
3-6 weeks
Video
$5,000-$150,000
4-12 weeks
White paper
5-20 man days
3-8 weeks
A quick conclusion is that content is expensive to create
Scripted blog post costs are $99 to $199 depending on length and required expertise. Visual.ly
infographics are quoted $1,995 to $4,995 depending on how much efforts you put in the brief
creation.
1
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As well see below there are several tactics that this guide will provide to help you reduce the
costs of your content production and here are the two main strategies that you should consider at
the planning stage:
1. Using curated content as part of your content mix: among other benets like credibility,
thought leadership and inuencer engagement, content curation also is very efcient from
an ROI standpoint. While writing a good blog post takes 2 to 4 hours or $80-$200
(excluding brieng/editing time) to outsource, curating a piece of content and turning it
into a curated post can take as little as 15 minutes for you or one of your team members.
2. Using software and tools to optimize the productivity of your team: its easy to waste a lot
of time when it comes to producing or curating content. If you work as a team, add to that
time spent coordinating your team. Software and tools can help you not just streamline
your process but also save time planning, sourcing, publishing and distributing content.
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Build the foundations

of your content
strategy
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Before you rush to produce all the content youve just planned, its important to think about how
this content will be published for your readers and how it will be articulated with your business
online presence. Content Marketing is more than blogging and sharing links on social media. In
this section, well take a look at the basic content infrastructure every company needs to
maximize results.
Social Media, on its own, is out. Content hubs are in.
Faced with decreasing organic reach on many social networks, some could be tempted to solve
the equation through a high-volume/low-quality solution but what, as this Facebooks post
explains, you cant compromise on its quality otherwise your content will be buried in 1,500 stories
and never make the cut.
In short, publishing more crap will yield no results.
This leaves us with 2 choices (or the combination of both):
1 - increase volume and quality at the same time;
2 - increase engagement.
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As our recent study on its impact for professionals shows and as detailed in the following section
of this guide on publishing content at scale, content curation is a great way of achieving #1. By
leveraging what you already do (read great content; have expertise), by combining it with content
curation technology that helps you identify more rapidly and by makin it easy to publish it to all the
social networks you want to maintain, platforms like Scoop.it allow you to create and feed a
content strategy efciently. As the study showed, 88% of professionals surveyed said that content
curation helped them to nd the time to publish content while 65% said it improved their SEO
rankings.
But lets also look at #2.
When Facebook (or Twitter) dene engagement, they always look at the engagement on Facebook
(or Twitter). They dene it by the number of likes, re-shares, retweets, favorites, clicks, etc This is
good but could be too restrictive.
Social Media engagement does not only happen on the social network itself. Resharing a link you
found on Facebook to Twitter is engagement. But commenting a blog post you found through
Twitter is also engagement. Subscribing to a blog is again engagement. Generating leads of all
forms is engagement and - as more and more content experts like Barry Feldman point out - one
of the best ways to measure the impact of your content.
Ask yourself the question: whats better for you? That someone likes one of your pictures on
Facebook or that she subscribes to your blogs newsletter?
So while optimizing engagement on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ should denitely
remain an imperative for anyone who publishes on social media and wants to get results, thinking
of engagement only in the context of these platforms is doomed. In short, sharing is not enough:
you need a content hub.
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Heres what we mean by that:
I dont care how much you tweet, if youre just tweeting links, youre missing out.
Why? Because if youre just sharing:
Your content investment is short-lived: the lifetime of a tweet is in minutes; a few hours at
best.
You have no or limited opportunity to provide context.
You drive your audience away from you; not to your own site.
No opportunity to convert.
No opportunity to show related content.
No trafc from search.
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By having a content hub, now things are totally different:
Your content is now archived somewhere and can be discovered and re-shared in the
future (I regularly see people tweet my Scoop.it-hosted content months after I published it;
this for instance links back to this scoop published 2 months earlier).
Extra perk if youre a business: having individuals re-share your content on Facebook has a
lot of value since the Facebook News Feed algorithm prioritizes people over pages.
Your curated content receives targeted trafc from search (on average 40% on Scoop.it
topics).
Even through a simple aggregation, if you add specic commentary to your content, you
will show more and better context making your content more engaging for the audience
you target.
You can add conversion & engagement CTAs (subscribe, contact me, request a demo,
book services, etc).
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So while you might have different resources to manage social media, newsletters, blogs... (for
instance if you have a community manager and a content strategist working with you), its time to
break the silos and unify your content strategy around a content hub.
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Building and integrating your content hub to your website

With this information in mind, its time to develop the rst part of your brand new SMB content
marketing strategy: your content hub; your home to centralize not just the content you create but
also third-party content that youll need to curate to make your content more credible.
Over the past year or so, content marketers have been trying to learn how to create quality
content, share quality content, get their content distributed to as large of an audience as possible,
integrate SEO without being too spammy, collaborate with their teams, and so much more. So,
where are content marketing tools headed in 2015? Towards the content marketing hub.
In the coming months, well see content marketers leaning towards organizational as well as
functional tools in order to ensure that their content marketing is powerful and impacting as it can
possibly be. The content marketing hub is a place where you can nd, share, create, upload,
distribute, measure, and collaborate on content.
One of the main ways to leverage a content hub as a business is to add curated content to your
website or blog. By selecting the most interesting content for your target audience and adding
some context to it, you will naturally show your expertise to your visitors a good objective in
itself. But, if you do it right, you should also enjoy the following benets:
Audience engagement as readers can now discover more interesting content than just
your own stories or product news: loyal visitors will stay longer, hopping between related
curated pieces, and have reasons for coming back or even subscribe to receive your email
newsletters.
SEO as your Website now contains more quality content on your niche topic which can be
indexed by Google. Not only will that content be well targeted and relevant but it will also
be organized and contextualized which is what Google is looking for (more on seo benets
of content curation here).
Social Trafc as your readers can share content they like while directing trafc to your site
(more on why you should use a content hub for your social media publishing here).
Conversions as readers of your curated content are not just clicking on links in your tweets
or Facebook posts to end up on third-party websites, but are instead being directed to your
own website that now acts as a content hub. You can incorporate call-to-actions in your
hub to either contact you, subscribe to your newsletter or request a demo of your product
(more on how to use content curation for inbound marketing and lead generation here).
Here are the pros and cons of key integration options that you should be aware of:
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Embed a sidebar widget

A quick and easy way to add curated content to your website is to add an RSS-widget to the
sidebar. Simply adding the RSS feed of your curated stream will do the trick:
Of course a basic RSS widget is very minimal in terms of design and lacks a visual experience. If
youre using Scoop.it for your content curation, you can make things look much more dynamic by
using the Scoop.it widget.
But regardless of the design and while this type of integration is really quick, it has the following
limitations:
No content is displayed beyond a title and a visual: your insights are not showing which is
a lost opportunity to engage your audience and this makes your content less attractive
from an SEO standpoint.
No new web pages are created as a result: from an SEO standpoint, this will impact your
existing pages (with the restriction above) but will not help having more pages indexed by
Google.
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Readers can not share any of the content from your site.
Embed curated content pages

Another layout you might consider is to have
one page of all of your curated content (or
one page per topic if youve curated several
topics). If youre using Scoop.it, the embed
code will let you do that with a simple cut
and paste.
Heres an example of how it can look:
Compared to the previous solution, this
implementation lets you achieve a lot more:
it incorporates visuals, your insights are now
clearly showing and this page can have
conversion hooks as well as the full
navigation of your site to let your readers go
back and forth. But again, with the abovelisted objectives in mind, it has the following
limitations:
Youre adding only 1 page (or 1 page

per topic) to your site, which is better
than none but doesnt optimize your
content curation efforts.
Readers can still not share any of the

content from your site because even
though you could have sharing
buttons on these posts, there are no URLs on your website for this content. You could
create tweets and Facebook posts redirecting to the original content but you would then
lose the benets of having a content hub for your social media publishing.
Enable a CMS integration to turn your curated content into curated blog
posts
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If you already have a CMS (Content
Management System) for your website and
blog, for instance Wordpress, you should
consider an integration of your curated
content directly at the CMS level such as the
one that advanced curation platforms like
Scoop.it provide.
This solution solves the above limitation as
each piece of content you curate is now
turned into a post in your CMS and therefore
a page of your website, with its own
permalink URL that can be indexed by search
engines as well as re-shared by your readers
individually.
The problem that could arise now is how to
differentiate your curated content from your
created content?
This might not be a problem if you dont
create much original content or if you
consider both to be equally important and
interesting to your readers. There is no right
or wrong answer to this: on the Scoop.it blog
for instance, we mix them both because our
curated pieces always including a fair amount
of original content from us as a Scoop.it
insight. Plus the Scoop.it integration we use
makes it clear its curated by prominently
displaying the source of the original content
and links back to it.
However, you might feel they should be
separated for editorial reasons, or you may
want to simply organize your content in a certain way if you have multiple topics.
Heres how you can address that in the case of Wordpress (but the same would apply to any other
CMS provided your content curation platform integrates with it):
Mapping posts by WordPress category:
One way to do this is by mapping your curated topics within WordPress categories. If you have
only one topic, you can assign all of your curated posts to a category called Curated content for
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instance. If you have say 3 topics, you could have 1 topic in the Industry News category, another
one in Market trends and a third one in Best practices.
Then by using Menus from the Appearance settings of your WordPress dashboard, you can
organize how you want to display content from your various categories:
An example of how this can be seen at http://acme-insurance.com/ where the Blog main menu
shows both curated and created content mixed, but the corresponding submenus are showing
only original posts (http://acme-insurance.com/category/news/) or only curated posts (http://
acme-insurance.com/category/curated-content/).
Create a dynamic home template:
If youre using your own WordPress template or are able to modify your existing one, you can even
go further and make your home page a lot more dynamic by showing the latest posts by category.
WordPress is a very powerful platform and lets you do pretty much what you want so the
possibilities are limitless.
You may think of your website as primarily your home page and then, further down, some content
pages that visitors can navigate to. Its not. In todays reality where social media and SEO drives
the most trafc, most of your readers will come from content pages rst to THEN discover your
websites home page.
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Key Points On Content Hubs:

1. To make your content marketing strategy efcient, you will need both created and
curated or shared content integrated together into a content hub you control.
2. While it can be important to give access to your content on your home page for
audience engagement, it will not drive more trafc if you simply do that.
3. To optimize your contents impact and its benets in terms of SEO, social trafc,
branding, etc you should consider a full integration with your Website as shown in
the table below.
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Social media, as a part of a strategy, is still in.
As we said social media engagement is not a strategy and how sharing without a content hub
wasnt enough, you might wonder whether you need social media at all. Of course! We are not
saying social media is not essential but simply that its not enough. So lets detail why it is still
important for your company to be on social media.
People expect your business to be there.
We have come to the stage in history where people expect your business to be on social media by
default. It is a little like how twenty years ago people automatically expected your business to be
in the phone book. People are going to search out the things that they like on social media, and if
your target audience likes you then they are going to search you out. If you are not on there, then
they are going to be disappointed, and you risk them becoming disillusioned.
You can gain free trafc for your website, blog or business.
Social media is going to take up your time, and your time is valuable. Even if you are a blogger
your time is valuable, because whilst you are typing things into social media you are not working
on your blog. However, if you think about it, you will see that every other form of marketing is also
going to take up your valuable time. Whether you are working on your SEO, proof-editing or making
adverts for your afliate adverts, you are going to be using your time.
The big difference between working on your marketing and working on your social media
marketing is that it is free to host your adverts and promotional material. If you were to create an
advert and host it on a website, then it is going to cost you money. But, if you were to create an
advert and then post it on social mediait is free! In that sense, you are far more likely to see a
bigger return on your investment when you consider how little you had to invest in the rst place.
Social media has a few good SEO benets too.
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The online programmers have made social media integration something that is simple and
effective at boosting your websites trafc and SEO (Search Engine Optimization). They have
created widgets that you can install on your website or blog so that people only need to click them
in order to talk about you on social media.
They have made widgets so that your audience can click a Like button to show their appreciation
for that element (text, image, video elements, etc). Not only do these widgets help to improve your
SEO, but they also allow the people on social media to display the things that they like to their
friends.
There are even comment sections that are powered by social media sites. Instead of making a
comment on a website or blog about an article/post, people can make a comment powered by a
social media site. The comment will appear on the website/blog with their prole picture next to it,
and it will also appear on their social media prole (if they want it to). This will help to improve
your trafc numbers and your SEO.
Which Social Networks Should You Focus On?

A lot of people will tell you to think really hard about where your audience is.
We say: dont be shy, dont over think and experiment.
Why?
Because there are now tools that will help you automate content publishing to social media
while leaving you in control and giving you enough exibility to adapt your message to each
channel. So the marginal cost of experimenting with say Google+ is lower than spending hours
in meetings, analysis or arguments on whether its a ghost town or not or whether your target
audience really likes it.
Just give it a try, measure the results and after a few weeks you will know for sure what
channels are good for you.
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Landing pages & Inbound Marketing

Your content marketing strategy can be purely focused on brand and thought leadership
development but you can add ROI to the equation by integrating it with your inbound marketing
strategy. By designing and creating landing pages where your visitors can sign up for demos or
sales calls, you can drive demand and generate leads by having prospects come to you instead of
you reaching out to them: this is the basic denition of inbound marketing which has proven a lot
more successful and efcient than traditional outbound, intrusive marketing over the past few
years.
So how do you connect content marketing to inbound marketing and create landing pages that
convert?
You must have done your pitch a million times already, right? You start by describing a target
persona then you talk about how miserable they are with problem X and nally you explain how
your solution solves problem X in such an elegant way that we all want to cry out of relief for your
soon-to-be-not-miserable-anymore persona.
Its a great story and you know how to handle objections, questions and feedback from your
audience. Based on who they are and how much thinking theyve done on problem X, their
questions are different. And youre also not doing the same pitch if you have 1 minute, if you have
5 minutes or if youre meeting for 30.
The problem with website visitors is that you dont get to be in front of them; you have to hand the
job over to your website. While you cant overload your home page with answers to each and every
objection or question, heres what you can do: break down your pitch into as many landing pages
as you need. Use tools like Unbounce or Leadpages to create them without even having to code.
Make them as long as needed to really hand hold your visitors through the entire articulated and
convincing argument.
Then connect your content hub to your landing pages through clear call-to-actions so that your
visitors ready to move to the consideration stage can easily request a demo or get in touch in a
seamless way. Your content will now not only convince but also convert.
Well describe best practices for landing pages, conversion hooks and lead nurturing in a following
section of this guide.
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Email Marketing & Marketing Automation

According to research performed earlier in 2014 by Gigaom and reported by eMarketer, email
marketing is still the most commonly used method of digital marketing, with a whopping 86% of
respondents claiming to use it. If thats not enough, though, over half (59%) of B2B marketers
surveyed by HubSpot say that email marketing is the most effective channel for generating
revenue.
Why are email marketing and content marketing such a great match?
1. Because email marketing ends up being spammy if its entirely self-promotional. Nobody
likes to read about your 15% end-of-month discount endlessly. Content that answers your
audiences question - aka content marketing - is not spam nor advertising: it becomes
something your audience will be eager to nd in their inbox.
2. Content requires distribution before it can generate some. Your email subscribers are your
most loyal readers and the more likely to share your content to their own social networks.
In short, email needs content and content needs email.
In the section dedicated to email distribution, well go in details on how email marketing can
produce great results through content and data on how content email newsletters perform way
better from an open and click rate standpoint than promotional content.
So for now, lets focus on what to put in place.
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The minimum you should put in place for email content marketing:
An email platform to manage your mailing list and distribute your email content
newsletters: if you dont have any, MailChimp is your best bet (we like Constant Contact
too but MailChimp is free up to 2,000 subscribers which is hard to beat).
Subscription forms: make it easy for people to sign up for content updates from your
company. On your blog, landing pages, gated content, etc (again, MailChimps got you
covered with embeddable code thats easy to congure)
A CMS-Newsletter integration: thats the important part that will save you time and
which is critical to understand. Creating newsletters from scratch every week is too
much a pain: use software like Scoop.it to automatically generate templated
newsletters from your created or curated content. Cut down the process to a simple
review, minor edits and send!
Beyond this simple set-up, you should consider Marketing Automation to provide a personalized
nurturing experience for your contacts aiming at converting them from simple readers to leads.
As you dene workow to trigger emails based on events and subscriber data as part of your
Marketing Automation strategy, youll realize something quickly: you need content to make it
better and more impacting.
Sure, you can send an email offering a sales call or a demo to that contact who became a hot lead
as he downloaded a white paper and made 3 visits to your site in the last 10 days. But if offering
sales call or demos is all you have, he might be not as responding than if you can send him a great
piece of content, a survey results or a guide that will help him move through the buyers journey.
Marketing Automation, like Inbound Marketing, requires some fuel: content.
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Lean Content: publish

content at scale with
limited resources
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Now that youve built the foundations of your content strategy, lets look at running your content
operation. The key to getting any results with your content strategy is to publish regularly and
consistently quality content. The time where you could rely on an occasional epic piece of content
such as a quarterly white paper or a yearly survey report are gone.
Here are several data points on this:
Numerous studies on social media - including the one below by Beevolve - have found a
strong correlation between social audience size and the volume of posts. Of course,
having many followers is not enough to have a successful content marketing strategy, but
building your audience is a necessary prerequisite to reaching your business goals.
Source: http://www.beevolve.com/twitter-statistics/
By analyzing data from the Scoop.it user base (1.5M+ users), we were able to quantify the
impact of content quality and publishing frequency on trafc. The details of our
methodology are on our blog but the bottom line is that Scoop.it users who publish the
best and the most content generate ~10x the trafc than the average users as shown in
the graph below:
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So a clear question to all content marketers is: how do I scale my published content while
maintaining or increasing its quality? And how do I do that with limited resources?
Well explore the various options to do that in the following sections.
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How to create good content

If 2014 wasnt the year of quality content, 2015 will be. Search engines as well as readers are
consistently looking to surface the best of the best; content that will make their lives better by
adding value and teaching them something that theyre looking to learn.
Theres one catch to the Internet allowing everyone to become a publisher, though: some of us
werent born writers, or just arent sure how to become them.
Expert blogger Jayson DeMers has a few tips that can help you get on the track to writing the
perfect business blogpost, including one of the most important practices of blogging for
marketing purposes: dening a clear strategy for each piece of content you create. Being
intentional about planning out each piece of content you create, along with the goals of that
piece of content and its distribution strategy, will take a lot of the pain out of creating original
content for marketing purposes.
Heres a table summarizing some of his key advice:
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4 steps to creating the perfect blog post according to Jayson DeMers

1. Inventing a captivating introduction: put yourself in the shoes of your target audience
and discern what you believe they will want to learn from this post so that you can tell
them up-front that theyve come to the right place.
2. Including a captivating image: Images take signicantly shorter amounts of time for
the brain to process, so winning the attention of your audience with a great one is the
way to go and is likely to keep readers on your page for a longer period of time.
3. Citing outside data or information: Readers are 3x more likely to trust information
coming from a third party.
4. Presenting content in an easy-to-read format: You may be starting to sense a theme
here. Making content easy for your audience to consume is innitely important.
Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jaysondemers/2014/06/01/how-to-write-the-perfect-business-blog-post/
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Outsourcing
There are many ways to outsource original content creation by leveraging existing services and
marketplaces to help speed along the process.
As PR and digital marketing evolve, so did many agencies which more and more offer content
services in addition to strategic recommendations and other digital practices.
You can of course recruit freelancers or writers directly but content marketplaces such as
Scripted, Odesk, ExpressWriters or Visual.ly help reduce the recruitment time of independent
content talents by standardizing the process and performing the matchmaking process. One such
example of this is a tool like Scripted, where you can post a brief of the piece of content youd like
written or created, and someone from their network of writers and designers will claim the task
and create the content for you within a specied period of time.
One thing to keep in mind when outsourcing content though is that you will still have some work
to do: for a freelancer or an agency to reect your brand, your tone or even simply your expertise, it
takes some effort which Rebecca Lieb gives a great check-list for in this blog post. Having a great
writer or designer for your blog or your infographic is just the beginning of the process and
outsourcing still takes work: creating a brief, editing, sending feedback and iterating content is not
to be neglected.
So even if your favorite agency can deliver content services or even if you leverage the
matchmaking capabilities and services of the new content marketplaces, outsourcing will always
require some budget and some time.
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Content Curation
Content curation is a key lean content strategy that will bring you many benets. Here is how in
detail.
How to leverage your hidden content gold mine

Youre sitting on a content gold mine that youre probably not leveraging properly; in fact, youre
might not even be conscious of it! You might be able to increase your repower, both in quality
and quantity, with just a minor change in your procedures. You might be one step away from
increasing your content ROI measurably.
How could such a content gold mine hide in your business in full oblivion?
As far as content goes, you are rst and foremost a reader: under all likelihood, you read more
than you publish. You spend valuable time discovering, digesting and ltering tons of content
throughout your working day sometime purposely, sometime serendipitously. Which measurable
benets do you draw from this investment? You acquire knowledge; you become a better person
and a better professional: there is ROI in knowledge. But how does this translate into your content
strategy?
Curation is the process of discovering, enriching and publishing existing content. Your unique
perspective and context on the content you curate yield added value to your readers.
So curation is a proven, effective contributor to any content strategy as it brings credibility,

repower and ROI.
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Clever publishing consists in streamlining your content consumption into content curation.
When engaged in a content strategy, curators invest time to hunt for content when they need to
publish. You can complement this attitude with an opportunistic approach: capture relevant
content when you nd it! Dont wait until you need it! Add this simple process to your reader
routine.
How can you do this efciently? This can be achieved with the proper tool (the purpose of which
being simply to save you time) such as the Scoop.it bookmarklet:
Then, whenever you meet content relevant to your editorial line, capture it by a simple click on this
bookmarklet:
By adding this curation reex to your reading routine, youve cleverly and substantially
increased your publishing repower. You can go one step further: leverage your team. You are a
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reader and so are your colleagues, partners, collaborators and associates. They can all be part of
your clever publishing process.
Amplifying your curation through content discovery tools

Capturing and re-purposing what you discover and read is clever. This is the beginning of your
content curation strategy making use of what youre already doing. But as powerful as
serendipity is, its not sufcient: an effective editorial line needs density, regularity, rhythm you
need relevant and rich content to feed your presence on many media (social media, sites, blogs,
newsletters) throughout the day.
Bottom line: you need predictability in your content sourcing in order to generate ROI.
To do that, you should highly consider content discovery tools that will automate content
discovery for you, provide a consistent stream of fresh, relevant content and save you time over
other serendipitous content discovery approaches.
One such example of these tools is our Scoop.it Smart Suggestion Engine that we built with
precisely that need in mind: it browses the web for you, listens and watches for what is published
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and exchanged within your topics of choice, and suggests whats relevant for you to curate. You
draw two immediate benets from it:
First, you learn and nd inspiration (more on this also in the following subsection).
Second, and most importantly, it helps you defeat the white page syndrome: at any given
point in time, it offers you unlimited content for you to feed your editorial line, as and when
you need it.
More details on how it works can be found here.
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Curation as a way to inform creation

Content curation is not just a placeholder for the lack of inspiration or time to create great
content. While it certainly can help publish relevant good content in the lack of a brilliant original
content idea, it's also a great way to generate some.
On top of using curation as a way to publish content, Content Marketer Tommy Landry argues that
content curation is also a way to generate content ideas that will ll the gaps and be more original
and impactful: by constantly monitoring what is published on your topics of interest to nd
content to curate, you will also understand with precision what content hasnt been produced yet
and needs to be. In short, content curation informs content creation as others also noted.
3 Tips To Use Content Curation To Inform Your Original Content Creation

Look back at your own curation work and pause on a weekly basis to reect on:
1 - what are the developing trends that people have been publishing on? Can you elaborate on
them?
2 - can you do roundup posts with top 5/10 pieces of content you've curated this week?
3 - what are the things your customers or prospects are asking and that the content you've
been curating does not cover: why not write a post on exactly that?
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How effective is content curation?

With over 1.5 million freemium users on the Scoop.it platform, we decided to add data to the
discussion and ask our SMB clients how curation has impacted their content marketing strategies
and goals.
The rst nding of this study let us know that content curation helps SMBs increase their content
volume. The average SMB has a mix of about 76% curation and 24% original content creation.
Along the same lines, about 40% of SMB marketing budgets goes towards content curation, yet
still manages to account for 76% of the total content volume.
Furthermore, as demonstrated in the chart below, one dollars worth of content curation has been
reported to bring 5.2x the volume of content, 2.2x the trafc, and 1.5x the leads as that same one
dollar spent content creation2.
Source: Scoop.its 2014 report on the ROI of content curation http://business.scoop.it/content-curationroi/

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4 Key Findings On The ROI Of Content Curation For SMB Marketing

1. Adding content curation to the marketing mix allows SMBs to increase the volume of
their content without a signicant increase in cost
2. Scaling content marketing by adding content curation yields more than it costs when it
comes to meeting business objectives
3. SMBs spend six less hours curating content than they do creating it, with content
curation yielding about 3x the volume.
4. 57% of website trafc for SMBs comes from content curation.
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Contribution
Employees
Content Marketing needs to grow beyond the marketing team as I once wrote about in that post
and as other authors such as John Jantsch also noted. But while everybody seems to agree, lets
be real: its not easy. I regularly talk to hundreds of business owners, entrepreneurs and even VP
Marketing at larger companies which all tell me how incredibly hard it is to get non-marketers to
create content.
But dont fool yourself: you wont get everybody to create content.
So yes, as Jantsch writes, this is also about creating a content culture favorable to content
marketing. And he recommends a number of useful steps to foster it which dont involve creating
content specically but theres a key one that he overlooks: collaborative content curation.
While its extremely hard to constantly remind people they have a blog post to nish, its much
easier to have them curate the content they read and they feel is valuable to the content strategy.
Your co-workers have expertise; and they read content which is valuable. Empower them to easily
curate it and share it so you can make your content marketing strategy stronger.
From a practical point of view, think about the following concrete ideas:
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3 Ways To Make Content Everybodys Job

1 create a weekly newsletter from the best posts that your team read this week;
2 create private content hubs where everybody can share content without too much over
thinking and then curate this pre-curation to your blog;
3 identify champions who naturally share content (tip: theyre the ones already sending links
by email to the rest of the company) and give them ownership: make these company thought
leaders responsible to create a weekly roundup post of curated links.
There are many other ways to involve more people in your content marketing strategy a premise
I can not agree more. But any of the above will be more efcient than waiting forever for one of
your engineers to write that epic slideshare or for your super busy sales rockstar to come out with
the perfect blog post.
Community
Whether you are or have a community manager or not, involving the community surrounding your
business in your content strategy is an excellent and highly recommended way to save time and
money on content creation as well as distribution.
Numerous community professionals have worked with their marketing teams to include
community in content marketing strategies. There are a few days to do this and numerous
benets to doing so.
The rst thing to consider is that your community is an excellent sample of your overall audience.
They are the ones that youve already won over; the ones that want to be a part of what youre
building and providing to the world. In order to reach more people like them through content, an
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excellent practice is to hold feedback sessions with willing members of your community. This can
be an extremely effective way of coming up with new content marketing topics or expanding on
the ones that youre already focused on.
Next, and most importantly, SMBs can leverage their existing communities to co-create content.
According to content strategist Ted Karczewski, If a customer or social follower asked a
profound question, brought up an interesting trend he or she was noticing, or said something
favorable about the brand, a writer or videographer should look to connect with that person to
extend the conversation. Co-creating content further supports community development, earns
trust, and guarantees amplication.
Asking your community members to write about their favorite things about your business or
product, how they are making it a part of their life, or their expertise and how it relates to your
brand is a great way to generate content as well as amplify distribution as your guest writer is
guaranteed to share the content that they wrote on your site with their networks.
There are lots of community professionals using content as a part of their strategy and vice versa
- learn more here.
Inuencers
Content Marketing and Inuencer Strategy must work together for either to be successful. 90% of
the worlds data has been generated in the past 2 years; and while content marketing is
approaching mass adoption, getting a message in front of the right people at the right time is as
formidable as it is essential. To rise above the noise, convey a message and mobilize buyers,
content marketers are turning to inuencers.
Investing in a content and inuencer marketing strategy can be one of the most impactful actions
a business can make. Lee Odden, TopRank Marketing
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The above framework gives a complete framework by Traackr, the leading inuencer marketing
platform, for designing and executing an inuencer marketing strategy tightly coupled to your
content plan. For more on this, we encourage you to check their Ultimate Guide To Content
Marketing Inuencer Strategy. But as a way to bootstrap this, heres how to bootstrap this and get
started.
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How To Get Started with Influencer Marketing

To Amplify Your Content Strategy
A good practical way to get started with inuencer marketing as noted by the Traackr team is
to curate inuencers content as its a way to:
Get in their radar: as you share a curated piece from them and clearly mention them as
the author, theyll likely to take notice;
Bring them to your site and have them discover what youre all about, especially if
youre using a content hub to create engagement and conversions from your social
media publishing;
Have them amplify your reach by re-sharing to their own audience;
Generate conversations with them that will eventually lead to co-creating content.
As a recent example of the above, I curated a post by inuencer Rachel Miller who took notice and
discovered my Scoop.it page on that topic and tweeted it. The conversation went on and she
invited me to join in her next #SSHour tweet chat that she hosts with Brian Fanzo - another
prominent inuencer in our space. This again amplied our content but also resulted in us cocreating content that generated further trafc, engagement and results.
Its good to remember that content is not created in vacuum. Its rst and foremost a way to
communicate from people to people. Involving inuential people in your content strategy is a
great way to keep it real and connected to your audience while extending its reach.
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Repurposing content
Weve all played Lego as kids. Are you thinking of your content as modular lego-type building
blocks?
Lee Odden explains in this post why you should because youll then be able to turn mico-content
into eBooks and then blog posts, newsletters, etc And vice versa.
A lean content practice that will help you scale your content marketing as shown in the following
graph.
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(Source: http://www.toprankblog.com/2014/05/modular-content-repurposing/)
Rebecca Lieb of the Altimeter group is also a big advocate of this technique and she came out
with the turkey leftover analogy for repurposing content: she explains how you could turn epic
content such as an ebook or a white paper into many other pieces of content with only marginal
additional work. Just like the Thanksgiving turkey leftovers can last you many more meals and
should given the hard work youve put into cooking it in the rst place.
Break big content into smaller pieces or do the opposite and plan your micro-content so that it can
t into something bigger like an ebook. Both are equally effective.
As Lee Odden points out, content curation plays an important role if you want to pursue this
strategy: Curation of micro-content is easy, provides useful information to your target audience
and can t within a social content workow designed to roll up to a larger content project.
Here are several interesting ways you can leverage the curation of micro-content:
create roundup posts with a given periods top 5/10 pieces of curated content (heres a
great example: http://www.toprankblog.com/2014/10/10-content-marketing-posts-2015/),
create the same as a weekly email newsletter (see this guides section on email marketing
for examples and data on this),
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publishing a mini content site with the top resources on a topic (heres our own example on
content curation: http://www.scoop.it/t/content-curation-insights-resources).
By assembling your Lego content blocks together, you will not only save time but you might soon
realize that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. And by breaking down your larger
constructions into content atoms, you will extend their lifetime and their impact.
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Distribute
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Synchronize your channels

Write it and they will come never actually happens. Yes, search engines will eventually bring
audience to your content but before that can happen you need to bootstrap your distribution
yourself. And to maximize the impact of your content, synchronizing your distribution channels is
essential.
Social media
A natural way to get distribution is of course to promote your content on your own social
channels. While you may initially only have a limited number of followers, dont neglect the impact
they can have: these people have chosen to follow you so theyre likely to be interested in your
content. In addition, think of this in a dynamic way: publishing consistently and regularly will
mechanically ensure your followers grow in number and become a key distribution channel for
your content.
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4 Must-dos To Get More Distribution From Your Social Channels:

1. Schedule your social posts at the moments where your audience is present,
2. Post multiple times: not all of your audience will be there when you post so dont be
afraid to repeat it at various times,
3. Use hashtags to attract new followers who are looking for your keywords on Twitter,
Google+ or Facebook search engines,
4. Mention people who are likely to retweet or reshare.
Email newsletters
As mentioned in the previous section, though social media has been all the rage these past few
years, you shouldnt underestimate how important email remains. But even better, you can make
social media and email work hand in hand in a synchronized way:
add sharing options to your newsletters so that your recipients can directly share your
content from their email inbox,
make your newsletters carefully curated with your best content - the one that received the
most trafc and shares since your last email newsletter - to amplify the success of your
most promising content.
So beyond that, what can you do to get optimized results from your email marketing?
Because email is such an important channel, weve done extensive research on it and heres what
weve learned over two years of using email newsletters as a part of our content marketing
strategy:
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1. Content performs much better than promotion
This might be expected but while promoting our premium products through discount or special
offers certainly helped our revenue grow, they werent as engaging to our audience as inspiring
content created or curated by Ally or the rest of the Scoop.it team.
On average, content beat promotion by a 2.2x on open rate and a 6.0x on click rate.
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2. Timing of campaigns is not entirely critical
As on social media where we stopped counting the number of best times to tweet infographics
long ago, there are a lot of studies online about the best time to send an email campaign. While
we saw some slightly higher performance of campaigns sent on Monday afternoons, the
differences dont seem to be very statistically signicant. Note that because we have a user base
which is quite international (65%+ of our users are now outside of the US), this might explain the
lack of impact of this criteria.
3. Having numbers in the subject lines helps the open rate
Is our user base super rational and number-driven? Not sure, but what we are sure of is that 9 out
of our top 10 best performing email newsletters had numbers in their subject lines, the winner
being 5 tips for hacking social media, optimizing for Twitter, and promoting at the right time (and
no, this latter was not one of these best time to tweet studies) with an astounding 45% open
rate.
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4. Piggybacking on famous brand names doesnt really work

Since 3 of our top 10 campaigns happened to include famous brand in the subject line (e.g.:
Content we love: 5 tips for lean thought leadership, Facebook Home, and Operation: Integrate all
the things!), we looked at whether it helped the rationale being that quoting Facebook or Twitter
or other 800-pound gorillas that everyone in our space wants to watch closely might yield higher
engagement. Frankly, we didnt nd strong evidence of an impact, as we found the number of
subject lines with famous brand names to those without them to be essentially the same.
5. Not having enough relevant content to send is by far the #1 hurdle

Overall, while there certainly is an art and possibly even a science of crafting impactful email
newsletters, when taking a step back, we found that the #1 criteria for impact was by far the
frequency of our campaigns.
It is worth noting that our #1 campaign outperformed the average by a huge amount; it is a clear
outlier. And, dont get me wrong: our top 10 performing email campaigns even excluding this
one clearly outperformed the average by a factor of 1.7x. This is a lot, but in reality its very little,
compared to the impact we could have lost by not sending any newsletters at all.
One thing to confess here: while this is our trade helping people nd great content to easily
publish to all their channels to develop and engage their audience I have to admit that weve
been historically much more focused on social media and SEO than on email. For that reason, we
were slow to adopt to email what weve been preaching to blogs, social media and search: content
curation. Yes, I know, it seems a little funny. But, the lesson was learned and we worked on it not
only by integrating much more content curation in our own email campaigns but also by making it
a feature on the Scoop.it platform.
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And, when we compare our recent results vs the historical ones, we found the biggest take-away
of all: as we started including curated content more systematically into our mix, we were able to
send content newsletters on a weekly basis without degrading the quality: our open rate went up a
bit but much more importantly, our increased frequency drove the number of recipients we
reached through the roof by a factor of 2.5x (when normalized to offset the fact our opt-in user
base grew rapidly in the meantime).
In other words, our best months were not the ones where we had just 1 or 2 exceptional
campaigns but were months where we were able to send newsletters every week.
Email Newsletters As Part Of A Content Strategy: Key Take-aways

1. Content outperforms promotion: better open rate and click rate.
2. Content enables marketers to send more emails without being spammy.
3. Email frequency is by far the #1 criteria to optimize reach of email campaigns.
4. Yes, subject lines and timing can have some inuence but again, youre better off optimizing
frequency than spend too much time over-experimenting on these.
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Inuencers
As explained above, co-creating content with inuencers is a great way to involve them in your
success, particularly get them to help distribute it. But while co-creating content is important, its
unlikely youll be able to co-create massive amount of content on a daily basis.
Another way to get inuencers to help is to place your content in the context of their interests:
curate your target audiences inuencer content,
adding your own thoughts to it and publish it on your content hub (blog, website)
share the resulting curated post on social channels while mentioning
Heres an example of a blog post I curated from Rachel Miller and shared with a clear mention that
this is adding to the conversation she started:
The tweet got her attention and she reshared my content:
And she even took the time to share our curated stream on that topic:
While you should denitely have co-creation in mind as mentioned in the previous section,
curating inuencer content with added context and clear mentions to add to the conversation is a
great way to get some amplication on a daily basis.
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Your community
All of your followers are not the same. As you develop your community management, you will
likely identify fans in your follower base. To get them to help you distribute your content, you can
use private groups on Facebook, LinkedIn or Google+ to address them specically and ask them
to share your content - particularly content that helps them with regards to their own audience.
SEO
Though you dont control SEO distribution per se, there are a number of indirect SEO benets you
can expect from doing the above: the more people will like your content, the more theyre likely to
link back to it. Link building can be a direct consequence of your success at doing all the above.
Of course, there are link building techniques that you can explore but by focusing on publishing
great content and on maximizing distribution, youll get the basic for SEO in place as this post also
details. An interesting data that underlines this point is that, just by publishing good curated
content and integrating this with social distribution, Scoop.it pages receive on average 40% of
their trafc from search engines.
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Leverage existing channels

What if you dont have many followers or an email subscriber list? How do you bootstrap
distribution when getting started? As mentioned before, the main answer to this question is to
publish regularly and consistently great content. But that doesnt mean you shouldnt leverage
other channels to bootstrap your audience or accelerate its growth.
Existing content platforms

One of the Lean Content best practices weve seen several speakers at our meetups recommend
is to leverage existing audiences on top of your own to increase the reach and the impact of your
content. While your blog may or may not yet have a strong audience, theres always more people
to reach. By placing your content on publishing platforms which offer interesting discovery
mechanisms or having blogs that are read in your industry re-publish it, you could in theory
multiply your own reach by not doing much more.
Though the idea makes perfect sense, it also comes with questions:
1. Re-publishing on other platforms can be more or less complex: some like LinkedIn publishing
platform or Medium are public or in the process of being public; some industry blogs (for example,
in our space, Social Media Today or Business 2 Community) recruit contributors based on their
own selection criteria.
2. Re-publishing content is creating potentially duplicate content which could hurt SEO and defeat
the purpose.
3. Re-publishing content means its read on a platform from where we cant convert our audience:
to subscribe to our blog, to sign up for a demo of Scoop.it, etc. As part of our own Content
Marketing efforts, conversion is an important metric.
At Scoop.it, we like to put ideas to the test so we did an experiment a few weeks ago to come out
with data that would support or reject this. While most of our original content is on our blog, weve
occasionally contributed to various other media such as Business 2 Community, Fast Company,
Business Insider or Social Media Today. In addition, Ally and I have also been publishing on
Medium and LinkedIn which now have interesting blogging platforms. But while until now we
hadnt been really consistent at tracking performance on these various platforms, this time weve
been measuring impact the best we could.
Heres what we did:
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- On June 18, I published a piece called Social Media Publishing is dead (as we know it) on our
blog.
- From there it had the usual social media promotion we do for all of our content: we share it to
our social channels including the Scoop.it channels; we also promote it specically to Scoop.it
users through the message that shows on their dashboards.
- The following day, on June 19, I published it under various names to:
1. LinkedIn: Is Social Media Publishing dead?
2. Medium: R.I.P. Social Media Publishing
3. Business 2 Community: The Death of Social Media Publishing (As We Know It)
- We also submitted the post to Social Media Today but their review process is typically longer and
they ended up publishing it on July 9th: Is Social Media Publishing Dead?
- We also did social media promotion on these links as for the original piece on our blog.
- On June 23, the blog post was included as part of our email content newsletter that we send out
on a weekly basis.
We measured results in 3 ways:

- First, we looked at KPIs per platform such as pageviews, shares (to social media) and
comments.
- Second, we looked at SEO impact: did we win some keywords? Which article did?
- Third, we looked at lead generation: though the third-party platforms could not generate leads for
us, was there any non-attributed leads that could maybe be correlated to the added trafc?
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Note that the post was successful which helped make the data interesting. Apparently the title
resonated with many who struggle with getting engagement on social networks and the content
generated comments and re-shares. This post ended up being in our Top 10% for Q2.
Unsurprisingly, the blog link performed better: not only was it there that we published it rst (24
hours earlier) but it had more social media promotion as well as promotion to the Scoop.it user
base through the site and via our weekly email newsletter.
Whats the impact of republishing content on trafc and engagement?
The rst learning is about amplication: as the above graphs demonstrate by comparing
pageviews and shares with and without it, re-publishing meant our content was seen and reshared by close to 2x more people.
In detail:
- LinkedIn came out close to the blog for Views and Shares and did amazingly better on
comments.
- Medium added close to a quarter of the blogs trafc and shares.
Note that we didnt retain likes on LinkedIn and recommendations on Medium as KPIs because
were not too sure what they bring besides augmenting the performance of the content on their
respective platforms but there was a very signicant number of likes on LinkedIn and
recommendations on Medium.
- Business 2 Community was less impacting but given the target audience of the site is very
relevant for us, its still signicant. Its also itself automatically syndicated back to Yahoo.
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- Social Media Today came late to the party (close to 3 weeks after the other ones) so Im not sure
we can really measure the impact on the same basis.
Whats the impact of republishing content on SEO?
Its always hard to judge results from an
SEO perspective but the post was able
to score some wins with keywords such
as impact of social media publishing
where it gained position #1 with the blog
version and #4 with Medium version.
Surprisingly, the duplicated post on
Yahoo! did better than the original
Business2Community version It was
also #1 on Google News through the
Business2Community version for the
same keywords or for facebook organic
reach decline.
But the conclusion is that republishing
didnt hurt the SEO performance of the
original post using the timeframe we
described above.
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Whats the impact of republishing content on lead generation?

Finally, we saw overall great performance from a lead generation point of view but none that can
really be attributed to the re-publishing activity: as mentioned before, the blog post performed
really well and this reected on the leads we generated from the blog but we didnt see a spike in
non-attributed leads that could be originating from our re-publishing activity.
While re-publishing will help you leverage existing audiences, the big limitation is of course that
you wont have conversion capabilities through that strategy. When you write on your own blog or
when you curate third-party content to your own content hub, you have to build your audience but
you can convert it (see our own post on how to generate leads through curated content for
instance).
In a way, re-publishing is the opposite of content curation: while it denitely brings leverage, it
doesnt help convert like your own content curation hub does.
So is re-publishing content worth it?
Yes, but it depends on your content strategys objectives.
Overall we achieved a near 2x amplication that helped us reach new audiences for a minimal
effort (beyond writing the blog post itself) and we didnt see any SEO downside quite the
opposite.
However, if lead generation is the only goal of your content strategy, its probably not the best
tactic for the reasons explained above.
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Best Practices When Republishing Content

To Other Blogs And Publishing Platforms?
If youre interested in applying re-publishing, you might want to consider the following good
practices:
1. Identify the blogs or platforms that will match your target audience.
2. Understand their rules of engagement: some platforms will want exclusive content, some
are happy with re-publishing or syndication.
3. Analyze what drives content performance on these blogs/platforms youre targeting: for
blogs, it might be understanding precisely the editorial line and building relationships with the
blogger or editorial team; for LinkedIn and Medium, its a mix of social following (your existing
network or the one you can build) and featuring opportunities (eg: being featured as part of a
Medium collection that has a large audience; Len Kendall was for instance kind enough to
feature my story in the awesome collection he created and curates and that is followed by an
impressive 11,000 people).
4. Vary the headlines and/or add some specic context as an intro: not only for SEO purposes
but also to adapt the post to the blog/publishing platform specic audience.
5. Promote the re-published content: dont be selsh and expect all the benets to go one
way. Share the re-published content and not just your own original blog post: there are multiple
opportunities to spread your sharing across several days anyway so you should be able to do
both.
6. Be realistic with your objectives: as explained above, re-publishing wont help much to
generate leads like your own blog or your own content curation hub can. So its best to use it
specically for new ideas, opinions or thought leadership pieces.
To follow up on that topic, you can read our experience on what we learned using SlideShare as a
visual blog - the visual content platform being one with massive trafc for professionals that you
might consider for implementing that tactic.
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Guest blogging
Guest blogging has been at the heart of a controversy last year as Googles Matt Cutts said: Okay,
Im calling it: if youre using guest blogging as a way to gain links in 2014, you should probably
stop. Why? Because over time its become a more and more spammy practice, and if youre doing
a lot of guest blogging then youre hanging out with really bad company.
But his words are important: having people contribute to your blog in an authentic way is by no
means a bad idea. What is targeted here is the spammy proposals that any blog with some trafc
will sooner or later receive: I blog for you if you blog for me and we exchange links. These
proposals of low quality content from people who have no idea what your audience cares about
and what your brand stands for are to be avoided at all costs. But building a carefully selected
community of guest bloggers - as mentioned above - is a great way to scale your content. The
reciprocal approach is also worth considering to bootstrap your audience and the best practices
are the same as in the above section on leveraging existing platforms: after all, contributing to
some other blog is leveraging their audience as a platform.
But in addition to these principles, you can also build relationships with blogs you contribute to
and over time make the exchange more interesting by negotiating to:
- include back links to your site (which in this case are totally white hat SEO),
- include links to your own landing pages,
- include links to your other content.
Online communities (tweetchats, G+ Hangouts)

In the same spirit of building groups with your most engaged community members, consider
existing communities. Search for and join some existing groups on your topics of interests.
Publish your content to these groups and even ask members to reshare it if they like it. Dont be
spammy but remember one important thing: if you publish valuable content to these groups
(unique awesome pieces or carefully curated ones from third-parties), they will enjoy reading it
and resharing it.
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Paid Content Distribution

While most of lean content marketing initiatives involve non-advertising-based inbound marketing
tactics, paid content distribution (or paid media) is yet another important channel in which to
further generate awareness and leads. As Gary Vaynerchuk said, content may be king, but
distribution is queen and runs the household.
Outbrain, Taboola, Disqus, Yahoo Stream Ads and NRelate are probably the most well-known paid
distribution networks. They promote your content as recommendations on the webs largest
content publishers including Yahoo, Conde Nast, CNN.com, and ESPN. Due to a variety of
audience targeting capabilities, certain networks may take some time to optimize for success.
Average PPC rates range from $.20-$.30 (based on anecdotal media reports), and some are as
high as $.75 for premium sites.
One network that stands out is Nativo, which differentiates on strategic / native placement within
a website versus just displaying links that push out to a publisher. These placements include
homepage and article pages so the experience is far superior, although its a CPM usually north of
$10, so a different model as well.
Facebook Sponsored Posts, Twitter Promoted Tweets and LinkedIn Sponsored Updates are also
forms of paid distribution that can generate varying degrees of awareness and leads. Facebook
and Twitter or the more economical route at between $.50-$.75 CPCs, however CTR on Facebook
is usually around .10% versus Twitter at north of 1% (note: these are anecdotal rates reported in
mainstream media so actual results may vary). Twitter of course has a much smaller base than
Facebook and tends toward media and entertainment content.
LinkedIns Sponsored Update prices tend to be in the $4 CPC range, due to hyper-targeting
capabilities, however the value of the network versus price is still an open question. Experiences
with InMails and Sponsored Updates indicate mixed results when it comes to CTRs or responses,
so its a good idea with this and all networks to start with a test budget and optimize from there
when you see success.
As various networks work to integrate content into publishers in a meaningful way, price,
targeting, nativity and relevance will continue to play factors in success. Its worth noting that
Tumblr, Instagram and Pinterest also have paid programs, which depending on how active you are,
can prove valuable. If you believe Marissa Mayer theres opportunity: The average post on Tumblr
gets reblogged about 14 times. The average sponsored post on Tumblr gets reblogged 10,000
times.
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Source: https://www.titan-seo.com/newsarticles/trifecta.html
There is denitely an opportunity to pay for play in content marketing. Whether this offers a real
leverage for SMBs remains to be seen as history shows us that whenever it becomes a money
game, companies with deep pockets win. If you have some budget to allocate for paid distribution,
its probably a good idea to get some experience and give it a try. One thing though: make sure to
measure returns by tracking your campaigns as we describe in the Measuring ROI section of this
guide.
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Convert through
content
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Turning readers into contacts

Just because youve started a business blog, doesnt mean youre a content marketer. Being able
to convert through your blog is the ultimate golden ticket to content marketing.
Subscription forms
If people are reading a post on your blog, its likely that theyll be interested in your future posts.
Make it as easy for your audience as possible to read everything you post on your blog by creating
a form to collect contact information and send your new posts out by email.
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There are many ways to add subscription forms to your blog. If youre using WordPress, theres a
simple widget for that. If you want to take it a step further, try out tools like MailChimp. You can
create a form in the MailChimp backend and paste the code for it onto your blogs sidebar. Then,
all the email addresses collected will be automatically added to a mailing list and all you have to
do is create a newsletter and send it out!
Staying fresh
You might be a marketer, or an executive, or a community manager, or even a social media intern.
If youre anything other than a full-time blogger, you probably have lots of other things going on
every day that take away from your precious writing time. Every week that goes by without a post,
though, is equal to potential lost readers.
Curate content thats been created by others. In this age of information overload, there is plenty of
content out there thats already been written and is relevant to your messaging. Read a few pieces
at the beginning of your day and share them with your added insight to provide value to your
readers while saving more time for your other work and original posts.
Calls to Action
Theres a reason its called content marketing instead of blogging. When youre creating a blog for
your small business, its important to remember to connect it back to actual sales in order to see
results. If your blog is a separate website with no connection to your website where readers can
make an actual purpose, youre missing out on a huge opportunity.
What action do you want your readers to take that will turn them into customers? Is it to sign up
for a demo? Or to purchase a product online? Whatever it may be, you can easily create a widget
on the sidebar of your blog using HTML and linking to the website you want your readers to visit.
Tools like HelloBar will help in the process of creating CTAs.
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Guide readers through your site

Whether your website visitors are coming from social media, search, or other referrals, the more
time they spend on your website, the better. According to Chartbeat CEO Tony Haile, 55% of
readers spend less than 15 seconds on a webpage. That barely gives them enough time to read
your blog posts, nevermind sign up for your newsletter or visit your business landing page. The
odds of readers visiting other pages on your website if they even stay on for longer than 15
seconds, that is are slim to none. With some encouragement, you might be able to grab a few
more moments of your visitors precious time.
Make it easier to visit another blogpost on your site than to leave your blog altogether. There are
numerous plugins that you can install to display related content at the end of every post, or even
create a popup window when your reader scrolls to a certain point in the page.
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Leverage the behaviors of your audience

Do you know which pages are visited most by your audience? Do you know where they normally
give up and close the window? You should. Knowing where your readers go on your website is an
extremely helpful way to provide more value to them and achieve your own goals at the same
time. With Google Analytics, you can track the rst and last pages of each readers website visit as
well as the average number of pages visited and which pages lose the most readers.
When youve learned the behaviors of your readers, you can optimize your website to make the
most out of said behaviors. There are also tools like bounceexchange and optinmonster that
monitor where your readers go both within your site and on the pages that they visit and serve a
popup before they leave in order to collect an email address, lead to another page, or encourage a
purchase.
Encourage social sharing

This might sound like a no-brainer, but youd be surprised. If youre not explicitly telling your
readers to share your posts, theyre probably not going to.
Sidebars like ShareThis and AddThis are extremely easy to install on your blog and make sharing
exponentially more convenient for your readers by providing simple buttons to click that lead to
precomposed social media posts. If you want to take it a step further, pick out a few tweetable
tidbits from within your blog posts and include a Click To Tweet link.
Make these six changes to your business blog today and you will, without question, see an
increase in the ROI of your content marketing efforts.
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Content for lead generation & landing pages

Youve created convincing landing pages as weve seen before so now you have 2 questions:
1. How can I bring more people to see them?
2. How can I get more people who see them to convert.
Content marketing is a great way to address #1 and as weve said before, you should think of
content as the fuel to your inbound strategy. The landing pages wont get you any leads if nobody
sees them but if youve implemented the above, you must now have built a solid content engine
that not only generates trafc but also brings some of that trafc to your landing pages through
the various conversion hooks described in the previous section.
Beyond your rst results, you can probably optimize the trafc your bring from your content by
doing a couple of things:
-
First, you can test (or even better A/B test) the conversion hooks you place on your blog or
on your various content properties. A great tool to do this is HelloBar which not only will
help you create this conversion hooks easily but also has a built it A/B test engine that is
very easy to use and understand.
Second, you should think of how to better align your content and your landing pages. If you
started with one unique landing pages, chances are this one-size-ts-all approach wont
work for all the buyer personas / buyer stage matrix weve described in the Strategize
section. Even though starting with one landing page is ok, to optimize your trafc and
therefore your leads, think about creating a number using this persona / buyer matrix and
pair content with the corresponding landing page accordingly. This infographic will give
you some ideas of the various types of landing pages you can consider. Another idea to
generate landing pages is to turn some of your evergreen content into a landing page. This
Slideshare that we wrote on the benets of content curation for SEO is now also a landing
page that was created in a very short time using Unbounce as we repurposed existing
content and didnt have to create it from scratch.
Over time, youll generate not just more trafc to your content but more trafc from your content
to your landing pages.
In parallel to that comes the work to optimize your landing pages conversions: how many of the
landing page visitors end up as leads. Again, A/B testing is a must here as there are many results
that will prove counter-intuitive: if youre not convinced, make the test on these 12 case studies
explained on their blog by Unbounce.
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And if youre looking for ideas on what to test for, heres a great example that generated $1 million
for Moz as well as detailed explanations on how they did it.
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Content for lead nurturing and social selling

Leads are not clients yet. Depending on your industry and product, the sales cycle might be long
or short but its rarely instantaneous, hence the need to nurture leads by helping them mature their
purchase decision faster.
Content can and should help in that process too.
Without content, your sales team are likely to be repeating themselves constantly: when do you
have time for a quick chat?, did you make a decision yet?, how can I help you make a
decision?, could we have a quick chat?, etc
Its frustrating for them or for your prospects. Not only that but it puts your sales team in an
uncomfortable bargaining position: theyre now begging constantly for a meeting, a call, a
decision...
Enter content.
By providing your sales team with great resources or timely fresh content, you will enable to turn
this begging process into something completely different: a discussion. Now they can provide
value to their prospects: As you asked the question last time during our call, I thought youd be
interested in that article that the Forbes just published precisely on that topic or Since youre
also doing business with the insurance industry, you might be interested in this case study we just
published on our blog.
If your sales team is practicing social selling, these conversations will naturally extend to Twitter,
LinkedIn, etc @prospectname Here is a great study that answers your question provides addedvalue and is a great way to initiate a conversation that will lead to a potential demo or sales.
Finally, if youre using Marketing Automation services to run lead nurturing campaigns, a diverse
portfolio of created and curated content is an important success factor to optimize engagement.
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Measure ROI
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How do we measure ROI and know our content isnt just fueling some vanity metric but is actually
helping our business?
If content marketing is the new advertising, then we should try to assess this question with the
same criteria. Which means rst, we should acknowledge that while advertising is a practice that
has been undisputed for decades, measuring its ROI can greatly vary. After all, a lot of marketers
would still agree with John Wanamaker who said more than a century ago: Half the money I
spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I dont know which half.
When it comes to digital advertising though, this question is easier to solve because we have
metrics: we know how many views a YouTube Ad received, we have impressions of ad banners,
clicks on Adwords ads, CTRs, etc. As a result, while we cant always have a precise answer to the
ROI questions, here are ways to better measure it and more importantly to improve it.
Measure the output: content volume and quality

To produce return you rst need to have output. Weve mentioned before how critical it is to
publish not only good content but also to publish it frequently.
You should use an editorial calendar to set goals and keep track of your content volume:
number of created or curated blog posts published every week
number of resulting social media posts
number of newsletters sent
How about quality?
Quality is of course subjective but a good proxy we like to use is the number of shares youre
getting per post from your audience across all social networks. Not that quality is enough to
generate share but as weve seen before, you should heavily promote your content anyway. As you
push it to them, if it resonates with your community, inuencers and subscribers, their propensity
to share it will be higher. Keep track of that metric and analyze whether its progressing in line with
your overall trafc growth (which means quality is constant) or faster (which means quality is
increasing).
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Use content analytics to understand the performance of your content

The rst thing you need to understand is the performance of each individual piece of content.
Though Google Analytics will help you get some of that data, youll be better off using some
specic content analytics such as the ones Scoop.it brings as theyll give you a complete, 360
view on your content including social engagement and not just trafc:
While this is not ROI yet, views and engagement are good proxy for your contents popularity and
quality. Understanding quickly what piece of content worked better and which ones did not well directly from within your content platform - will help you and your team make progress faster.
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Use Google Analytics to measure progress on brand awareness

Measuring brand awareness is of course difcult and integrating it in a precise ROI calculation is
harder still. But there are at least a couple of metrics you should be able to get easily:
how much direct trafc do you get?
how much search trafc to your Web site does your brand name generate?
Both of these metrics can be easily obtained from Google Analytics. Whether this trafc is
coming from people visiting your web site directly or through a bit of help from Google, one thing
is for sure: they are all people whove remembered your brand to some extent. If your content
marketing is helping your brand awareness, you should see these metrics go up.
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Measuring thought leadership through pingbacks and social mentions

In addition to the above, you can keep track of how many times your content is linked back to
through pingbacks. Thats easy if you use Wordpress for your blog for instance. Pingbacks reect
your authority: your content is now becoming the reference to other people.
On social networks, the equivalent of pingbacks are mentions: you can use tools like Mention to
track them and measure if people are referring to you in their conversations on Twitter, Facebook,
LinkedIn, etc...
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Track conversions through Google Analytics

There are many ways to track conversions but heres a basic way to do so using Google Analytics:
Add Google Analytics event tracking for your conversions: heres a detailed guide on how
to do it.
Use Googles URL builder to track referral trafc from your content to your conversion
pages using UTM tracking.
Combining both of these will result in Google Analytics showing you not only how many
conversions you had per type of conversion but which content source delivered it. As you
understand which content channel delivers the highest conversions, youll be able to invest more
in it.
If lead generation is a key objective of your content strategy, I would however recommend that you
dene your various opportunities to generate leads as goals in Google Analytics. Goals can be
congured by going to Admin and then selecting a property and a view:
A goal can be for instance:

- collecting the email address of a visitor,
- generating a click on a live chat button,
- generating requests to be called back for a demo,
- etc
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If youve congured your goals and are using UTM tracking through Google URL builder, you will be
able to analyze your lead generation by trafc source:
or even by piece of content:
Goals are very powerful in Google Analytics which has many advanced features to better
understand your funnel and optimize your conversions.
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Create a benchmark with a Google Adwords campaign

A way of measuring the impact of content marketing is to consider it as media you didnt have to
buy. How much would you have had to spend to generate 1,000 clicks to your site if you had to pay
for it? How much to generate 100 conversions?
If you dont know, you can answer this question by running an Adword campaign: while this isnt
entirely free, you could run a $10/day budget for 2 weeks and get an initial idea of how much you
should bid on keywords that relate to your business. For $150, youll have an answer: say you
received 300 visits and 15 leads from that campaign:
your cost of getting 1,000 clicks is $500 (1,000 / 300 x $150);
your CPC (Cost per Click) is $.50 ($150 / 300);
your CPL (Cost per Lead) is $150 / 15 = $10.
Now you can compare that with the impact of that $5,000 infographic you did last year: did it bring
500 leads or more? If it did, then you could say youd been better off than buying AdWords which
is a good benchmark to beat considering AdWords visitors are explicitly searching for something.
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Track your SEO progress through tools like Moz or SEMRush

Ranking high on specic keywords (or keyword combinations) is not only a great way of
generating trafc to your content and your site but its likely to generate brand awareness and
conversions. Measuring progress on this can be done using a manual list of keywords and
monitoring your progress against it on a weekly basis but its likely that the process will become
cumbersome rapidly so you can use Moz to automate the process and also get interesting
insights and analytics.
For a full list of SEO tools including analytics, this article by Writtent is a great help.
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Conclusion
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SMB marketers are at a turning point. The Internet has redened their job and they need to
adapt to keep meeting their business objectives. Their new playing eld is more open, connected,
real-time and therefore more competitive than ever.
On the other hand, this open and connected world is an opportunity! The audience has never been
so fragmented, and therefore accessible to niche and focused SMBs, and marketing can now be
lean: affordable to clever players who adopt the rules, technologies and tactics.
To win the attention war and grow, SMBs need to learn how to accompany their future customers
in a long and convoluted journey throughout the web. From brand awareness, thought leadership,
and SEO to community engagement, lead generation, and lead nurturing (possibly through
marketing automation), every element of the SMB arsenal is fueled by one core resource: content.
SMB marketers therefore need to develop a content strategy; to become a media that feeds their
targeted audience, wherever it is, on a regular basis with relevant content.
Such content strategy should keep both sides of ROI in check:
The Return: what are the key performance indicators and how to measure them? Lead
generation should be the ultimate KPI, although other intermediate metrics matter too.
The Investment: deploying a content strategy costs money and time (often the SMBs
scarcest resource). Adopting lean content strategy is both possible and necessary
The good news, and the number one takeaway of this guide, is that deploying a lean content
marketing strategy that works for SMBs is possible: It requires focus, organization and
technology.
Focus: focus on your unique message, your target audience, your overarching KPI.
Organization: dene an editorial line and calendar that leverage existing content; amplify it
on all channels; leverage your community and your internal resources.
Technology: save time and increase your impact by using SMB-dedicated solutions to help
you source, organize, schedule, distribute and monitor your content.
The web is an open playing eld; in 2015, clever SMBs can win the game. Go Lean Content now!
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The Lean Content Marketing Handbook

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What are the main topics covered in the handbook?

What are the main topics covered in the handbook?

How can SMBs develop an effective content strategy?

How can SMBs develop an effective content strategy?

The Lean Content Marketing Handbook for SMBs