Turning those same documents into structured, AI-discoverable content lets you answer real questions across the entire journey: pre-sales research, onboarding, troubleshooting, and expansion. In this guide, you’ll learn how to treat internal documentation as a scalable content engine, with a practical framework for repurposing, optimizing for search and AI, and measuring business impact without exposing sensitive data.

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Why Internal Docs Are a Hidden Growth Channel

Most organizations already maintain an enormous body of internal documentation: implementation playbooks, solution design docs, onboarding checklists, support macros, sales decks, and meeting notes. These assets are created to solve real problems, capture tribal knowledge, and speed up internal workflows.

That makes them unusually rich in the exact elements strong content needs: specific problems, step-by-step solutions, edge cases, objections, and clear outcomes. In contrast, net-new marketing content often starts from a vague topic idea and has to reverse-engineer that level of detail.

When you treat internal documentation as a content source, you can dramatically compress the time it takes to create accurate, high-intent resources. Instead of guessing what your audience cares about, you mine the questions they already ask and the answers your teams already give.

From lost knowledge to discoverable answers

To unlock that value, start by mapping internal doc types to external-facing formats that users and search engines can easily consume. Each format should be tailored to a specific intent and stage of the journey, not copy-pasted from the source file.

For example, you might repurpose internal assets like this:

• Sales battlecards and competitive decks → comparison pages, “vs.” articles, and decision guides.
• Onboarding runbooks → step-by-step product setup tutorials and “first 30 days” guides.
• Support macros and ticket histories → knowledge base FAQs and troubleshooting articles.
• Product specs and release notes → feature deep dives, changelogs, and upgrade playbooks.
• Implementation designs and architecture diagrams → technical guides and best-practice reference pages.

This mapping is where “high-leverage reuse” happens: the heavy thinking has already been done in the internal document. Your job is to reshape it into clear, search- and AI-friendly answers tailored to external audiences.

The Doc-to-Demand Framework for Internal Docs SEO

To turn internal documentation into an ongoing acquisition and enablement channel, you need more than ad-hoc repurposing. The Doc-to-Demand Framework is a repeatable, six-step workflow that takes you from raw docs to SEO- and AI-ready content tied directly to revenue and support outcomes.

Step 1: Inventory and tag your docs

Start by building a consolidated inventory of your internal documentation across tools such as wikis, drive folders, ticketing systems, call recordings, and slide libraries. For each item, capture metadata such as topic, product area, audience (admin, end-user, buyer), lifecycle stage (pre-sale, onboarding, adoption, troubleshooting), and sensitivity level.

You can adapt the way you build an AI-optimized content audit framework to structure this inventory, using a simple spreadsheet or database that supports filtering and prioritization. The goal is to see at a glance where you already have deep internal coverage and where you are light on knowledge.

Step 2: Prioritize by demand and impact

Once you know what exists, rank documents by the combination of user demand and business impact. Demand signals include repeated support questions, high-volume internal search queries, and keyword research that reveals strong search interest. Impact signals include ticket volume, deal influence, onboarding friction, and expansion potential linked to the topic.

Step 3: Transform docs into public assets

Now reshape your highest-priority docs into external content that answers a clearly defined question for a specific persona. That typically means tightening the scope, replacing internal shorthand with plain language, and adding missing context such as prerequisites, definitions, and expected outcomes.

Decide on the right format based on intent: a knowledge base article for “how do I” questions, a guide or playbook for complex workflows, a comparison page for evaluators, or a troubleshooting tree for error messages. AI writing tools can accelerate drafting from the source document, but human reviewers must ensure accuracy, tone, and context are appropriate for external audiences.

Step 4: Apply documentation-specific SEO

Documentation behaves differently from traditional blog content, so your on-page optimization needs to align with how users search when trying to solve a problem. Focus each page on one primary task or question, expressed in natural language that mirrors how users actually phrase their queries.

An internal docs SEO checklist for these pages might include:

• Descriptive, task-focused titles and H1s that mirror real questions or jobs to be done.
• Clean, predictable URL patterns tied to product areas and tasks rather than internal team names.
• Short, scannable sections with H2/H3 subheadings that align with logical steps or scenarios.
• “Related articles” modules that connect adjacent tasks and prevent dead ends.
• FAQ or HowTo schema where appropriate to help search engines interpret procedural content.

For long-lived guides and core help topics, the same principles used when structuring evergreen content for long-term AI discoverability apply, especially around keeping a stable URL and incremental updates. Before publishing, confirm that the piece reflects current best practices in light of evolving Google AI content guidelines for SEO pros, so it is easy for both search engines and generative systems to trust and surface.

Step 5: Optimize for AI and LLM discoverability

Generative engines and AI assistants work best with well-structured, unambiguous content. Make each section of your documentation as self-contained as possible, with clear headings, brief summaries, and explicit references instead of pronouns such as “this” or “that feature” when the subject could be unclear.

Examples, screenshots, and edge-case notes are especially valuable here because they give models concrete patterns to learn from. Consistent terminology, domain-specific glossaries, and explicit descriptions of preconditions and outcomes all increase the likelihood that your documentation will be cited when AI tools assemble answers for users.

Step 6: Publish, interlink, and measure impact

Publishing is not the final step; it is the beginning of your feedback loop. Ensure your new or updated documentation is visible on relevant product screens, in search results within your help center, and in contextual links in related blog posts or product pages.

Thoughtful cross-linking within your docs and between your docs and marketing content supports both human navigation and optimizing internal linking for AI crawlers and retrieval models. From there, track performance against the goals that justified repurposing in the first place, such as reduced support tickets for a topic or increased activation of a key feature.

Architecting Documentation for Humans, Search, and AI

Once the core workflow is in place, the structure of your documentation itself becomes a strategic asset. A clear content model helps users find answers quickly, enables internal docs SEO at scale, and gives AI systems a predictable framework for parsing and recombining your knowledge.

Internal docs SEO structure that scales

A scalable documentation structure typically includes multiple layers: high-level “getting started” hubs, product-area overviews, task-focused how-tos, and troubleshooting references. Each level should have a specific purpose and avoid duplicating content from other layers, with clear paths that guide users from broad orientation to precise execution.

Consistent naming conventions, breadcrumbs, and predictable navigation labels reduce cognitive load for readers and make it easier for search engines and AI models to infer relationships between topics. Over time, this structure becomes a kind of semantic map of your product, where every new article slots cleanly into a known pattern instead of creating more chaos.

Linking your docs, blog, and product content

Documentation does not live in isolation; it needs to be woven into your broader content ecosystem. Strategic links from blog posts to specific help articles provide implementation depth for high-intent readers, while links from docs back to thought-leadership pieces help users understand the “why” behind complex workflows.

On the search side, some of your best opportunities for AI citations and visibility come from optimizing old top pages for featured AI answers and connecting them to precise documentation. By routing evaluators from general guides into concrete, task-based docs, you shorten the path from curiosity to successful usage without creating redundant content that competes in the same SERPs.

Governance, safety, and ownership

Because internal documents frequently contain sensitive details, governance is non-negotiable when turning them into public-facing assets. Establish clear rules about which doc categories can be repurposed, what must be redacted or generalized, and how to distinguish internal-only notes from externally safe content.

Assign ownership for each major documentation area to a specific role or team, with defined review cadences and status labels such as “draft,” “live,” and “deprecated.” This keeps your public content in sync with reality, reduces the risk of exposing confidential information, and ensures that both search engines and AI tools learn from accurate, up-to-date material.

Turning Docs Into a Repeatable Content Engine

The highest payoff from internal docs SEO comes when repurposing is baked into your content operations, not treated as a one-off clean-up project. That means assigning responsibilities, creating recurring workflows, and tying documentation work directly to business metrics your leadership already cares about.

Content operations workflows that keep this running

A practical approach is to run a recurring “doc mining” cycle, quarterly or even monthly. Each cycle pulls in representatives from product, support, and marketing to surface new internal docs, review performance data on existing content, and choose the next batch of topics to transform.

Within that cycle, clarify who does what: one person owns the inventory and prioritization, another specializes in transforming raw docs into user-friendly formats, and a subject-matter expert handles accuracy reviews. Lightweight tools, such as a shared backlog, status tags, and basic automation to pull in fresh ticket themes. go a long way toward making the process sustainable.

Measuring ROI from repurposed internal docs

To prove the value of this work, align your measurement with the part of the journey each repurposed asset serves. For pre-sales, this might include organic traffic from high-intent queries, demo requests originating from documentation pages, and influenced revenue from prospects who consumed docs before closing.

For onboarding and support, focus on deflection and efficiency: reducing repetitive “how do I” tickets, shortening time-to-value for new customers, and lowering handle time when agents can link to clear articles instead of rewriting answers. Expansion-oriented documentation, in turn, can be tied to increased adoption of underused features and improved renewal or upsell rates among customers who engage with those resources.

When to bring in specialist support

At a certain scale, orchestrating internal docs SEO, AI discoverability, and cross-functional workflows can exceed the capacity of a small internal team. Signals that you may need specialist help include a large backlog of undocumented features, fragmented knowledge bases across multiple tools, and ambitious goals around AI assistants or in-product coaching.

If you want a partner with playbooks for SEVO, documentation architecture, and AI-ready content, Single Grain can help you design and execute the system end-to-end. You can get a FREE consultation to assess your current documentation, identify quick-win repurposing opportunities, and map a roadmap that connects your internal knowledge to measurable revenue and support outcomes.

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Build an AI-Ready Internal Docs SEO Engine

Internal docs SEO turns the work your teams already do (writing playbooks, answering tickets, documenting edge cases) into a discoverable asset for search engines, AI tools, and users at every stage of their journey. With a structured inventory, a clear Doc-to-Demand workflow, and a documentation architecture that serves both humans and machines, your internal knowledge base becomes a compounding advantage rather than an untapped archive.

As you align governance, operations, and measurement around this approach, your documentation stops being a cost center and becomes a durable growth channel. If you are ready to accelerate that transformation and want expert support across SEO, AI discoverability, and content operations, Single Grain can help you build an AI-ready internal docs SEO engine for your organization. Get a FREE consultation and turn your documentation into a source of ongoing demand, retention, and customer success.

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Instead of rewarding one-off campaigns or occasional page updates, AI systems look for an ongoing pattern of locally relevant publishing tied to each store, clinic, office, or service area. Understanding how your local publishing cadence interacts with these algorithms and how to measure and optimize it lets you move from sporadic visibility to consistently appearing in AI-generated shortlists, map packs, and “best of” local roundups.

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Understanding Local Content Velocity and Local Publishing Cadence

At its simplest, local content velocity is the rate at which you create and update content tied to a specific geography or location over a defined time period. That includes new pieces, such as city-specific blog posts or Google Business Profile (GBP) updates, as well as edits to existing assets, such as location pages, menus, or service descriptions.

Local publishing cadence adds a second dimension: the rhythm and consistency of those updates. A brand that publishes ten local posts in a single week and then goes silent for three months has very different cadence signals from one that ships two to three high-quality pieces per week for an entire quarter, even if the total volume is similar.

Components of an effective local publishing cadence

Local content velocity spans multiple assets and channels, each contributing signals that AI recommendation engines can interpret. For most multi-location or regional brands, an effective cadence typically covers:

• Core location pages (per city, region, or store) with locally tuned copy, offerings, and FAQs
• Ongoing local landing pages for campaigns, events, or seasonal promotions
• Regular GBP posts with local offers, updates, or highlights
• City- or neighborhood-specific blog or news articles
• Local social posts and stories tied to each market

The foundation for all of this is well-built location pages, which should already be structured so AI can understand where you operate, what you offer, and who you serve. A detailed guide to optimizing location pages for AI local recommendations can help ensure your base layer is ready before you dial up publishing velocity on top of it.

How Local Content Velocity Influences AI Local Recommendations

AI-driven local recommendations, whether in map packs, generative search overviews, or assistant-style answers, are built on models that constantly weigh recency, relevance, and authority. Your local content velocity directly shapes all three of these dimensions for each location.

Signals AI engines read from your local publishing trail

Every time you publish or update local content, you leave a new signal for AI systems to interpret. Over time, this trail helps models answer questions such as whether your business is still active, how engaged it is with the local community, and how reliably it can serve specific needs in that area.

Those signals typically come from multiple sources: structured pages on your site, GBP updates, local reviews, citations, and unstructured mentions in local blogs or news. Businesses maintaining a steady stream of high-authority local mentions and citations, especially ongoing “best-of” lists and neighborhood coverage, consistently gain more visibility in AI-generated shortlists over time.

Reviews amplify this effect. When AI engines see a pattern of fresh reviews with location-specific language, it reinforces both recency and topical relevance. A deeper analysis of how reviews influence AI local business recommendations demonstrates how review velocity and content quality feed directly into these models.

Why AI ranking models reward consistent local content velocity

AI recommendation engines are fundamentally probabilistic; they constantly estimate which entities are most likely to satisfy a given local query at any given time. Consistent local content velocity gives them repeated, up-to-date evidence that your locations are active, relevant, and trustworthy.

When your location pages, posts, and local mentions are updated in a steady rhythm, models learn a reliable pattern. That pattern influences everything from whether you appear in a “top 3 plumbers near me” generative answer to how prominently you’re listed for “best tacos in [city].” Pages not updated for more than three months are over three times more likely to lose visibility in AI search than recently refreshed ones, a stark illustration of how low update velocity can quietly erode your presence.

Because the core mechanics already do this work, there’s no need to restate it later; instead, the rest of your strategy should focus on measuring, prioritizing, and operationalizing cadence to align with how these models already behave.

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Measuring Local Content Velocity Across Locations and Channels

To manage local content velocity, you need to quantify it at the location level, not just the brand level. That means tracking not just “How much did we publish?” but “How much did we publish for this specific city this month?” and “How recently did we touch key assets for this market?”

Core metrics to track for local content velocity

A practical measurement framework usually includes a small set of location-level metrics that roll up into a dashboard. Useful metrics include:

• Pieces per location per month: Count of new or significantly updated local assets per location (pages, posts, GBP updates, local blogs).
• Channel mix ratio: Distribution of output across web pages, GBP, social, and email for that location.
• Freshness window: Days since last meaningful update to the primary location page and GBP profile.
• Engagement per piece: Clicks, calls, direction requests, or bookings generated per local asset.
• AI visibility indicators: Impressions in map packs, mentions in AI Overviews, and contributions to non-branded local queries.

Brands that operate hundreds of locations often layer these into a location “health” score to see which markets are under-published relative to their size or potential, so they can adjust cadence where it matters most.

Sample local content velocity benchmarks by industry

While there is no universal “right” cadence, it is helpful to align expectations by vertical and channel. The following example benchmarks show how aggressive different industries might be for each location once foundational SEO and GBP hygiene are in place:

These ranges are starting points for planning and should be adjusted based on market competitiveness, location revenue, and how much incremental AI visibility you stand to gain. A broader view of local SEO for multi-location brands in AI search can help you contextually align these cadence choices with your overall strategy.

Designing Local Publishing Cadence by Channel and Location Lifecycle

Once you know where each location stands, the next step is to design a realistic but ambitious local publishing cadence that fits both your team’s capacity and the expectations of AI engines in your category. This requires looking at cadence through two lenses at once: by channel and by the lifecycle stage of each market.

Channel-by-channel cadence playbook

Each channel contributes different types of signals, so their cadences should not be identical. A practical channel playbook might look like this:

• Location pages: Major updates when offerings, hours, or policies change, plus structured refreshes to content and FAQs two to four times per year.
• GBP posts: Frequent, short updates focused on offers, events, or timely information; often one to three posts per week in competitive markets.
• Local blog/news: Deeper stories tied to local events, community involvement, or city-specific advice; typically one to four per month.
• Local social: High-velocity, lightweight content that keeps each location’s feed obviously active, often several posts per week.
• Email to local list: Campaigns that highlight location-specific offers, reminders, or seasonal updates, with a cadence that avoids fatigue but maintains awareness.

Maintaining this multi-channel cadence across dozens or hundreds of markets is hard to do manually. AI-powered content operations can automate workflows and provide real-time analytics, enabling teams to sustain higher publishing velocity without sacrificing quality. Structured content models and reusable components can accelerate publishing by up to 90%, while standardizing metadata that AI engines rely on to understand local relevance.

Adapting cadence across location lifecycle stages

Not every market needs the same intensity of local content velocity at all times. A new store launch in a competitive metro deserves a heavier wave of content than a mature location with stable visibility and demand.

A useful way to allocate effort is to classify locations into lifecycle tiers (launch, growth, and maturity) and define different cadence expectations for each tier. In launch markets, you might double the recommended GBP and social output while prioritizing a series of local blog pieces that seed entity understanding faster. In mature markets, more effort can shift toward periodic refreshes, reputation management, and targeted experiments based on performance data.

This lifecycle lens prevents over-publishing in low-impact markets while ensuring that high-potential locations get the sustained cadence required to influence AI recommendations early. Because ongoing refresh is such a key piece of this puzzle, many teams lean on a documented framework for running an AI content refresh for generative search to structure when and how they revisit local pages and posts without overwhelming internal resources.

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Building an AI-Driven Local Content Velocity System

AI is not just reshaping how recommendations are generated; it can also guide what you publish, where, and when. Instead of guessing which locations need more content this month, you can use AI to analyze demand, performance gaps, and competitive signals and then feed those insights directly into your local publishing calendar.

Using AI to set the right local content velocity for each market

Because local markets differ in search demand, competition, and user behavior, a one-size-fits-all cadence leaves growth on the table. AI models can segment locations based on opportunity by combining factors such as query volume, current rankings, map-pack presence, and revenue potential.

Once locations are scored, you can assign differentiated velocity targets; for example, doubling GBP posts and local blog pieces for high-opportunity, underserved markets while keeping others at maintenance cadence. A playbook for predictive SEO with AI to anticipate trends and content gaps is especially valuable here, since it helps you forecast where new local topics are emerging before competitors saturate them.

Turning AI insights into a location-level calendar

To operationalize this, many teams build a “local velocity” layer into their content planning process. AI systems analyze performance and search data weekly or monthly, then output:

• Location-level priorities for upcoming periods
• Recommended topics and keywords tied to each geography
• Channel-specific suggestions (e.g., GBP vs. blog vs. social)
• Suggested publication windows to align with seasonality or local events

Those recommendations then feed into a shared calendar with clear owners and SLAs, so content actually ships at the velocity your models prescribe. For brands seeking outside expertise to build this end-to-end system, Single Grain’s SEVO and AEO programs help connect AI-driven insights with location-level execution, aligning local content velocity directly with revenue goals rather than vanity metrics.

If you are exploring this route, you can request a free consultation with Single Grain to see how an AI-powered local content velocity system would look for your specific footprint and tech stack.

30/60/90-Day Plan to Increase Local Content Velocity Safely

Knowing that local content velocity shapes AI recommendations is one thing; reshaping your operations to support it is another. A 30/60/90-day plan lets you move quickly without burning out teams or flooding your ecosystem with low-quality posts.

First 30 days: Audit and baselines

In the first month, focus entirely on understanding where you stand today. Key steps include:

• Inventorying all existing location pages, GBP profiles, and major local content assets per market.
• Measuring current pieces per location per month by channel for the last 90 days.
• Capturing baseline AI visibility metrics such as map-pack impressions and non-branded local traffic.
• Scoring locations on a simple 1–5 scale for both opportunity (market size, revenue potential) and current presence (rankings, content depth).

By the end of this phase, you should have a shortlist of high-opportunity, underserved locations where increasing publishing cadence is most likely to influence AI recommendations and business outcomes.

Next 30 days (days 31–60): Pilot and scale-up

The second month is about testing increased local content velocity in a controlled way. Select a subset of high-opportunity locations and:

• Set explicit weekly publishing targets by channel.
• Create templates and guardrails to enable local teams or partners to contribute content efficiently.
• Implement faster approval workflows for pilot locations.
• Monitor AI and organic metrics weekly to spot early signals of impact.

This pilot helps you verify that your planned cadence is operationally realistic and that systems are in place to maintain quality across multiple contributors and markets.

Final 30 days (days 61–90): Optimization and automation

In the third month, you shift from experimentation to institutionalizing what works. That typically includes:

• Rolling the refined cadence to a broader tier of locations based on your opportunity scoring model.
• Locking in standardized workflows, SLAs, and quality checks for all local content types.
• Automating recurring tasks such as reporting, content reminders, and some types of templated posts.
• Documenting playbooks that specify local content velocity targets by location tier and channel.

Throughout this phase, tools and frameworks for adapting content to AI-shaped user intent ensure that increased volume remains tightly aligned with the questions people actually ask and the way AI engines frame answers.

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Quality, Risk, and Governance in Local Publishing Cadence

Increasing local content velocity without strong governance is risky. Over-publishing thin or duplicated content can confuse AI models, dilute engagement metrics, and even trigger spam signals, especially when hundreds of locations share nearly identical pages or posts.

Avoiding thin, duplicate, and spammy local content

The fastest way to undermine your efforts is to roll out templated local pages or posts that differ only by city name. AI engines are adept at detecting near-duplicate content and may treat it as low-value or manipulative, especially if engagement is poor.

To keep quality high as velocity rises, each location’s content should feature unique local angles, such as store-specific offers, staff highlights, community partnerships, neighborhood landmarks, or local pain points. Establishing minimum quality standards for word count, originality, media use, and local references helps prevent shallow output from creeping in when deadlines are tight.

Governance and roles for sustainable velocity

Multi-location brands rarely succeed with local content velocity when everything is centralized or decentralized; the sweet spot is a hybrid model. Central teams set strategy, architecture, templates, and QA standards, while local managers, franchisees, or regional partners supply on-the-ground context and lightweight assets.

Clear role definitions (who owns topic selection, drafting, approvals, publishing, and measurement) are essential. Many organizations formalize service-level agreements that specify turnaround times for each step, ensuring that increased cadence is sustainable rather than dependent on heroic efforts. As mentioned earlier, the goal is to build a durable publishing pattern that AI engines can reliably learn from and reward over time.

From Local Content Velocity to Measurable AI-Driven Local Growth

Local content velocity is not just a productivity metric; it is a strategic lever for shaping how AI engines perceive and recommend your business in every market you serve. When your local publishing cadence is well-measured, prioritized, and governed, it steadily feeds models with fresh, trustworthy evidence that your locations are the best answer to specific local needs.

Defining clear velocity metrics, designing channel- and lifecycle-specific cadences, and layering AI-driven insights on top will turn sporadic local visibility into a repeatable growth system. Instead of hoping your locations appear in generative answers or local shortlists, you build the publishing patterns that make inclusion the default outcome.

If you want a partner that can connect these dots across SEO, AI search, and multi-location operations, Single Grain specializes in SEVO and AEO programs that align local content velocity with revenue-impacting KPIs. To see what this could look like for your brand, get a FREE consultation with Single Grain and explore how an AI-optimized local publishing cadence can amplify your presence in AI-driven local recommendations.

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Employee-shared content generates 8x more engagement than content shared from a brand’s official page. That’s not just an impressive statistic—it’s a wake-up call for marketing professionals who haven’t yet tapped into their most valuable content creators: their team members. This approach, known as employee-generated content (EGC), is transforming how brands connect with their audiences in 2025 and beyond.

There’s a simple reason why employee-generated content is so successful: consumers like seeing a face to represent a brand. Employee-generated content is also more authentic and is better at building trust than a similar post from a spokesperson, brand ambassador, or influencer.

Here’s your employee-generated content guide and how to use this strategy to unlock more engagement and trust among your audience.

Key Takeaways

• Employee-generated content drives 8x more engagement than content shared from a brand’s official page, making it a powerful tool for expanding reach and building authentic connections with audiences.
• Authenticity builds trust with consumers as 76% of people trust content shared by individuals (employees) more than branded content from companies, providing a critical competitive advantage.
• Successful EGC programs require a supportive culture where employees feel comfortable sharing their experiences, along with clear guidelines that provide structure without stifling creativity.
• Employee-generated content delivers multiple benefits, including enhanced brand authenticity, expanded reach, diverse perspectives, improved employee engagement, and cost-effective content creation.
• Real-world success stories demonstrate EGC’s impact across industries, with companies like Papa John’s achieving 183 million views on a single employee video and Fleet Feet seeing a 305% increase in engagement through structured EGC initiatives.

What Is Employee-Generated Content?

Employee-generated content (EGC) refers to any brand-related content created and shared by employees. This can include social media posts, videos, blog articles, testimonials, behind-the-scenes glimpses, and thought leadership pieces that showcase both company culture and individual expertise. Your employees can post this content on the business marketing channels or their own social media.

Unlike traditional corporate content that often feels impersonal, EGC brings authentic voices and perspectives to the forefront. It transforms employees from mere representatives into genuine brand ambassadors who share their real experiences and insights.

The key distinction between EGC and other content types lies in their authenticity. For example, while user-generated content strategies focus on customer advocacy, employee-generated content leverages the unique position of team members who have insider knowledge and authentic connections to the brand.

The Power of Employee-Generated Content: By the Numbers

People trust people, more so than a polished corporate ad. The impact of employee-generated content is supported by this compelling data, which demonstrates its effectiveness:

• Engagements: Corporate content often generates less engagement than personal posts. Companies that share EGC report 27% higher online engagement rates. This dramatic difference stems from social media algorithms that favor person-to-person content and the natural trust people place in individuals over institutions.
• Adoption rate: Organizations are increasingly recognizing the value of authentic employee voices. Research from DSMN8 reveals that 50% of organizations encourage authentic employee-generated content, moving away from templated or pre-approved posts. This shift reflects a growing understanding that audiences crave genuine human connections.
• Internal engagement: The success of EGC initiatives depends on employee participation. Encouragingly, 73% of social media managers say that over half of their employees regularly engage with branded content, according to GaggleAMP. This high level of internal engagement indicates that employees are not just content creators but also active participants in promoting the brand.
• Social sharing: One of the most powerful benefits of EGC is its ability to extend a brand’s reach. The Impression Digital Team found that employee posts are reshared up to 24 times more frequently than brand posts. This allows brands to reach new audiences through their employees’ networks, often accessing communities that might be skeptical of traditional advertising.
• Trust and credibility: Perhaps most significantly, EGC builds trust in ways corporate content cannot. According to Speakap, 76% of people trust content shared by individuals (employees) more than branded content from companies. This human element provides a critical competitive advantage.

Benefits of Employee-Generated Content

Beyond the impressive statistics, employee-generated content delivers multiple strategic benefits for organizations. EGC resonates deeply with employees and consumers, and it can also strengthen company culture. Here’s why.

Enhanced Brand Authenticity

There’s a reason why EGC is more trustworthy: consumers don’t just prefer authenticity—it’s expected. When they see a face with your branding, your audience connects to your company on a personal level.

Employee-generated content offers an unfiltered, behind-the-scenes look at your organization that resonates more than polished corporate messaging. When employees share their genuine experiences, they humanize your brand and build connections that feel real and relatable.

Expanded Reach and Visibility

There are many reasons why EGC can expand your reach. Your employees collectively have networks that far exceed your brand’s direct audience. They can showcase your company’s branding through social media posts, merchandise, events, and more.

How can you use EGC to your advantage? Empower employees to share your content and tap into their expanded networks. When you encourage staff members to use your merchandise, you benefit from the endorsement that comes with it. This organic reach often extends to audiences who value relevant content and might be resistant to traditional advertising.

Diverse Perspectives and Fresh Ideas

While your marketing team might develop a consistent style, employees across departments bring diverse perspectives and creative approaches. From engineers explaining technical concepts to customer service representatives sharing success stories, this diversity of voices creates a multi-dimensional brand image. This keeps your content ideas fresh and appealing to new audience segments. As a result, brands will see a boost in brand awareness and overall growth.

Improved Employee Engagement and Retention

EGC can also improve recruitment and employee retention. When employees contribute to your brand’s narrative, they develop a stronger sense of ownership and pride in the organization. Recognition for their content contributions can boost morale and engagement while fostering a sense of community among staff members. According to research on employee advocacy, team members who actively participate in content creation report higher job satisfaction and more substantial alignment with company values.

Cost-Effective Content Creation

Developing high-quality content at scale is a persistent challenge for marketing teams. Employee-generated content provides an affordable solution. Instead of relying on content creators, brands can expand their marketing capabilities across the organization. This approach not only reduces production costs but often results in more engaging content than what could be produced through traditional means.

Real-World Success Stories

Social Media Engagement through Employee-Generated Content

Case Study: Papa John’s

Challenge: Papa John’s faced a highly competitive quick-service pizza market and needed to stand out by creating authentic connections with its audience.

Solution: The company empowered pizza chefs to produce and share behind-the-scenes TikTok content showcasing unique skills like dough-spinning while using trending hashtags and sounds.

Results: This employee-generated content strategy achieved massive engagement with creators recording over 183 million views on a single video and collectively generating hundreds of millions of views and over 150 million likes on TikTok.

Key Takeaway: Authentic employee content can drive unprecedented social media engagement even in highly competitive markets.

Retail Employee Advocacy Driving Consistent Brand Messaging

Case Study: Fleet Feet

Challenge: Fleet Feet needed to boost organic reach and maintain consistent brand messaging across multiple store locations.

Solution: The company deployed a comprehensive employee-generated (store-generated) content strategy with structured processes, opt-in participation, and clear brand guidelines.

Results: Fleet Feet achieved a 38% year-over-year increase in employee-generated content production, which accounted for 25% of total Instagram posts, along with a 192% increase in organic impressions and a 305% increase in engagements.

Key Takeaway: Structured employee-generated content initiatives can drastically amplify organic reach and engagement in retail.

Building an Effective Employee-Generated Content Strategy

Creating a successful employee-generated content program requires thoughtful planning and a positive company culture. Here’s how to develop a strategy that drives results.

Create a Supportive Culture

The foundation of effective EGC is a workplace culture where employees feel comfortable sharing their experiences and perspectives. Leadership must demonstrate commitment by:

• Participating in content creation themselves
• Recognizing and celebrating employee contributions
• Creating space for authentic expression
• Emphasizing that perfection isn’t required

A culture of trust encourages employees to share their thoughts without fear of criticism or negative consequences.

Establish Clear Guidelines and Processes

While authenticity is crucial, structure helps employees create content that aligns with brand values. Plus, marketers can collaborate on the best content types and topics to ensure the posts achieve business goals. Develop:

• Brand voice guidelines that define boundaries while allowing personal expression
• Legal and compliance frameworks to protect sensitive information
• Simple approval processes that don’t stifle creativity
• Content themes and prompts to inspire ideas

The best guidelines provide helpful guardrails without micromanaging the creative process. For example, experienced employees could have more autonomy while newer team members should receive additional guidance.

Provide Training and Resources

Not every employee is a natural content creator. Support your team with:

• Workshops on effective content creation for different platforms
• Templates and examples of successful employee content
• Technical training on tools and platforms
• Access to simple recording and editing equipment

Remember that training should focus on empowering employees rather than imposing rigid standards or corporate speak.

Recognition and Incentives

Sustained participation requires ongoing motivation, and employees want to be compensated for their hard work. From a simple shoutout to fun incentives, there are many ways to celebrate an employee’s content success. Consider:

• Featuring top creators in company communications
• Creating friendly competition with leaderboards
• Offering tangible rewards for exceptional content
• Connecting content creation to professional development goals

The most effective incentives align with your company culture and emphasize values beyond mere metrics.

Leverage Technology

Here are examples of technology that can streamline your EGC program and make participation easier:

• Employee advocacy platforms that simplify content sharing
• Content management systems for submission and approval
• Analytics tools to track performance and recognize contributors
• Mobile apps that reduce friction in content creation

The right technology reduces administrative burden while providing valuable insights into what resonates with audiences.

Overcoming Common Challenges

Even well-designed employee-generated content programs face obstacles. Here’s how to address the most common challenges.

Maintaining Consistency While Preserving Authenticity

Challenge: Finding the balance between brand consistency and personal takes.

Solution:

• Focus guidelines on core brand values rather than specific wording
• Create templates that allow for personalization
• Use examples to illustrate boundaries rather than strict rules
• Implement light-touch approval processes that focus on significant issues

Sustaining Employee Participation

Challenge: Keeping employees engaged with content creation long-term.

Solution:

• Regularly refresh prompts and themes
• Celebrate and showcase successful content
• Make EGC a part of your marketing plan
• Connect content creation to career development
• Make participation as frictionless as possible
• Share performance metrics so creators see their impact

Managing Legal and Compliance Considerations

Challenge: Protecting sensitive information while enabling authentic sharing.

Solution:

• Provide clear training on confidentiality boundaries
• Create pre-approved content libraries for regulated industries
• Implement simple approval processes for sensitive topics
• Develop decision trees to help employees determine what requires review

Measuring and Demonstrating ROI

Challenge: Connecting employee-generated content to business outcomes.

Solution:

• Set clear KPIs aligned with business objectives
• Track both engagement metrics and conversion data
• Use UTM parameters to attribute traffic and leads
• Compare the performance between EGC and traditional content
• Calculate cost savings from reduced production expenses

Future Trends in Employee-Generated Content

As employee-generated content continues to evolve, several emerging trends will shape its future development. Here are some of the biggest trends.

• Integration with employee experience initiatives: Forward-thinking companies are connecting their EGC programs with broader employee experience strategies. They treat content creation as an extension of culture building. These organizations create virtuous cycles where positive experiences drive authentic content, which in turn attracts like-minded talent.
• Platform-specific strategies: Different platforms require tailored approaches to EGC. While LinkedIn remains valuable for thought leadership, platforms like TikTok and Instagram are generating more spontaneous and creative employee content. Successful programs will develop platform-specific strategies that leverage each channel’s strengths, rather than using one-size-fits-all approaches.
• AI-enhanced content creation: Artificial intelligence tools are making content creation more accessible to employees without specialized skills. From writing assistance to video editing, these tools reduce barriers to participation while maintaining authenticity. The key will be using AI to enhance human creativity rather than replacing the personal touch that makes EGC effective.
• Integration with customer-generated content: The lines between employee and customer content are blurring, particularly in organizations where employees are also users of the product or service. Innovative brands are creating integrated approaches that combine employee expertise with customer experiences to develop multi-dimensional narratives around their offerings.

Getting Started With Employee-Generated Content

Ready to harness the power of your team’s authentic voices? Fortunately, implementing an EGC strategy is easy. Here are practical steps to launch your employee-generated content initiative:

1. Audit your current landscape: Identify existing employee content creators and organic advocacy.
2. Define clear objectives: Determine what success looks like for your organization.
3. Start small with pilot groups: Begin with engaged employees in communication-oriented roles.
4. Create simple guidelines: Focus on empowerment rather than restrictions.
5. Provide basic training: Offer platform-specific tips and content ideas.
6. Celebrate early wins: Recognize participants and share successful content.
7. Gather feedback: Continuously refine your approach based on employee input.
8. Scale thoughtfully: Expand your program as you develop best practices.

Remember that successful EGC programs evolve. Start with foundations that can grow and adapt as you learn what works for your specific organization and culture.

Use Employee-Generated Content to Boost Trust and Authenticity

Employee-generated content is more authentic than traditional marketing tactics. EGC offers a powerful opportunity for organizations to build trust, expand reach, and create genuine connections with their audience. The most successful organizations view employee-generated content not just as a marketing tactic, but as an extension of their company culture. Offer the right frameworks, training, and recognition so that you can transform your team into powerful brand storytellers.

Have you tried EGC, but it’s still not expanding your reach? Work with the leading content marketing agency that understands how to integrate employee voices into your broader content strategy.

The post Employee-Generated Content: Unlock 8X Higher Engagement appeared first on Single Grain.

Key Takeaways

• Audit for Repurposing Potential: Learn to identify which creative assets have the highest potential for successful repurposing.
• Platform-Specific Optimization: Understand how to effectively tailor content according to each platform’s requirements and audience expectations.
• Format Transformation Framework: Master converting content between formats (video, audio, text, graphics) while preserving core messaging.
• Workflow Efficiency: Implement systems that make repurposing a standard part of your content creation process rather than an afterthought.
• Performance Measurement: Refine your approach by tracking how repurposed content performs compared to original assets.

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

The Strategic Value of Content Repurposing

Creating fresh content consistently is challenging and resource-intensive. According to research from the Content Marketing Institute, producing enough high-quality content is the top challenge for 60% of B2B marketers. This is where strategic repurposing becomes invaluable.

Content repurposing isn’t just about recycling—it’s about reimagining and optimizing your creative assets for different contexts. When done effectively, repurposing can:

• Extend the lifespan of your best content
• Reach new audience segments who prefer different content formats
• Reinforce key messages through multiple touchpoints
• Improve SEO performance through content diversity
• Significantly reduce production costs and time investments

As Eric Siu, CEO of Single Grain, notes in his article on repurposing content, “By repackaging and redistributing your valuable content into different formats, you can extend its reach, attract a wider audience, and boost your organic traffic.”

Auditing Your Creative Assets for Repurposing Potential

Before repurposing your content, identify which assets are worth the investment. Not all content has equal repurposing potential.

1. Identify Your Top-Performing Content

Start by analyzing your existing content to determine which pieces have resonated most with your audience:

• Traffic metrics: Which content attracts the most visitors?
• Engagement metrics: Which pieces generate the most comments, shares, and time on page?
• Conversion metrics: Which assets drive the most leads or sales?
• Evergreen potential: Which content remains relevant regardless of time or trends?

Single Grain’s content marketing experts can help you analyze your content performance data to identify the assets with the highest repurposing ROI.

2. Evaluate Content Complexity and Divisibility

Some content types naturally lend themselves to repurposing better than others:

• Long-form content: Comprehensive guides, whitepapers, and in-depth articles can often be broken down into multiple smaller pieces.
• Data-rich content: Research reports and data-driven content can be transformed into various visual formats.
• Process-oriented content: Step-by-step guides and tutorials can be adapted for different learning preferences.
• Multi-faceted topics: Content covering several aspects of a topic can be split into focused pieces.

3. Consider Content Freshness

Assess whether the content needs updating before repurposing:

• Factual accuracy: Are statistics, facts, and references still current?
• Industry relevance: Have best practices or industry standards changed?
• Brand alignment: Does the content still align with your current messaging and positioning?

Platform-Specific Optimization Strategies

Each platform has unique characteristics that influence how content should be presented. Here’s how to optimize your repurposed assets for maximum impact across different channels:

1. Social Media Platforms

Different social networks have distinct content preferences and audience expectations:

2. Website and Blog Content

When repurposing for your owned media channels:

• SEO optimization: Enhance repurposed content with targeted keywords and proper on-page SEO elements.
• Depth and comprehensiveness: Expand on ideas that were condensed for other platforms.
• Internal linking: Connect repurposed content to related resources on your site.
• Multimedia integration: Embed videos, audio, and interactive elements to enhance engagement.

Single Grain’s SEO services can help ensure your repurposed website content is optimized for search visibility while maintaining user engagement.

3. Email Marketing

When adapting content for email:

• Segmentation: Tailor repurposed content to specific subscriber segments based on interests and behaviors.
• Scannable format: Break content into digestible sections with clear headers and bullet points.
• Personalization: Customize introductions to make repurposed content feel fresh and relevant.
• Clear CTAs: Add specific calls-to-action that guide subscribers to the next step.

Format Transformation Framework

Converting content between formats requires a systematic approach to preserve value while adapting to new mediums.

1. Video to Multiple Formats

Long-form video content is a goldmine for repurposing:

• Blog posts: Transcribe videos and enhance with additional context, examples, and resources.
• Podcast episodes: Extract the audio and optimize sound quality for podcast platforms.
• Social snippets: Identify key moments and create 30-60 second clips for social media.
• Quote graphics: Pull impactful statements and create shareable quote images.
• Infographics: Transform data points and processes into visual representations.

According to research by Wyzowl, 87% of video marketers say that video gives them a positive ROI. By repurposing video content across multiple formats, you can maximize this return even further.

2. Written Content to Visual and Audio Formats

Transform text-based assets into more dynamic formats:

• Infographics: Convert statistics, lists, and processes into visual representations.
• Video scripts: Adapt comprehensive articles into engaging video content.
• Slide decks: Transform key points into presentation slides for platforms like SlideShare.
• Podcast episodes: Use articles as the basis for audio discussions, adding commentary and examples.
• Social carousels: Break down key points into a series of swipeable images.

3. Audio to Text and Visual Formats

Podcast episodes and audio content can be repurposed into:

• Blog posts: Transcribe and edit audio content into well-structured articles.
• Quote graphics: Extract memorable statements for social media sharing.
• Audiograms: Create waveform videos with captions for social media.
• Email newsletters: Summarize key points from audio discussions for email subscribers.
• Infographics: Visualize concepts and data points mentioned in audio content.

Building an Efficient Repurposing Workflow

To make repurposing a sustainable practice rather than an occasional effort, you need to establish a systematic workflow.

1. Plan for Repurposing from the Start

Integrate repurposing into your initial content planning:

• Content briefs: Include notes on potential repurposing opportunities in your content briefs.
• Asset organization: Structure original content to facilitate easy section extractions.
• Media quality: Ensure original assets are created with sufficient quality to support repurposing (e.g., high-resolution images, clean audio).

2. Create a Repurposing Calendar

Develop a schedule for transforming and distributing repurposed content:

• Platform rotation: Plan which platforms to prioritize for different repurposed assets.
• Timing strategy: Determine optimal intervals between original content and repurposed versions.
• Seasonal relevance: Align repurposing efforts with seasonal trends and business cycles.

3. Leverage Technology and Tools

Streamline the repurposing process with specialized tools:

• Transcription services: Use AI-powered transcription tools to convert audio/video to text.
• Design templates: Create platform-specific templates for consistent visual repurposing.
• Content management systems: Implement systems that facilitate content reuse and tracking.
• Automation tools: Use scheduling and automation tools to distribute repurposed content efficiently.

Single Grain’s content marketing team utilizes advanced tools and workflows to help clients implement efficient repurposing strategies that maximize content ROI.

4. Delegate and Specialize

Assign specific repurposing responsibilities based on team strengths:

• Format specialists: Designate team members who excel at specific formats (video editing, graphic design, writing).
• Platform experts: Leverage team members’ knowledge of particular platforms for optimization.
• Repurposing coordinator: Consider appointing someone to oversee the entire repurposing workflow.

Measuring Repurposed Content Performance

To refine your repurposing strategy over time, you need to track how repurposed content performs compared to original assets.

1. Set Platform-Specific KPIs

Establish relevant metrics for each platform:

• Social media: Engagement rate, shares, audience growth, click-through rate
• Website: Traffic, time on page, conversion rate, backlinks
• Email: Open rate, click-through rate, forward rate, conversion rate
• Video platforms: View duration, completion rate, engagement, subscriber growth

2. Compare Performance Patterns

Analyze how different types of repurposed content perform:

• Format effectiveness: Which transformed formats perform best relative to original content?
• Platform ROI: Which platforms deliver the highest return for repurposed content?
• Content types: Which original content types yield the most successful repurposed assets?

3. Refine Your Approach

Use performance data to optimize your repurposing strategy:

• Double down on success: Allocate more resources to the most effective repurposing channels.
• Adjust underperformers: Modify your approach for formats or platforms with weaker results.
• Test new combinations: Experiment with untried format transformations based on performance patterns.

Final Thoughts

Effective repurposing requires a deep understanding of platform-specific requirements, audience expectations, and format optimization. When done right, repurposing creates a cohesive cross-platform presence that reinforces your brand message while respecting the unique context of each channel.

Ready to implement a more strategic approach to content repurposing? Single Grain’s conversion rate optimization experts can help you develop a comprehensive repurposing workflow that maximizes the impact of your creative assets across all relevant platforms.

Related Video

The post Repurposing Creative Assets Across Multiple Platforms: A Tactical Guide appeared first on Single Grain.

This change is exciting but also brings up important issues about ethics and being open to what’s new with caution.

After all, it’s important to find the right balance between using new AI-powered technologies like ChatGPT and being responsible with them as the future of entertainment is seemingly heading more toward a heavy use of AI.

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The Evolution and Impact of AI in Content Creation

In marketing, tools like ChatGPT, Perpelxity AI, and Google Gemini are changing how we create content to match what people like. This technology helps make AI marketing strategies that are incredibly personalized and interesting, which can greatly increase how much consumers are interested and engaged with advertisements.

However, it’s important to be clear about when content is made by AI. To be trustworthy, it still has to retain the quality of a human-written piece. People like things to be real and genuine, so marketers need to tell them when they’re using AI to create content. This helps keep the trust between the brand and the consumer strong.

For example, parts of this article you’re reading was written with AI (probably not a surprise there). But the key lies not in getting AI to pump out content and just pray it’s sufficient.

No, it’s in still vetting the quality and material within the content and verifying the information after the fact. And of course, even doing so still can save marketers a ton of time in the content creation process.

And, as you might suspect, other entertainment mediums are leveraging AI content creation as well.

Let’s look at how AI is changing things for entertainment industry brands, too:

• Companies like Netflix and The New York Times are using AI to make games more engaging:

• AI in marketing campaigns is creating new standards for success, focusing on how well they get people involved and make them take action.
• Using AI the right way in creating content is very important, especially when dealing with issues like being original and respecting copyright.

Key Takeaway: AI is changing how we create content, bringing new levels of personalization in marketing and opening new ways to entertain. However, it’s important to handle it with care when it comes to ethics and being open about its use.

AI in the Entertainment Industry: Beyond Marketing

AI is doing more than just marketing in entertainment. It’s changing the way we enjoy games, movies, and more. Netflix uses AI to suggest shows and movies you might like, making watching more fun and personal.

But, using AI to make content raises questions about originality and copyright. As AI gets better, the entertainment industry must find a balance between being innovative and respecting creators’ rights.

Here’s how AI is changing entertainment:

• Improving storytelling by using data to create content that connects better with people.
• Making video games more exciting by changing based on what the player does and likes.
• Helping to make content creation cheaper and faster by doing some tasks automatically.

Even one of the recent hit game, The Finals, came under backlash for featuring AI voiceover work for the in-game announcers. This ruffled the feathers of many in the gaming community as it signals the declining use of traditional actors and actresses in favor of substituting human talent with replicable capacities through AI.

This is the future of entertainment we’re facing, folks. It’s already come for gaming, and it will be more prolific in cinema before long.

Key Takeaway: AI is making entertainment more personal and engaging, but it also brings up important questions about ethics, such as the density of which its favored over human talent and creation.

The Future of AI-Generated Content: Opportunities and Challenges

The future looks bright for AI in making content, with tools like ChatGPT leading the way to more personal marketing and entertainment. This change aims to make experiences more suited to what people like, changing how we interact with content.

But, this future also brings big challenges, like the spread of false information and the effect on jobs. As AI gets better at making complex content, it’s harder to tell apart what’s made by humans and what’s made by machines. This brings up issues about what’s real and who to trust.

As we move forward, here are some important things to consider:

• Setting up strict ethical rules for using AI in making content, to ensure it’s accurate and not misused.
• Being open about when AI is used, so audiences know when content is made by AI to keep their trust.
• Teaching creators and marketers about AI marketing automation, so they can use these tools wisely.
• Watching how AI affects jobs, and finding ways to help and retrain those impacted by automation.

Key Takeaway: AI’s role in content creation is huge, offering chances for new ideas but also bringing ethical and practical issues that we need to handle carefully.

Final Word on the Future of Entertainment and Marketing with AI

AI is changing the game in creating content. It’s opening up new ways for marketing and entertainment, allowing for more personal and engaging experiences.

But as we dive into this future, it’s critical to remember the need for ethical guidelines and being open about how we use AI. Keeping trust and ensuring the quality of AI-made content means we must keep talking and researching responsibly. Let’s commit to using AI’s power in a way that values both innovation and doing the right thing.

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If you’re ready to level up your digital marketing with AI, Single Grain’s marketing experts can help!👇

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For more insights and lessons about marketing, check out our Marketing School podcast on YouTube.

The post AI in Marketing: Is Content Creation the Future of Entertainment? appeared first on Single Grain.

The key to automating a consistent flow of qualified leads is setting up a quality marketing funnel.

By guiding potential customers through a series of stages, from awareness to conversion, well-crafted marketing funnels can increase conversions, drive revenue and create loyal customers.

In this comprehensive guide, we’ll show you how to do that. Whether you’re just starting out or looking to optimize your existing funnel(s), this guide will help you create a simple marketing funnel that best fulfills your needs.

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

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What Is a Marketing Funnel?

A marketing funnel is a roadmap that illustrates the customer journey from awareness of a product or service to the final stage of purchasing and beyond.

This roadmap usually consists of paid ads, social media, SEO, content marketing and many other channels. Here’s what a basic marketing funnel looks like:

While the concept is simple enough, marketing funnels can be very complex for several reasons, including:

• There are many different marketing channels to choose from (paid ads, SEO, etc.).
• Your customers may have varied pain points (a doctor who wants a survey tool may have different needs from a teacher who needs a survey tool).
• Every customer has a different level of awareness (some have heard of your brand and are looking at alternatives, while others don’t even know that solutions exist).

Given these variables, it’s easy to understand how creating marketing funnels can quickly become complicated.

Even if you’ve never sat down to formally create one, you probably already have a marketing funnel without knowing it. The reality is that most businesses have multiple funnels. In addition to capturing people through blog posts, a business might attract prospects through paid ads, influencer marketing, or some other marketing channel.

Marketing Funnels vs. Sales Funnels – Are They the Same?

Although both terms are used interchangeably, a marketing funnel is different from a sales funnel:

• The marketing funnel primarily emphasizes the broader stages that prospects go through, from initial awareness to becoming qualified leads. It encompasses all the marketing activities that attract and engage potential customers. It focuses on building and maintaining relationships with potential customers by providing valuable information and content.
• The sales funnel, although part of the marketing funnel, is narrower and concentrates on the stages of the marketing that occur after a lead is generated and qualified. It’s primarily concerned with the actual sales process and converting qualified leads into customers.

Here’s a basic sales funnel:

Marketing Funnel Examples

An example of a marketing funnel could be someone who travels the buying journey via:

• Blog Post > Email List > Conversion
• Podcast Ad > Blog Post > Conversion
• Facebook Ad > Landing Page > Conversion
• Influencer Social Post > Landing Page > Conversion

Basically, if people are purchasing your product or service online, you have a marketing funnel whether you know it or not.

Here’s an important thing to keep in mind: Although your marketing model may seem clear and simple on paper, it’s not always that linear in real life. There are often regressions and jumps as people actually go through your marketing funnel.

For example, in the example below, even though both Customer A and Customer B came in through content marketing, they each had a very different customer journey and experienced the funnel differently:

This is one of the reasons why our strategy at Single Grain is to create an omnichannel marketing plan — because you never know where you will capture potential customers. Even after a customer has made a purchase, your funnel can continue with cross-sells and upsells.

Now that you know what a marketing funnel is and how it works, we’ll show you how to build one that uses the channels most appropriate for your business and that isn’t ridiculously complicated.

After creating a marketing funnel that earns our business enough valuable leads to sustain a seven-figure revenue, we wanted to share a framework for marketing funnels that will help you reliably generate leads regardless of your current available resources and industry.

Related Content:
* What’s the Right Content for Each Stage of the Marketing Funnel?
* 3 Scalable Content Promotion Strategies to Blast Your Funnel
* The Types of Videos to Use at Each Stage of the Marketing Funnel

Stages of a Marketing Funnel

If you’ve ever used a paper funnel at the gas station to help you pour oil directly into your car’s oil reservoir and not all over the engine, then you understand the basic idea of how a funnel works.

A marketing funnel works via stages, from the broader section at the top of funnel (ToFu) that pulls in many people, through the narrower section in the middle of funnel (MoFu), and down to the even narrower section at the bottom of funnel (BoFu) that is populated by serious buyers:

That’s why the most important thing to understand when it comes to building a marketing funnel is that you need to look at it from the customer’s perspective. Doing so will save you a lot of guesswork and headaches.

With this in mind, let’s look at three-stage, four-stage, and five-stage marketing funnels.

Basic Three-Stage Funnel (ToFu/MoFu/BoFu)

A basic three-stage marketing funnel — often referred to as top of the funnel, middle of the funnel, and bottom of the funnel — is a simplified model that divides the customer journey into three main stages:

• Top of the Funnel: The ToFu stage is the widest part of the funnel and focuses on creating awareness and attracting a broad audience. Content at the ToFu stage should be educational, informative, and engaging. Some examples include blog posts, social media content, infographics, and videos that capture user attention and provide value.
• Middle of the Funnel: The MoFu stage nurtures audiences who have shown interest in your brand or products but have not purchased yet. The focus is on building a relationship and providing more in-depth information. Content at the MoFu stage should be more specific and tailored to the interests and needs of your leads. Examples include ebooks, webinars, email newsletters, and product demonstrations.
• Bottom of the Funnel: The BoFu stage is where you focus on converting leads into paying customers. It’s the stage where prospective customers are actively considering a purchase decision. BoFu targets are those who have engaged with your middle-of-the-funnel content, shown strong interest, and may be comparing your products or services with others. Content at the BoFu stage is geared toward making a sale. This can include product demos, free trials, pricing information, case studies, and direct sales outreach.

Note: Time urgency or limited inventory is often used in the BoFu stage to help push the lead into a sale. For example, hotel or flight websites often use urgency to drive sales by stating (often in red lettering) that there are only a couple rooms or seats left. It is super important, however, to be genuine and not use fake urgency in your marketing strategies or you risk the loss of brand credibility and trust.

The ToFu, MoFu, and BoFu model helps businesses tailor their marketing strategies and content to match the varying needs and behaviors of prospects at different stages of the buyer’s journey. It’s a simplified but effective way to guide potential customers from initial awareness to conversion.

 Need a targeted full funnel marketing strategy that fuels sales growth? Single Grain’s marketing funnel experts can help!👇

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Detailed Five-Stage Funnel

The five-stage marketing and sales funnel model is widely used in preparing a marketing strategy because it maps out the entire customer journey.

The different stages help businesses create targeted strategies and content for each phase, from initial awareness to building and maintaining customer loyalty. Let’s now understand each marketing funnel stage in detail.

Stage 1: AWARENESS – Problem/Need Recognition (ToFu)

Recognizing that you have a problem is the beginning of the buying process. This is the awareness stage.

If you don’t know you have a problem, why would you purchase a solution for it? For example, you may have gum disease, but if you don’t see or feel anything out of the ordinary in your mouth, it won’t even occur to you to do an online search for gum disease.

Or, if your furnace goes out in the middle of winter, you immediately know that you have an issue and will quickly jump to the next step (information search) in the buying process. You may do a little bit of research, but because your problem is so pressing, you won’t take long.

Other products or services will require much more education. An example might be purchasing a pharmaceutical drug. In this case, a person may recognize a physical symptom (“problem”), but it might persist for some time before they take action and look for a solution.

Stage 2: INTEREST – Information Search (MoFu)

Recognizing a problem or need is the step that triggers a search for more information and brings potential leads to the second stage of the funnel. The strategies used to gather information tend to vary based on the size and scope of the purchase, for example:

• Recognizing that you’re hungry might result in a quick Yelp search for restaurants in your area.
• Deciding which provider to hire to install a new in-ground pool at your home will involve doing some search engine querying, calling around, reading customer reviews, visiting showrooms, and talking with salespeople.

At this point, people aren’t looking for promotional content; they’re looking to learn more about potential solutions for their needs.

Stage 3: CONSIDERATION – Evaluation of Alternatives (MoFu)

Once customers are aware of a solution, the next step is to compare the alternatives that your article or ad has discussed.

Again, the time spent in this stage will vary based on the type of purchase being contemplated. Choosing a restaurant might be as simple as deciding, “Well, I feel like Chinese food, not Mexican, tonight.”

But say the customer is evaluating marketing automation programs to help improve the marketing and sales funnel they created. Because these programs can require investments of $1,500 a month, they’re likely to undergo a much more careful and thorough evaluation process. They might:

• Seek out referrals
• Request free trials of the different systems they’re considering
• View training videos to get a feel for how each system will perform
• Request online demonstrations with each company’s representatives

If you’re running a marketing services business, you might create content about:

• How to choose a marketing agency
• Agency pricing guides
• Whether a company should go with a contractor or hire in-house

(The above examples are non-promotional, educational content resources we’ve created for our readers who are considering hiring digital marketing agencies.)

Note that prospects reaching this stage are more serious about making a purchase than customers doing initial research. So, if you have limited resources, you don’t have to start at the top of the funnel.

💰 Conversions are more tied to your bottom line than traffic.

Instead, start by targeting only the bottom-of-the-funnel prospects for maximum conversions from minimum effort.

Stage 4: CONVERSION – Purchase Decision (BoFu)

The purchase decision is the natural conclusion of the preceding three stages. The potential customer has determined that they have a problem, investigated their options, decided which one is best for them … and now they’re getting ready to pull out their wallets.

At this conversion stage, optimizing your website for conversions (CRO) is an excellent way to increase sales. You can also provide risk-free trials, money-back guarantees and similar offers that make purchasing your product or service a no-brainer.

Tip: Focus on bottom-of-the-funnel (BOFU) or middle-of-the-funnel (MOFU) keywords for better conversions.

It’s worth answering a common question that comes up around BoFu tactics:

• How can I address potential customers’ final objections to buying? To effectively address potential customers’ final objections to buying, your internal teams, such as customer support, sales representatives, and account managers, should regularly communicate with each other. Why? To gain insights into the specific reasons that may be hindering people from making a purchase from you. This information will allow you to tailor your content creation efforts to directly address and alleviate each of these objections.

Stage 5: LOYALTY – Post-Purchase Behavior

One more thing: The customer journey isn’t over just because a purchase has been made. What happens after the sale is also important.

If your new customers are greeted by a thoughtful onboarding process, personal attention, and all the resources they need to use your product successfully, they’re more likely to become loyal customers. They’ll happily give recommendations and product endorsements.

On the other hand, if your new customers experience disappointment after their purchase, they’re more likely to request refunds, write negative reviews, and recommend that others in their social circles purchase from your competitors.

If you have a great product that solves a problem, and you make the whole customer journey easy and pleasurable, post-purchase behavior will take care of itself.

There are certain actions you can take to help facilitate better post-purchase behavior, i.e., retention:

• Creating FAQ content
• Adding testimonials from brand advocates
• Making it easy/easier to get customer support
• Soliciting feedback on the buying process

Related Content: 5 Ways to Re-Engage Those Long-Lost Customers

AIDA: The Four-Stage Content Creation Funnel

There’s another way to remember the stages of the marketing funnel and match them to content creation: with the acronym AIDA.

AIDA is a classic marketing framework that represents a four-stage content creation funnel. It stands for Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action. This model has been widely used in marketing and advertising for over a century.

Let’s take a look at the different stages of the AIDA framework to attract prospective customers:

Attention:

• Goal: Grab the audience’s notice.
• Approach: Use compelling visuals or striking headlines.
• Example: Include an engaging image or a captivating headline in an ad.

Interest:

• Goal: Foster curiosity and intrigue.
• Approach: Offer valuable and relevant information.
• Example: Explain the benefits of your product or service in a way that piques curiosity.

Desire:

• Goal: Stoke a strong desire or need.
• Approach: Emphasize emotional and practical benefits.
• Example: Showcase how your offering fulfills desires or provides unique advantages.

Action:

• Goal: Encourage the audience to take a specific action.
• Approach: Include a clear and compelling call to action.
• Example: Use a “Buy Now” button or a “Sign Up” link to prompt immediate engagement.

The AIDA content creation funnel provides a structured approach to content marketing tactics, guiding marketing and sales teams in effectively moving target customers through the stages from awareness to action.

Whether you prefer the traditional marketing funnel stages or the acronym AIDA, the results are the same:

• Customers enter the marketing funnel.
• They choose to either purchase from you or move to an alternative solution.
• The purchase concludes the stages of the conversion funnel.

Although most people enter the funnel at the top, not everyone does; some will enter at subsequent stages. Regardless, the process remains the same.

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How to Build a Marketing Funnel for Your Content

For more actionable insights, consider exploring dedicated tools that help optimize each stage of your marketing funnel to maximize conversions and ROI.

Now that you know how people make decisions, it’s time to create your marketing funnel. We’ll use the slightly simpler AIDA stages for our builder example.

As mentioned earlier, one of the main points is choosing which marketing channels to include in your marketing efforts. To start with, you can use this template for marketing funnels. Ideally, you’ll want to use all of the marketing channels below:

Unfortunately, the reality is that few companies have the resources to tackle all of these channels (podcasting, paid search, social media, email marketing, newsletters, e-books, white papers, etc.) effectively.

So, although we’ll discuss each stage of the marketing funnel, keep in mind that it might be more effective to start at the bottom of the funnel and work your way up, since customers already at the bottom of the funnel are much more likely to make a purchase and become repeat customers.

Overview of the Steps to Create a Marketing Funnel

By understanding and implementing the steps involved in creating successful marketing funnels, you’ll be able to methodically guide potential buyers through a well-defined customer journey, and increase the likelihood of funnel conversion and long-term customer relationships.

Here’s an overview of the steps required to build a successful marketing funnel:

• Identify Your Audience: First, to create an effective marketing funnel, thoroughly understand your target audience’s demographics, behaviors and preferences so that you can tailor your marketing efforts accordingly.
• Set Objectives: Clearly define specific and measurable marketing objectives that align with your business goals, ensuring that they are achievable, relevant and time-bound to guide your funnel strategy effectively.
• Choose Channels: Select the most appropriate marketing channels and platforms based on your audience’s preferred communication methods and your objectives, allowing you to reach potential customers where they are most active.
• Create Content: Craft compelling and relevant content for each stage of the funnel, ensuring that it addresses the needs and interests of your target audience, guiding them through their decision-making journey.
• Lead Capture: Develop strategies to capture leads’ contact information — such as email addresses or phone numbers — using techniques like sign-up forms, landing pages, or gated content to initiate further engagement.
• Nurture Leads: Build relationships with leads by providing valuable information and addressing their questions or concerns, gradually guiding them toward a decision to engage with your product or service.
• Conversion Strategies: Implement tactics and incentives that encourage prospects to take specific actions — such as making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or requesting a demo — to move them from prospects to customers.
• Measure and Optimize: Continuously monitor the performance of your marketing funnel, analyzing metrics and data to identify areas for improvement and fine-tune your strategies for better results.
• Post-Purchase Engagement: Maintain ongoing engagement with customers after purchase by providing exceptional post-sales support, offering loyalty programs, and soliciting feedback to foster long-term relationships and encourage repeat customers.

Now that you’ve got a good idea of what a digital marketing funnel entails, let’s dive into the funnel stages (using the simpler AIDA funnel).

Tools to Optimize Your Marketing Funnel

Google AdWords

Google AdWords is a tool that will help drive more people into the first stage of your funnel—the “awareness” stage.

Facebook Advertising

Facebook ads offer a powerful way to attract visitors by targeting audiences based on interests and demographics, helping to nurture prospects through your funnel.

Unbounce

Unbounce allows marketers to build, publish, and test landing pages without technical complexities, which can significantly improve lead capture rates.

Stage 1: Problem/Need Recognition (ToFu)

Your customer may be vaguely aware that they have an issue, though they may not be actively looking for a solution.

For example, let’s say you sell vests that keep outdoor workers cool in the summertime. Your target audience may find that being hot is annoying, but they may not be aware that anything exists to solve it, so they likely won’t even be thinking of looking for a solution.

But, if they see or hear an advertisement for a cooling vest, they might have an “aha!” moment and do some further research on the subject. So, capturing people at this stage generally consists of outbound marketing or advertising.

Keyword Strategy for ToFu

At the problem/need recognition stage, focus on keywords related to general pain points, symptoms, or issues that your product or service can address. Use terms that capture the audience’s problem awareness but not necessarily the product-specific solution.

By understanding which search terms are relevant at this stage (use keyword research tools to identify ToFu terms), you can introduce searchers to your solution. These terms could be broader topics that potential customers are interested in, such as “how to get traffic to a website” for a company offering SEO services.

Some examples of keywords at this stage related to different niches can be:

• Signs of hair loss in men
• How to reduce back pain
• Managing stress at work
• Symptoms of dry skin
• Ways to improve home security
• Understanding financial stress
• Impact of poor posture on health
• Preventing kitchen fires

Best Channels for ToFu

• Podcast Advertising: Reach audiences who are interested in your industry or field, and create ads that spark recognition of the problem.
• Influencer Marketing: Partner with influencers who can discuss common issues that your product or service addresses in their content.
• Paid Ads (Facebook, YouTube, Google, etc.): Craft ad campaigns that focus on problem awareness rather than direct product promotion.
• Radio Ads: Use radio advertising to introduce the pain points your solution can resolve, targeting relevant demographics.
• TV Ads: Create TV commercials that highlight the challenges your audience faces without explicitly selling your product.

Examples of Content for ToFu:

• Blog posts addressing common challenges or issues in your industry
• Informative videos or infographics highlighting common pain points
• Educational podcasts discussing industry challenges without directly promoting your solution

Purchase Intent: This stage is the furthest from purchase intent, so prioritize optimizing your website for Stage 4 (conversion) and gradually work backward through the marketing funnel stages.

Action Tip: Investigate where and how your competitors have been advertising the longest, as it may indicate effective channels for raising problem awareness.

Stage 2: Information Search (MoFu)

Now that your customers are interested in finding a solution to their problem, the next step is to create the information they want to know.

Keyword Strategy for MoFu

In the information search stage, target MoFu keywords related to educational and informative content. Focus on answering questions and providing insights related to the audience’s problem or need.

For instance, if your product is an SEO tool suite, create content on different subtopics around SEO tools (like platform comparisons), tools for different aspects of SEO (such as keyword research and link building), and free versions of these tools.

Here are some keyword examples for the middle-of-the-funnel stage:

• How to [solve a problem or address a need]
• Tips for [common issue or pain point]
• Guide to [relevant topic]
• Best practices for [related subject]
• Solutions for [specific problem]
• Benefits of [related solution or approach]

Best Channels for MoFu

• Content Marketing: Offer in-depth information and insights about how your products or services solve different pain points of your target audiences.
• SEO: Optimize your content to rank for informational keywords that your audience is likely to search for.
• Social Media: Use your social platforms to share educational content that addresses your audience’s early-stage pain points.

Examples of Content for MoFu:

• Create blog posts addressing fundamental topics related to your industry or product.
• Establish a YouTube channel focusing on “how-to” guides, “what is” explanations and other educational content.
• Develop search-engine-optimized content that ranks well for specific informational queries.
• Share social media posts that inform users about basic pain points relevant to your product or service.

Purchase Intent: This stage is still relatively distant from purchase intent. Prioritize optimizing your website for Stages 4 (conversion) and 3 (desire) before focusing on Stage 2.

Action Tip: Discover what people typically search for when they first recognize a problem or need, and create content that answers those initial questions effectively.

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Stage 3: Evaluation of Alternatives (MoFu)

At this stage of the marketing funnel, your customers know that a solution to their pain point exists. So, the next stage (if they continue down the funnel; most will simply bounce at this point until the pain grows strong enough that they take action) is to evaluate different solutions.

Keyword Strategy for MoFu

In this stage, target keywords that indicate strong purchase intent. Focus on keywords related to your product or service, competitor alternatives, and pricing comparisons.

Here are some example keywords for this stage:

• [Product/service] reviews
• [Product/service] vs. [competitor]
• Best [product/service] for [specific use case]
• Top-rated [product/service]
• [Product/service] pricing and plans
• Is [your product/service] worth it?
• Discounts on [product/service]
• [Product/service] deals and offers
• [Your brand] [product/service] coupon code

Best Channels for MoFu:

• SEO & Content Marketing: Publish content that highlights the advantages of your solution over competitors and addresses purchase-related queries.
• Retargeting Ads: Reach out to users who have shown interest by visiting your website or specific product pages.
• Review Campaigns: Encourage customers to leave reviews on platforms such as Google My Business, Yelp or industry-specific review sites. Because 95% of customers read online reviews before buying a product, be sure to include them on your landing page as well as website.

Examples of Content for MoFu:

• If you are marketing for a product like FreshBooks, create content optimized for keywords like “best accounting software for small business.”
• Create landing pages that have a high-quality score when you bid on competitor keywords like “QuickBooks” to capture users actively comparing accounting software options.
• Optimize your pricing page through link-building efforts and internal linking. Run retargeting ads that target users who have visited your pricing page.
• Add social proof to your site. Send out customer surveys and request reviews from happy and loyal customers to build social proof.

Purchase Intent: Purchase intent is very high at this stage, making it a top priority for optimization. If resources are limited, focus on fully optimizing this stage before moving up the marketing funnel.

Action Tip: Take full advantage of the conversion stage’s high-quality audience by exhaustively optimizing every step in this stage before addressing earlier marketing funnel stages.

Stage 4: Purchase Decision (BoFu)

This is the most important stage: when you will convert the prospects into buyers. By this stage, potential prospects are already aware of your brand, and they have done all their research. Now, their intent is to buy, and your strategy should be to make the process as smooth as possible.

Keyword Strategy for BoFu

In this stage, your keyword research strategy should revolve around commercial keywords that express clear purchase intent. Focus on specific product or service keywords, as well as transactional keywords like “buy” or “purchase.”

Here are some example keywords for this stage:

• Buy [product/service]
• [Product/service] for sale
• [Product/service] pricing
• Discounted [product/service] price
• [Product/service] coupon code
• Free trial of [product/service]

Best Channels for BoFu:

• PPC Marketing: Leverage pay-per-click (PPC) advertising on platforms like Google Ads and social media to target as many leads as possible who are actively searching for specific products or services you sell.
• Email Marketing: Send reminders, FAQs, and support information to facilitate the purchase process. To encourage website visitors to sign up for your email list, use CTAs that prompt visitors to subscribe, offer incentives to sign up such as a one-time discount, and describe the benefits of subscribing to your email list.
• Remarketing Ads: Run display ad campaigns to leads who have previously engaged with your website or products. This will remind them of your offerings and encourage them to complete their purchase.
• Webinars and Demos: Host live or on-demand webinars and product demonstrations to showcase the value of your products or services and address any remaining concerns.

Examples of Content for BoFu:

• Develop comprehensive product or service pages that provide detailed information, pricing, and options for potential buyers.
• Create articles or infographics comparing the pricing, features, and benefits of your product/service against competitors or alternatives.
• Showcase real customer testimonials, reviews, and success stories that highlight the positive experiences others have had with your business.
• Provide step-by-step guides on how to make a purchase, including instructions for navigating your website, applying discounts, and completing the order process.
• Promote special offers, discounts, or bundles for a limited time to encourage immediate purchase decisions. You can also use urgency if your inventory is running low. A word of caution when using urgency in marketing tactics: don’t use fake urgency. Lying about limited availability or time constraints can harm customers’ trust and credibility in your brand.

Purchase Intent: People are ready to make a purchase and just want reassurance of the value you will provide them. This should be a priority after Stage 3 (usually, if you nail Stage 3, they won’t have many objections).

Action Tip: You can simply hire a CRO expert, or you may want to try different versions of your sales/pricing page to see which one converts the best.

Dive Deeper:
* What’s the Right Content for Each Stage of the Marketing Funnel?
* 17 Effective SEO Techniques to Drive Organic Traffic in 2023
* Why You Should Use Long-Tail Keywords in Your SEO Campaign

Which Marketing Funnel Metrics Should I Track for Each Stage?

So now you’ve created your funnel and defined exactly how your prospects will interact with it. The final step in the process is to figure out which metrics you’ll track to determine how well your funnel is functioning.

Top-of-the-Funnel Metrics (Awareness)

• Traffic Volume: This measures the total number of visitors to your website or landing page. In the top-of-the-funnel stage, a high traffic volume is crucial because it indicates that your content or marketing efforts are successfully reaching a broad audience.
• Source of Traffic: This metric identifies the channels from where visitors are coming to your website: search engines, social media, referral sites, direct visits, etc. Understanding this helps you assess the effectiveness of your marketing channels. It enables you to allocate resources to the platforms that generate the most awareness and adjust your marketing strategy if certain sources are underperforming.
• Click-Through Rate (CTR): This is the percentage of users who click on your website in the search results compared to the number of total users who view it. It measures the effectiveness of your content in capturing the interest of your audience. A higher CTR indicates that your messaging resonates with users and encourages them to explore further, a critical aspect of moving prospects through the marketing funnel.
• Impressions: Impressions refer to the total number of times your content or ad is displayed to users. In the awareness stage, impressions matter because they signify the reach of your marketing efforts. A high number of impressions suggests that your brand and content are gaining exposure, even if users haven’t engaged with them yet. It’s a key metric for evaluating brand visibility.
• Engagement Rate: Engagement rate measures the level of interaction or participation users have with your content: likes, shares, comments and other social media interactions. While awareness is the primary goal in the ToFu stage, engagement rate helps you gauge the quality of that awareness. Higher engagement suggests that your content is resonating with users, potentially leading to deeper interest and consideration as they progress through the marketing funnel. It also indicates the effectiveness of your content in connecting with your audience.

Middle-of-the-Funnel Metrics (Consideration)

• Time on Page: This measures the average amount of time that users spend on a specific web page or piece of content. In the MoFu stage, time on page is important because it indicates the level of engagement and interest users have in your content. A longer time on page suggests that users are considering the information you’ve provided, which can be a sign of their growing interest and readiness to explore your offerings further.
• Bounce Rate: This calculates the percentage of users who navigate away from your site after viewing only one page. For MoFu, a lower bounce rate is ideal. A high bounce rate can indicate that visitors are not finding the content engaging or relevant to their needs. By reducing bounce rates, you increase the chances that users will continue to explore your site and move closer to conversion.
• Page Views Per Visit: This metric measures the average number of pages a user views during a single session. A higher count per visit suggests that users are actively considering multiple pieces of content on your site. This indicates deeper engagement and a greater interest in your offerings, which aligns with the MoFu goal of nurturing prospects who are exploring their options.
• Lead Conversion Rate: This measures the percentage of visitors who take a specific action to become sales-qualified leads, such as signing up for a newsletter or downloading a gated resource. It’s a direct indicator of how well your content and offers resonate with users in the consideration stage. A higher conversion rate indicates that your content effectively guides prospects toward providing their information, demonstrating their interest in your solutions.
• Cost Per Lead (CPL): This metric calculates the amount of money spent on marketing campaigns to generate one new lead. CPL is crucial in the MoFu stage because it helps assess the efficiency of your lead generation efforts. Lower CPL indicates cost-effective strategies for attracting and nurturing leads. By optimizing this metric, you can allocate resources efficiently to continue nurturing potential customers as they move toward the decision stage of the funnel.

Bottom-of-the-Funnel Metrics (Conversion)

• Conversion Rate: This is one of the important metrics that measures the percentage of prospects who take a desired action, such as making a purchase, completing a sign-up, or requesting a demo. In the BoFu stage, conversion rate is crucial as it directly reflects how effectively you’re turning leads into paying customers. A higher conversion rate indicates that your strategies for persuading and closing deals are successful.
• Cost Per Acquisition (CPA): CPA calculates the average cost of acquiring a new customer through your marketing efforts. CPA is vital because it helps evaluate the efficiency of your marketing spend in acquiring new customers. A lower CPA indicates cost-effective strategies for converting leads into paying customers, making your marketing budget more efficient.
• Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV): This measures the total revenue that a customer is expected to generate over their entire relationship with your business. CLTV is crucial in the BoFu stage because it provides insight into the long-term value of each customer. Maximizing CLTV through successful conversions ensures sustainable growth and profitability for your business.
• Sales Cycle Length: This metric measures the average time it takes to convert a lead into a paying customer, from initial contact to final sale. Understanding the sales cycle length is valuable for assessing the efficiency of your conversion process. Shortening the sales cycle can lead to faster revenue generation and improved resource allocation.
• Revenue Per Customer: This calculates the average amount of revenue generated by each customer during their relationship with your business. Revenue per customer is essential in evaluating the value of individual customers. It helps identify opportunities for upselling, cross-selling, and maximizing the financial return from each conversion, which is critical in the BoFu stage for maximizing profitability.

Post-Purchase Stage Metrics (Retention)

• Customer Retention Rate: This measures the percentage of customers that the company retains over a specified period. A high retention rate results in repeat purchases and increases brand loyalty.
• Net Promoter Score (NPS): The NPS measures customer loyalty for the company. A high NPS indicates strong customer loyalty and the potential for organic growth through referrals and positive word of mouth.
• Churn Rate: This calculates the percentage of customers who stop doing business with your company over a certain period. High churn rates may indicate issues with product satisfaction or customer support, making it essential for businesses to address and reduce churn to maintain a healthy customer base.
• Upsell/Cross-Sell Rate: The upsell/cross-sell rate measures the percentage of existing customers who purchase additional products or services from your business. Monitoring this rate helps identify opportunities to offer complementary products or upgrades to existing customers, enhancing their overall experience and your bottom line.
• Customer Satisfaction (CSAT): This is a metric to measure customer satisfaction. A CSAT score helps you identify areas for improvement in your products and customer service to further improve customer experience.

Final Word on Marketing Funnels

Make no mistake, creating a sales and marketing funnel using the process described above is no easy feat. This isn’t a project you’re going to complete in one afternoon — it’s a pursuit that you’ll want to actively address as long as your company is in business.

Creating a marketing funnel is not a simple undertaking, but it’s one of the few opportunities you have to drive significant improvements in your efficiency and effectiveness when closing deals. For SaaS businesses in particular, creating effective marketing funnels requires specialized expertise in subscription-based customer journeys – from free trial signups to paid conversions and reducing churn. Working with a SaaS marketing agency specializing in subscription funnel optimization can help implement the trial-to-paid strategies, onboarding sequences, and retention tactics that are essential for SaaS growth.

If you’re ready for more high-converting leads, Single Grain’s marketing funnel experts can help!👇

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Additional content contributed by Joydeep Bhattacharya

The post How to Build and Optimize a High-Converting Marketing Funnel appeared first on Single Grain.

In this ultimate guide to pillar content, I will explain what makes compelling, impactful pillar content. I’ll also take you through the steps required to create an SEO pillar content strategy. Plus, I’ll share the best pillar content examples to inspire your business to achieve its content marketing goals.

Get ready to captivate your audience, boost your search rankings, and set a new standard in content excellence!

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What Is Pillar Content?

Pillar content, often referred to as cornerstone content, is a comprehensive, in-depth piece of content that serves as the foundation for a specific topic or subject area on your website.

It’s called “pillar” content because it supports and gives structure to other related content, much like how a pillar supports a building:

In essence, pillar content is content that provides a complete answer to any question a user may be searching for on a given topic. It’s specifically designed to provide value for the reader, and also to rank highly in the search engines.

Pillar content is typically long-form and covers a broad topic extensively. It often comes in the form of guides, e-books, or extensive blog posts, and is intended to provide significant value to the reader.

Another name for pillar content is 10X content:

This is content that Rand Fishkin from Moz describes as “content that’s 10x better than the highest ranking result for a given keyword.”

The basic characteristics of pillar content include:

• Comprehensive: Pillar content covers a broad topic extensively and solves a problem or answers a question with comprehensive, accurate information. It should provide readers with a thorough understanding of the subject.
• Long-Form: Pillar content tends to be longer and more in-depth than regular blog posts or articles. This allows the topic to be covered in detail.
• Evergreen: Pillar content should ideally be evergreen, meaning the information it contains remains relevant and valuable over time.
• Authoritative: Pillar content is designed to showcase expertise on a topic, and as such, it should be authoritative and reliable.
• Well-Structured: Due to its length, your pillar content structure must make it easy for readers to navigate and understand. This often includes the use of headings, subheadings, lists, and visual elements.
• Keyword-Focused: Pillar content is usually centered around a specific keyword or phrase relevant to your field or industry.
• Linked to Cluster Content: Pillar content serves as a hub for related, shorter pieces of content (cluster content). These pieces should be interlinked, creating a content cluster that aids SEO.
• Highly Shareable: It’s different in scope or detail from other content on the subject. Given its comprehensive and valuable nature, pillar content tends to be highly shareable on social media and other platforms, helping to boost visibility and reach.
• Regularly Updated: To maintain its relevance and accuracy, pillar content should be updated regularly, especially as new information or trends emerge related to the topic.
• Includes a Call-to-Action: Often, pillar content includes a call-to-action (CTA) to encourage readers to take a specific step, such as subscribing to a newsletter or downloading an additional resource.

As it relates to business blogging, pillar content can also be defined as a series of posts that represent your site’s best work. These are the posts you’ll refer new visitors to, as well as the ones that will continue to be useful to readers long after they’re initially posted.

Blog posts and articles are great examples of ideal pillar content, but infographics, videos or other informative pages are also useful content types that can be included on a pillar page to support the topic.

The Role of Pillar Content in SEO

It’s no secret that publishing blog posts or articles on your business website is a great way to:

• build the content needed to enhance your site’s SEO strategy
• and connect with your audience on a more personal level

And one of the main benefits of pillar content is that it can help with your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. How?

By interlinking related, shorter blog posts (also known as cluster content) to your pillar content, you create a content cluster. This signals to search engines like Google that your pillar content is the authority on the subject. This strategy can help improve the visibility of your content on search engine results pages (SERPs).

More than 92% of content marketers use blog posts as part of their content marketing strategy:

Where many marketers go wrong is prioritizing quantity over quality, and pumping out short content pieces every day because they think it’s going to bring in more traffic.

The Content Marketing Institute reports that, when it comes to their blog posts and articles being the most effective content types for demand generation:

• 29% of B2B marketers think their efforts are “extremely” or “very” successful
• 55% of B2B marketers think their efforts are “moderately” successful
• 17% of B2B marketers think their efforts are “minimally” or “not at all” successful

The truth is, creating a lot of high-quality content isn’t easy. There’s a big difference between a business blog that’s chock-full of lackluster, uninformative posts and one that’s bursting at the seams with the type of high-value content that naturally draws in readers.

As you’ll obviously have better business results with the second scenario, you need to take the time creating content pillars that solidifies your blog’s reputation as a go-to source for good content within your industry.

Here are the top ways how an effective pillar content strategy assists in SEO:

• Comprehensive coverage: Pillar content aims to cover a broad topic or theme comprehensively. By creating in-depth, high-quality pillar content, you demonstrate expertise and authority in your niche. Search engines value authoritative content and are more likely to rank it higher in search results.
• Keyword targeting: Pillar content allows you to target relevant keywords and search terms related to your industry or niche. By conducting keyword research and strategically incorporating target keywords into your pillar content, you can improve its visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs).
• Internal linking structure: Pillar content serves as a central hub that connects to related subtopics or cluster content within your website. By organizing your content using a topic cluster model and establishing a strong internal linking structure, you create a logical and interconnected web of content that search engines can crawl and index more effectively.
• Enhanced user experience: Pillar content provides valuable information and answers to users’ queries in a comprehensive and organized manner. When users find your pillar content helpful, engaging, and easy to navigate, they are more likely to spend more time on your website, reduce bounce rates, and increase overall user engagement metrics. Positive user signals like these can improve your website’s SEO performance.
• Backlink generation: Well-crafted pillar content tends to attract backlinks from other websites, blogs, or industry publications. Backlinks are external links pointing to your content, indicating to search engines that your content is valuable and authoritative. High-quality backlinks can significantly boost your website’s domain authority and improve its overall SEO performance.
• Long-term value: Pillar content is designed to be evergreen, meaning it remains relevant and valuable over an extended period. Unlike time-sensitive or trending content, pillar content provides lasting value, generating consistent organic traffic and SEO benefits over time.
• SERP features and snippets: Well-structured pillar content that effectively answers common search queries can appear in featured snippets, knowledge panels, or other SERP features. These prominent positions in search results can significantly increase visibility and drive more organic traffic to your website.

Difference Between Content Pillars and Cluster Content

Most content marketers are confused between pillar post and topic clusters. Now that you have read the pillar page definition, let’s take a look at the differences between pillar content and topic clusters.

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Benefits of Pillar Content

The main benefit of pillar pages to users is obvious: It provides all the information people are searching for on a topic in one place.

But there are even more benefits for website owners, including:

• Longer time spent on your site’s pages. Pillar content usually offers comprehensive information on a given topic. As a result, users are likely to spend more time reading through the various aspects you’ve covered, absorbing the rich information provided. This increased dwell time can positively impact your site’s SEO, as search engines may perceive your site as valuable and engaging.
• A decrease in bounce rate. Pillar content that is well-structured and addresses user queries effectively can reduce bounce rate significantly. By delivering on the promise of comprehensive coverage on a topic, users are less likely to return to search results for other sources, thus indicating to search engines that your content is satisfying users’ needs.
• Backlinks and a ton of social media shares. High-quality pillar content is more likely to be linked by other websites and shared on social media. These backlinks and shares not only increase your content’s reach but also serve as indicators of content quality and relevance, which can enhance your search engine rankings.
• Gets traffic throughout the lifetime of your blog or website. Pillar content is usually evergreen, which means it remains relevant and valuable over a long period of time. This long-term relevance helps attract consistent traffic, contributing to your site’s sustained visibility and user engagement.
• A high Google ranking. Pillar content, due to its in-depth coverage, high word count, and potential to earn backlinks and shares, can significantly improve your SEO efforts. Search engines like Google appreciate comprehensive, high-quality content and may reward your pillar content with higher rankings in search results.
• Improved site structure. Pillar content often serves as a cornerstone around which related, shorter pieces of content (or cluster content) revolve. This setup can enhance your site’s structure, making it easier for both users and search engine bots to navigate your content, thus improving user experience and SEO simultaneously.

5 Steps to Creating Effective Pillar Content

Because pillar content goes above and beyond standard blog posts, it requires some extra effort to create content pillars.

If you’re interested in making use of this potent business tool on your own website, take a look at the following 5-step process for creating your own series of pillar articles.

Step 1: Understand Your Audience

Building pillar content for your personal or business blog might seem like an individual pursuit – after all, isn’t this an opportunity to pour out your innermost thoughts and most meaningful pieces of advice to your readers?

Well, yes and no. Writing pillar content that’s uniquely yours is important, but it’s even more important that the topics you choose to address resonate with your audience members.

If you’re counting on these critical articles to represent your business in the best way possible, it’s important that they be of the greatest possible use to your readers.

To do this, you must first define your audience and conduct audience research.

Define Your Audience

To define your audience, start by creating detailed descriptions of the specific people you want to connect with. These descriptions, known as buyer personas, give you a complete picture of the individuals you’re trying to reach.

Begin by answering the following questions:

• Is my audience primarily male or female?
• What is the average age of my audience members?
• Which ethnic groups do my audience members belong to?
• Where are my audience members located geographically?
• What do I know about my audience’s average education level?
• What is the average socioeconomic status of my audience members?

Answering these questions will give you some idea about how to best address your audience within your pillar content posts, but you’ll need to conduct an even more thorough analysis on the following subject before you start writing.

Here is an example buyer persona for a company selling guitars. Look how detailed the description is as though it is of a real person.

Conduct Audience Research

To create a detailed buyer persona, you need to perform audience research. This means learning about their characteristics, what they like, and how they act. By doing research, you collect the data necessary to create an accurate and complete buyer persona.

Choose the most suitable research methods to collect data about your audience. Common methods include:

• surveys
• interviews
• focus groups
• observations from your sales team
• analyzing existing data or market research reports

Design questions that will help you gather the desired information from your target audience. Make sure the questions are clear, unbiased and relevant to your research goals.

Once you have collected the data, analyze it to identify patterns, trends, and key insights about your audience. Look for commonalities and differences among respondents to gain a comprehensive understanding.

Tools to Use for Audience Research

There are several tools you can use to perform audience research. It’s also important to combine multiple tools to gain a comprehensive understanding of your audience.

Here are the top tools to use for audience research:

• Social media listening tools: Use social media analytics tools to monitor and analyze conversations happening on social media platforms. This allows you to understand audience sentiments, interests, and trends.
• Website analytics: Get help with tools like Google Analytics to gain valuable data on your website visitors, including demographic information, user behavior, and interests. This can give you insights into your audience’s preferences and interactions with your website.
• Customer feedback and reviews: Analyze customer feedback and reviews through platforms like Yelp, Trustpilot, or dedicated feedback collection tools to gain valuable insights into your audience’s experiences, preferences, and pain points.
• Competitor analysis: Analyze your competitors’ marketing strategies, target audience, and customer interactions to gain insights into their audience. Tools like Semrush or SimilarWeb can help you gather competitor data.
• Data analysis platforms: Use data analysis tools such as Excel, Tableau, or SPSS, to evaluate large datasets to identify patterns, correlations, and trends within your target audience.

Dive Deeper: A Comprehensive Guide to Create Compelling Traffic-Driving Pillar Posts.

Step 2: Identify Your Readers’ Most Pressing Needs

Now that you know who your audience members are, it’s time to uncover the issues that are on their minds, as understanding their pressing needs will help you to develop relevant topics for each of your pillar posts.

There are a number of ways to use your audience to determine the best content ideas.

Analyze Data from Social Media, Surveys and Customer Service

Review comments, feedback or inquiries from your readers on your website, social media platforms or customer support channels. Look for common themes or recurring questions that indicate their pressing needs.

If you aren’t a member of your own target audience, you can still get a glimpse into their mindsets and interests by monitoring ongoing conversations on social media platforms, especially LinkedIn and Twitter (try using Twitter’s Advanced Search):

Read through your followers’ posts and take a look at which topics are mentioned, which articles are shared most frequently and which messages get shared most often. This information should give you a starting point for producing your pillar articles.

Put Yourself in the Shoes of Your Customers

Are you a member of your target audience? If so, try to remember how you felt and what you thought about when you were a beginner in your industry. Think about the questions you had and the things you were most desperate to learn, and then use these ideas as the basis for your pillar articles.

Examine Success Gaps

In business, there’s a gap between the company’s desired result and the user’s desired result known as the success gap.

For example, if you have a productivity app, your desired outcome is to get people to download it and use it. The customer’s desired outcome is to be more productive. Your app alone won’t make them productive – they may have bad work habits, time management issues or be prone to procrastination.

But addressing those gaps with content will help your existing customers be successful and also pull in new people who struggle with similar issues – people who are likely to want to use your app.

Analyze Competitor’s Content

If you’re still struggling to come up with topic ideas, take a look at the content pieces from your competitors that are popular to discover their strengths and weaknesses:

You can perform a competitive analysis using tools like Semrush and Ahrefs. As long as your audiences are similar, the topics that are playing well on other sites in your industry will likely translate well to your own audience (just be sure not to plagiarize!).

Note: Because you’ll be investing significant resources into developing your pillar content, give the specific topics you’ll cover some serious consideration before moving on to the next step.

Identify the Best Content Format

Identify the content format that would be ideal for your target audience. There are several different types of pillar content with the potential to be high ranking and convey your information, including:

• how-to guides
• list-based posts
• statistic-based posts
• quick reference guides
• roundup posts

When choosing the best content format for your pillar content, consider the complexity of the topic, the preferences of your target audience, and the most effective way to present the information.

You can also experiment with a combination of formats, such as embedding videos or infographics within long-form articles, to create a more comprehensive and engaging pillar content experience.

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Step 3: Create Damn Good Content

At this stage of the process, you should have a solid content idea for your pillar content page that’ll meet your users’ needs, not just now but in the future. Now it’s time to start creating your pillar articles!

As you approach the content creation process, remember that your pillar content articles should be so helpful and engaging that audience members feel compelled to bookmark your page and share them with their friends, family members and colleagues.

Writing and Designing Pillar Content

• Headline: It’s been said a zillion times before, but remember that 80% of people will read a headline while only 20% will click to read the rest of the blog post. This is the very first thing people will see, so make it catching, intriguing and informative (no click bait!).
• Hook: Even after people click on your article, only 16% of your readers will read the entire thing. Your lede (or hook) — that attention-getter at the start of the blog post — must make the reader want to keep reading. Here are some good hooks:
  • Interesting facts that they haven’t heard before
  • An anecdote, a cliffhanger or the end of a story
  • A direct question that the reader resonates with
  • A current events reference

• Story: People love stories because it creates a human connection based on empathy. Just because you are writing an article and not a novel doesn’t mean you can’t use storytelling techniques in your post.
• In-depth content: Dive into each section of your pillar content, providing comprehensive information, examples, statistics, and practical tips. Use clear language, break down complex concepts, and incorporate visuals or multimedia elements to enhance understanding.
• Research: Have you ever read an article that said something like “Humans only use 10% of their brain”? This ‘fact’ has been widely circulated, suggesting that we have untapped psychic or intellectual potential. However, upon deeper examination, this claim is demonstrably false. According to modern neuroscience, we use virtually every part of the brain and that most of the brain is active almost all the time. There’s no better way to lose the trust of your readers than to not back up what you’re saying with reputable, up-to-date research.
• Revise: Take the time to revise and edit several drafts of your pillar content posts before publishing them – asking yourself each time whether or not the content you’re sharing goes above and beyond what your readers will expect. If you’re just churning out the same content as everyone else in your industry, it’s not worth the effort.

Formatting for Readability and Engagement

• Structure: Unless you’re devising a new torture method, don’t force your audience to read a 2,000-word article that has no headers, no images, no bullet points and no paragraphs.
• White space: Incorporate space, or empty space between paragraphs, sections, and images to improve visual appeal and readability. It gives readers a visual break and helps to guide their eyes smoothly through the content.
• Images: Incorporate relevant images, infographics, or charts to enhance visual appeal and illustrate key points.
• Paragraphs: Long paragraphs and sentences can be intimidating and difficult to read. Aim for shorter paragraphs to enhance readability. Similarly, keep your sentences concise and avoid using overly complex language.
• Hyperlinks: Include hyperlinks to credible and relevant external sources or internal pages within your content. This allows readers to access additional information or dive deeper into specific topics of interest.
• Responsive: With the increasing use of mobile devices, ensure that your content is mobile-friendly. Use responsive design techniques to adapt your content to different screen sizes, making it easily readable and accessible on smartphones and tablets.
• Action/Takeaway: Now that you’ve wowed the reader and performed a miracle by getting them to read your entire blog post, you need to tell them what you want them to do. End your piece with a clear call to action;

Integrating Pillar Content Best Practices

• On-page optimization: Optimize your content by placing keywords in important web page elements such as the title tag, headings, meta description, URL, and within the content itself. Ensure that your content is well-structured with appropriate HTML tags (H1, H2, etc.) to indicate the hierarchy and importance of the information.
• URL structure: Use search-engine-friendly URLs that include relevant keywords and accurately describe the content of the page. Short, descriptive, and readable URLs are preferred by search engines and users alike.
• Internal and external linking: Incorporate internal links to other relevant pages on your website to guide users and search engines through your content. External links to reputable and authoritative sources can provide additional value to your readers and signal to search engines that your content is well-researched.
• Page load speed: Optimize your website’s load speed by compressing images, minifying CSS and JavaScript files, and utilizing caching techniques. Fast-loading pages improve user experience and can positively impact search engine rankings.

Dive Deeper:
* How to Write Lead Nurturing Content: 7 Proven Tactics
* 17 Effective SEO Techniques to Drive Organic Traffic in 2023
* How to Write a Strong SEO Title Tag (with Formulas & Templates!)

Step 5: Update Pillar Content as Needed

Finally, keep your eye out for any industry changes that require you to update your pillar content.

Proper upkeep is essential for every type of pillar post, as these are the foundations of your entire blog and should always stick out from the rest of your content. Don’t be afraid to be draconian with your editing and check regularly through all your pillar posts to ensure their relevance.

Monitor Performance Metrics

• Organic traffic: Keep track of the organic traffic your content receives over time. Analyze which pages are attracting the most organic visitors and identify any significant changes in traffic patterns. This metric helps you gauge the overall performance and visibility of your content in search engine results.
• Keyword rankings: Monitor the rankings of your target keywords for each piece of content. Identify keywords that are performing well and those that need improvement. By tracking keyword rankings, you can identify opportunities to optimize your content further or address any decline in rankings.
• Bounce rate: Bounce rate measures the percentage of visitors who leave your website after viewing a single page. A high bounce rate may indicate that your content is not meeting users’ expectations or needs. Analyze the bounce rates of your pages and consider making adjustments to improve engagement and encourage visitors to explore further.
• Dwell time: Dwell time refers to the amount of time users spend on your website or a specific page before returning to search engine results. A longer dwell time indicates that visitors find your content valuable and engaging. Monitor the average dwell time of your content and aim to create compelling, informative, and user-friendly content that encourages users to stay longer.
• Click-through rate (CTR): CTR measures the percentage of users who click on your content when it appears in search engine results. Analyze the CTR of your pages to determine their attractiveness and relevance to users. If your CTR is low, consider optimizing your meta titles and descriptions to make them more compelling and aligned with user intent.
• Conversion rate: If your content has specific conversion goals, such as capturing leads or driving sales, track the conversion rate. This metric indicates how effective your content is in driving desired actions. If your conversion rate is low, consider revisiting your content to ensure it provides clear and persuasive calls-to-action and aligns with your audience’s needs and expectations.
• Backlinks and social shares: Monitor the number and quality of backlinks your content receives from other websites, as well as the social shares it generates. Backlinks and social shares are signals of authority and popularity, which can positively impact your content’s visibility and SEO. Identify opportunities to acquire more backlinks or encourage social sharing of your content.

Update and Refresh Content

If shifts within your industry make your articles out of date or irrelevant, you’ll want to update your content so that it continues to provide excellent value to your audience. This is especially true if you plan to promote your pillar articles frequently, as referring visitors to out-of-date or incorrect information can have a negative impact on your reputation over time.

Updating blog posts on a regular basis also aids in boosting Google rankings.

Don’t forget to update the actual date on the pillar content, as Google requires that step to recognize that the piece of content has actually been updated.

Add a simple note at the top of the piece to indicate that it’s been updated:

Whenever you update a piece of content, promote it throughout all your marketing channels, stressing that it’s been updated with more info or up-to-date info, etc..

Those who engaged with it the first time will likely go back to see what’s new, and it will tell your audience that you are an authority in your industry, who stays on top of trends and news.

Identify Content Gaps

Perform a thorough audit of your existing content to identify any topics or subtopics that are missing or underrepresented – i.e. content gaps. Look for areas where you have limited or no content coverage. Analyze whether the existing content adequately addresses the needs and questions of your audience.

Look for keywords that have significant search volume but are not well covered by your existing content. These gaps can indicate areas where you can create new content. Ahrefs has a Content Gap tool that makes this easy:

Pay attention to the questions, comments, or feedback received from your audience through social media, email, or customer support channels. Look for recurring themes or inquiries that indicate areas where your audience is seeking more information or guidance.

Refresh Visual Elements

Assess the current visuals used in your content, such as images, infographics, charts or videos. Determine if they align with your brand, are visually appealing, and effectively convey your message. Identify any outdated or low-quality visuals that may need replacement or improvement.

Consider using original images, custom illustrations, or engaging photographs that resonate with your audience and enhance the visual impact of your content.

Ensure that your visual elements are optimized for mobile devices. Mobile-friendly visuals are essential as a significant portion of internet users access content through smartphones and tablets. Test the responsiveness and readability of your visuals across various screen sizes to ensure a seamless user experience.

Explore the use of multimedia elements such as videos, animations, or interactive features to make your content more engaging and dynamic. Videos, in particular, have become increasingly popular and can effectively convey complex information or demonstrate processes in an easily digestible format.

Dive Deeper:
* What Is Content Decay and How It Affects Your SEO
* 7+ Content Optimization Strategies to Increase Your Rankings
* Why You Should Update Content – Or Risk Losing The Traffic You Have [Case Study]

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Pillar Content Examples

We rounded up five very different approaches to pillar content that you can use to help you think of ideas for your own.

HubSpot: The Ultimate Guide to the Best Productivity Apps, Tools and Software

This is billed as a guide post, but it’s really a list post. A long list post. The 30 apps that HubSpot chose to include each get a couple of paragraphs explaining the features, uses and prices of each one. It’s broken into categories like chapters for easy navigation:

Within the post, they promote a gated guide to increasing workplace productivity, using the pillar content as a lead-in to the landing page. It’s smart – someone who reads a whole guide about productivity apps is likely looking for ways to boost their own output.

If those people deem this content to be useful and trustworthy, they’ll be ready to give up their contact info for more.

Backlinko: The SEO Services Report

Original research is usually a slam-dunk when it comes to pillar content, and Brian Dean of Backlinko is a master at that. Bloggers and journalists within your industry are hungry for recent stats on the topics they write about, and if you can give it to them, you’ll get a link in return.

In addition to key takeaways, the information in this Backlinko post is presented in both text and eye-catching visuals:

Single Grain: How to Create a Powerful Marketing Funnel (Step by Step)

Rule #1: Always promote your own content within your other relevant content. 😉

This marketing funnel piece is a how-to/guide post, and it’s one of the most popular posts on our site. It gives the reader a step-by-step guide on how (and why) to create their own marketing funnel, and was written after seeing a lack of articles that went into this much detail (although there are more today): 5,400 words and tons of images, including several originals:

We published it a few years back, but keep it updated regularly (and let people know when we do an update).

Diet Doctor: Keto Guide for Beginners

Another real value and great content pillar example is the Keto Guide for Beginners by Diet Doctor. This pillar content example has everything you need to create an excellent pillar page.

What we like the most about this page is the inclusion of visual guides throughout the content. All the cluster pages are linked using visually attractive images.

In addition to the visual guides, they have videos, charts, case studies and compelling CTAs to make it a comprehensive, multimedia styled post:

To add more value for the reader, they also include a printable leaflet that you can stick on your fridge:

You can too create videos, infographics, images, and other supporting elements to produce similar styled content for your targeted keywords.

Pillar Content Pays Off

So overall, while it may take significantly longer to create your pillar content posts compared to the shorter blog posts you crank out on your business blog, you should find the extra search and referral traffic to be well worth the effort.

It’s worked for us, and if you do it right, it will work for you, too!

If you’re ready to grow your business with content, Single Grain’s content marketing experts can help!👇

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The post 5 Steps to Create Stellar Pillar Content That Boosts Your SEO appeared first on Single Grain.

The content audit.

A well-executed content audit done on an annual basis can deliver big insights into your website’s blog and content marketing strategy that far exceeds its ho-hum reputation.

Too often, we post something and then never go back to it again. Years later, it’s outdated, stale, and completely irrelevant. Good practice demands that we return to our content periodically to ensure that everything is as fresh and beautiful as the day it was released to the world.

In this post, we’ll show you two ways to do a content audit, one quick version and one long version.

What Is a Content Audit?

A content audit involves taking a look at all the content on your website and assessing its relative strengths and weaknesses in order to prioritize your future marketing activities. It’s a qualitative assessment and evaluation based on the KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that you select beforehand.

This process should not be confused with a content inventory, which is simply an accounting of all these different assets. In other words, it’s a quantitative collection. Although a content inventory is part of the audit process, the audit itself goes much further in depth. The Content Analysis Tool (CAT) can make content inventories a snap. When you start off on the right foot, the rest of the journey is that much easier.

When performed correctly, a good audit will help you to answer questions about the content pieces on your site:

• Which ones are performing best?
• What topics does your audience most connect with?
• Which posts have overstayed their welcome?

An audit will tell you where you need to focus your future efforts in terms of both an SEO and content marketing perspective. And it can even give you insight into potential changes that will improve your lead generation, sales, and marketing processes.

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Before Beginning Your Content Audit

If you’re struggling to understand your visitors’ behavior on your website or why your current marketing initiatives aren’t working, a content audit is easily one of the best things you can do for your business.

But before we get into the step-by-step process of conducting one, you need to answer a few questions.

Why Am I Conducting a Content Audit?

There could be any number of reasons. There’s no one correct approach for conducting a content audit – the exact steps you’ll take will depend on your reasons for undergoing the process in the first place.

Typically, content audits are conducted for two primary reasons:

• SEO – Conducting a content audit for SEO purposes helps you to identify any weak spots in your site’s search engine optimization. By cataloging the different keywords, word counts, optimized images and other elements that are associated with each content asset on your site and comparing them to your current page rankings, you should be able to determine what changes need to be made to improve your site’s natural search performance. And as most traffic coming to your site is from organic search, this is a crucial business exercise that you should be doing at least annually.
  
• Content Marketing – Another great reason for performing a content audit is to assess the current status of your content marketing efforts. Instead of looking at page optimization factors, you’ll concentrate on things like page length, visit metrics, and social shares to determine how your audience is responding to each content piece you’ve created (and, consequently, how you could alter your content marketing efforts in the future to improve its performance).

Of course, there’s no reason you can’t do both. While you’re digging through your SEO metrics, it’s easy to jot down your content marketing data as well.

Or you might be approaching your content audit from a slightly different perspective. Whatever the case may be, being clear about your intentions ahead of time will help to streamline the process and minimize extra effort. Know why you’re doing before you start doing it.

Related Content: How (and Why) to Conduct an Effective Blog Post Audit

What Resources Do I Have Available for My Content Audit?

A good content audit is a time-consuming process. If you’re currently swamped with other priorities, undertaking such a massive project may not be the best use of your time or energy. If you can’t devote the proper resources to it, it’s better to wait until you can.

That being said, there is more than one way to approach a content audit. In this article, we’ll offer both a comprehensive step-by-step audit, and a quick high-impact method. If you don’t have the resources to undertake a complete content audit, the shorter version will help you focus your time.

And keep in mind that you do have options. Instead of undertaking the entire audit process by yourself, delegate some of the data-gathering steps to another employee in your organization or to an outsourced worker hired through sites like Guru or Upwork:

You also have the option of completing only small sections of the audit at any given time, or paying for tools that help to automate parts of your research process (gone are the days of having to manually sift through everything yourself!). More on this later.

What Do I Hope to Get Out of My Content Audit?

Before you begin, be clear about the reason you’re conducting a content audit in the first place. If you aren’t going to take action based on the data that your audit produces, you might as well skip the process altogether. An audit for the sake of an audit is a waste of time and resources.

Any of the following are potential content audit goals. You may have others that are not on this list, and you’ll likely have more than one in mind as you go through it.

• Identify ways to improve organic search performance
• Pinpoint which past content marketing pieces have performed best
• Determine which content topics your audience seems to prefer
• Locate gaps in the content you’ve provided for different stages of your sales funnel
• Discover pages to be consolidated because of overlapping content
• Highlight pages with high impressions, but low conversions
• Generate ideas for future content pieces
• Eliminate content that no longer reflects your business, niche, or corporate culture

That’s the theory. Now let’s put it in practice.

Related Content:
* How to Create a High-Performance Content Marketing Strategy in 2023
* What’s the Right Content for Each Stage of the Marketing Funnel?
* 30 Ways to Come Up with Great Ideas for Your Blog Posts

Meet John, Our Hypothetical Business Owner

To help illustrate how to do a content audit, we’ve created John, a business owner with a heart of gold. He runs a small software company that’s developed an SaaS budgeting tool.

He’s invested in content marketing for about a year, but he isn’t sure whether all the time he’s spent blogging, creating videos, and releasing infographics has paid off. As a result, he decides to conduct a content audit to see how his individual content pieces are performing and what – if anything – he should do differently in the future.

Because John only has five employees – all of whom are busy wearing multiple hats already – he decides to take on the audit process by himself. Because he’s a busy guy, he keeps the scope of his audit small, checking only the content he’s created in the past year and tracking only a few variables that indicate success to him.

Remember, the size and scope of your audit is completely up to you. This is not an all-or-nothing scenario. Do what you can when you can do it.

We’ll revisit John a little later on.

The Content Audit Process

If you’ve finished your homework (you did answer the questions above, right?), it’s time to get started. 

Let’s begin with the quick version. Try this if you’re tight on time and resources. These steps will help you quickly find and focus on the highest-impact tasks, with a smaller amount of total time invested.

Or if you have the resources available, keep reading for the full step-by-step process to complete your website’s first content audit (and feel free to amend it for subsequent ones).

How to Do a Content Audit: The Quick Version

Whether it’s because you’re tight on time, or you’re just not sure it’s worth doing, this is a great place to start.

These first three steps will help you find the highest impact areas to start with. They include key techniques that ElectricityRates.com recently used to increase organic clicks by 327%.

It’s possible to do this without any software, but it’ll take a lot longer.

How to Do a Content Audit: The Long Version

Step #1 – Create a Spreadsheet of All Your Content Assets

Unsurprisingly, the first step in completing a content audit is to find all your content. You have two different options for doing so:

• Use a crawling tool like Screaming Frog (free for up to 500 URLs) or URL Profiler (paid plans) to identify all the URLs on your existing website and download that data as a CSV file (just hit “Export” after it’s done crawling). These tools are also capable of automatically collecting various other SEO data points for you.

• Manually enter the URLs into your spreadsheet (you probably don’t want to go this route if you have 2,000+ pages, but a dozen or so is fine). The easiest way to do this is to log into your WordPress dashboard, navigate to Posts > All Posts, and then click on each one in turn to get its URL. Fancy? No. But it does the trick.  

Enter or import all the URLs you find into an Excel or Google Docs spreadsheet, leaving plenty of columns for the data you’ll gather in Step #2.

Or, if you’d rather not reinvent the wheel, you can add your links to any of the following freely-available content inventory and audit templates:

• Content Inventory Spreadsheet – MaadMob
• Content Audit & KWM Template – GoInflow
• Content Audit Template – Spears Marketing
• Content Inventory and Audit Template – Kevin P. Nichols
• Content Quality Audit Template – Content Strategy Inc.

Most audits use a spreadsheet to organize the data, but it’s not the only way. If you despise Excel for some reason (no judgement), you could opt for the WordPress Content Audit plugin. This tool allows you to create a content inventory directly in the Edit screens in WordPress. Set a few conditions, and you’re good to go.  

Just go with whatever you’re most comfortable with. Set yourself up for success by using the tools and methods that work for you.

Which brings us back to John, our savvy business owner from Seattle. Because his site is small and he’s pressed for time, he uses Screaming Frog to create the URL list pictured below:

To upload your CSV file into Google Sheets, go to File > Import > Upload and select the saved file from your computer. Easy-peasy.

John is well on his way with a handy list of all his URLs. Step 1? Check!

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Step #2 – Gather Asset Data

Remember those columns I mentioned earlier? Now’s the time to set them up and fill them out.

The exact data points you’ll want to gather will, again, depend on the goals of your audit, as well as the complexity you want to achieve. Although the lists below may look daunting, it isn’t necessary to collect data on every possible variable. In fact, you may be able to achieve the goals you set for yourself with only a handful of possible data points.

Potential SEO data points to gather (many of these are automatically generated by Screaming Frog):

• Page Title
• Target Keyword
• Meta Description
• Page Headings Used
• Inbound Links
• Images Present
• Image ALT Tags
• Date Last Updated
• Page Visits (measure for at least three months, if possible)
• Page Entries and Exits
• Page Bounce Rate
• Average Time on Page
• Broken Links

Potential content marketing data points to gather:

• Word Count
• Type of Content (article, blog post, informational page, landing page, infographic, etc)
• Content Condition (out-of-date, evergreen, etc)
• General Topic
• Assigned Tags or Categories
• Author
• Content Owner (as in, who is responsible for editing it)
• Number of Comments
• Number of Social Shares
• Accessibility on Desktop and Mobile Devices
• Call to Action
• Associated Sales Funnel Stage
• Conversion Data

Other items to track:

• Content Inventory Date
• Page “Score” (determine your own grading scale to quickly assess content effectiveness) or Action (Keep, Delete, Consolidate, Update)
• Page Status (keep, modify or discard)
• Date to Re-Review in the Future
• Additional Notes as Needed

Once you’ve selected the data points you’ll measure as part of your content audit, label a column in your spreadsheet for each one.

Now comes the fun part — time to do the heavy lifting of data collection (and yes, “fun” is subjective)!

Let’s get back to our pal John…

Since his primary goal is to determine what’s working with his current content marketing strategy, he decides to evaluate the following metrics:

• Page Title
• Page Visits (measure for at least three months, if possible)
• Page Bounce Rate
• Average Time on Page
• Number of Social Shares
• Conversion Data
• Page “Score”

While he could track other pieces of data as part of his audit – and probably glean additional insights from doing so – analyzing only this limited number of metrics makes it possible for John to complete his content audit while juggling his other responsibilities. The way he looks at it, he can always go back and add more to his analysis if he has the time down the road.

To find the data points he’s decided upon, John uses the following resources:

• Screaming Frog gives him the page title tags (and even title tag length…50-60 characters is optimal) for each of the URLs he’s tracking.

• Google Analytics provides page visit, bounce rate, and average type on page data (check out Reporting > Behaviour > Site Content > All Pages for a great place to start. You can export the data by clicking Export > CSV under the report title, and then import directly into your spreadsheet.).

• Shared Count gives him the number of times each post has been shared socially (there is a bulk upload feature, but you need to be a paying member to use it. Otherwise, you just enter each URL manually.).

• Act-On (the marketing automation program John is using) gives him conversion data by page (although he could have opted to use Google Analytics for this if he had goals already set up on that platform).

Once John is done gathering this data, he goes back through his list and assigns a score to each page on an “A – F” rating scale of his own creation.

Pages that receive “A” scores are his cream-of-the-crop, top-performing pages, while those that earn “F” scores are ones he’s embarrassed to find on his site. He also adds a note to his spreadsheet showing the date that his audit was created for the purpose of planning future audits.

And even though John didn’t do this, you could also head over to the Google Search Console to pull even more conveniently organized data. Click on Search Analytics, select Pages, and check Clicks, Impressions, and CTR to get a quick snapshot of how individual pages are performing.

There’s a “Download” button at the bottom of the page if you want to export the data as a CSV file and add it to your ever-expanding spreadsheet.

Learn More:
* How to Set Up Goals and Funnels in Google Analytics
* SEO & CRO: How Rankings and Conversions Complement Each Other
* How to Optimize Your Site for Search Ranking with Your Web Analytics Data

Step #3 – Analyze Your Data

If your site is large, expect the data-gathering process to take a long time. It’s not uncommon for audits to take days, weeks or even months to complete, depending on the size of the website and the organizational resources that are available for the process.

But even if your content inventory is completed quickly, you’ve still got another important step to take – actually putting all your information to use.

To be sure you’re getting something substantive out of your content audit process, you need to establish a set of recommended actions you’ll take once the audit is complete. And in order to do that, you need to dive into the data you’ve collected in order to draw conclusions.

It could be as simple as adding one more column to your spreadsheet: “Action.”

Here, you make the call as to what should happen to each individual content asset, like:

• Keep (your top assets, the ones with a healthy “A” or “B”)
• Update (your solid “C” or “D” assets that are decent, but could be improved)
• Remove (your bottom assets, perhaps those with an “E” or “F”)
• Consolidate (assets that are perhaps too short or not meaty enough and would benefit from being combined with another asset). Don’t forget to complete a 301 Redirect for any post that is absorbed into another one so as not to lose any SEO equity it had built up.

Unfortunately, there are no hard and fast rules that say, “If your content data indicates [this], do [that].” Instead, you’ve got to look at the data you’ve gathered and see if you can identify any trends that could inform your eventual recommended actions.

Take a look at John’s spreadsheet below and see if anything jumps out at you:

Here are a few observations you might have made:

• Visitors stay an average of two times longer on John’s video blog posts than they do on his text posts. This could suggest that John allocate more of his future content creation resources to video production.
• John’s highest conversion rates appear on the blog posts he publishes with list post titles. As a result, he may want to add more posts like this in the future.
• Although John’s infographic posts have the most social shares, they have the lowest conversion rates overall. This could suggest a few different things. He could be reaching the wrong people with his social media marketing efforts, the calls to action on his infographics could be weak, or he could be creating infographics on the wrong topics. John will want to dig deeper into each of these possible conclusions and determine whether to change his approach or continue to enjoy the potential SEO advantage that comes from having more social shares.

After further exploration, John decides to take the following actions after the completion of his content audit:

• Rewrite or remove all content pages that scored lower than a “C” in his analysis.
• Spend more time promoting his highest-converting pages on social networking sites.
• Create four evergreen content pieces that are similar to these highest-converting pages.
• Commit to publishing at least one new video post a week.
• Develop more content on the topic of budgeting, relative to other categories.

An audit might focus on content quality, the customer experience, content performance, or any combination of these.

Use the results of your content audit to come up with 5-10 actions you’ll take after completing it, based on any patterns that emerge from your data.

Then, set deadlines for yourself in order to put these actions into play and block out whatever time you’ll need to do so on your calendar. Add a deadline right into your spreadsheet (when it comes to columns, you can never have too many!).

One important thing to note here. When you’re staring at the mountains of data your content audit may generate, it’s easy to find yourself struck down by analysis paralysis. Basically, there are so many conclusions you could draw and so many things you could do, that you wind up doing none of them. Don’t let yourself fall into this trap.

Content marketer Pawel Grabowski offers many helpful suggestions to combat analysis paralysis, such as focus on what’s most important, break decisions down into bite-sized steps, and don’t worry about being perfect!

As long as you’re tracking your metrics and regularly revisiting the content audit process, you’ll see these shifts occurring and be able to remedy them long before they become big problems plaguing your site’s performance.

Taking Your Audit Further

If you’ve caught the auditing bug while going through the content analysis process, you can always take the skills you’ve learned to expand your audit beyond the borders of just your website.

Look at Your Competitor’s Websites

So now you know everything there is to know about your own content. But unless you have a truly unique product or service, you’re not the only show in town. You have competition for customers.

The performance of your content will always be tied, in some ways, to the content that your competitors put out. Even if their pieces don’t directly prevent visitors from seeing yours, there is a limited number of consumers out there and they all have a finite amount of attention. If they’re using all their energy focusing on the competition’s content, they may not have enough mental focus left to pay attention to yours.

Conducting an audit of your competitor’s content is similar to assessing your own, but with a few limitations. There are a few metrics that you may not be able to pull without having direct access to your their website and accounts. Bounce rate, average time on page, and conversion rate are three in particular that are difficult to discover without accessing the site’s Google Analytics profile or marketing automation account.

But that said, there are still plenty of different things you can track. You can evaluate the number of links pointing at your competitor’s content pages using tools like Majestic Site Explorer or BuzzSumo’s Backlinks.

You can measure social shares by looking for a share counter on the post itself, or entering the post URL into a service like BuzzSumo to see a detailed breakdown with their Most Shared feature. It might not be a complete audit, but even conducting this limited level of assessment will give you plenty of actionable data on areas where your competitors are currently outperforming your site.

What works for them? Can you improve on it in some way (the Skyscraper Technique is a fabulous way to bring in oodles of traffic)? Which sites are linking to them that might potentially link to you if approached with a powerful piece of content or a fantastic guest post idea?

Track Offsite Content Performance

Another way to expand your content audit is to include your off-site content assets (if they’re relevant to your audit goals). For example, if you’re assessing the effectiveness of your content marketing efforts, you’ll want to include as much data as possible on any infographics, slide decks, or other external content pieces you’ve released to promote brand recognition and viral sharing.

Again, your ability to track the metrics listed above on these content pieces will vary based on the sites hosting them. Gather what you can, but also look for other types of data that are unique to external content sources.

As an example, looking at your Google Analytics account should show you the number of visits that each external piece sent to your site. Comparing referred visits across external content pieces can be a great way to determine the direction of your next big content release.

Check out Reporting > Acquisition > Channels for a general breakdown of traffic by organic, direct, referral, and social (and select Referrals if you want to see the specific points of origin).

And if you utilize custom URLs with UTM parameters, for example, you can instantly see what content is sending the most traffic your way from offsite.

Expand the Audit Process to Other Marketing Channels

In addition to assessing your offsite content pieces, you can apply the audit process to your other marketing channels. If you run print ads in trade publications, try to determine how many inquiries you’ve received from each ad (hint – this is easiest to do if you record the source of your first touch with a new prospect in your CRM after your first conversation).

Or take a close look at your e-mail marketing campaigns. Is the content in your autoresponders still up-to-date? Do you have some messages that have a higher open rate than others? Services like MailChimp and AWeber have robust analytics at the ready.

Get My Free Content Marketing Plan

In Summary

When it comes down to it, a content audit isn’t just a one-off process that you conduct once in a blue moon. It’s a mindset that you should apply to both your website content and the other marketing channels you use.

By carefully inventorying your existing content pieces and assessing the data you’ve gathered for each item, you can make informed marketing decisions that will help you to save time, cut costs, grow your brand, and improve your overall advertising ROI.

And remember, there is no one-size-fits-all solution here. Content audits can take many shapes, routes, approaches, and scopes. It all depends on your needs and your goals.

The post The Step-by-Step Guide to Conducting a Content Audit appeared first on Single Grain.

In this article, we talk about the best content marketing strategies for startups that will help you drive viral growth. 

You will learn the most effective tactics for analyzing your audience and competitors to craft an advanced content marketing strategy, as well as how to create content that will outperform your rivals and propel your business to success.

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The Importance of a Content Marketing Strategy

There are many reasons why having a content marketing strategy is crucial, particularly for startup companies. 

The Content Marketing Institute reports that over 63% of businesses don’t have a formal or documented content marketing strategy. 

Source

It will come as no surprise to learn that the businesses that have written content marketing strategies are often the most successful. 

Of the businesses without content strategies, the ones that do manage to find success often do so as a matter of luck since they don’t have any idea of what works and what doesn’t. Without a written strategy, there is no way to measure your results and you risk all your marketing efforts going to waste.

Related Content: How to Create a High-Performance Content Marketing Strategy in 2023

5 Reasons Why a Content Marketing Strategy Is Important for Your Startup

1) Content Marketing Is Affordable

Compared to traditional marketing, content marketing costs up to 62% less, and yet it generates almost three times as many leads. It’s undoubtedly one of the most affordable methods of marketing available to businesses right now. 

2) Content Marketing Boosts Your Brand’s Presence

With the right content marketing strategy, you will be able to increase your startup’s presence online. By producing high-quality content, you will have more to put on your website and share on social media.  

As a side note, If you’re struggling to keep up with all of the demand around posting to social media on a consistent basis (like I have in the past) there are a lot of different Facebook automation tools to help.  And if Facebook isn’t your focus, you can find guides on automation for all of the social networks to help you out.

The more frequently you update your site, the better your SEO, and the more likely that your ideal customers will be able to find you in the search results.

3) Content Marketing Helps You Establish Your Expertise and Authority

Customers want to do business with companies that know what they’re doing. When you produce and publish content on relevant topics in your industry, as well as help to solve problems your audience is having, you’re showing that you have a good grasp on what is going on within your industry.

4) Content Marketing Increases Brand Trust and Loyalty

A Nielsen survey shows that over 70% of people trust the information on branded websites more than any other type of owned media. So if your startup’s website is full of valuable and helpful information and content, it’s more likely that customers will put their trust in you.

5) Content Marketing Helps Your Startup Grow

With content marketing, you will be able to drive explosive growth in your business. Over 66% of startups reported that content was the major driver of their company’s growth.

These are just some of the reasons why having a solid content marketing strategy for your startup is essential, but the list of benefits goes on. 

In addition to offering you all these great benefits, content also has a massive influence over your other online marketing strategies. For instance:

• Do you want visitors to sign up for your business’s email newsletter? Content can do that.
• Are you working to improve your SEO strategy? High-quality, relevant content will boost your SEO.
• Don’t know what you should be posting on social media? One important strategy is to share your blog posts.
• Are you looking for ways to make valuable contacts or connect with influencers in your industry? Mentioning the people in your content is a good way to reach out and start a relationship.
• Want a better way for onboarding SaaS sign-ups? Do it with content!

Basically, you can use content as the basis of any other marketing strategy that your business is using to lure more traffic to your website.

Understanding What Content Actually Means

Sure, everyone understands that content is valuable. But what exactly is content? 

When most people think about content, the first thing that comes to mind is written text. But content isn’t always just blog posts. It can also be YouTube videos, social media content, images, audios, and so on. 

Content is the presentation of information, in any form, and through any channel, to an audience. It has to have a purpose and be outcome-oriented. 

Once you understand that content is not equal to blog posts, then there are endless opportunities to create amazing content to drive growth for your startup. If content is king, then a variety of content must be king of kings. 

You need to focus on different types of content if you’re going to keep your audience engaged over the long-term. So in addition to written content, you also want to include graphic content, video content, and audio content.

There’s a long list of different types of content and you can create using these formats, including:

• Blog Posts
• White Papers
• Articles and Reports
• Original, Unique/In-depth Research
• Case Studies
• Testimonials
• How-to/Ultimate Guides
• Webinars
• Checklists
• Short or Long Videos
• Opinion Content
• Animations
• GIFs
• Memes
• Photographic Images
• Reference Content: 
• Podcasts
• Infographics
• … the list goes on!

So, if you want to experience phenomenal results from your content marketing efforts, it’s important that you go beyond simple blog posts when creating content. Consider what types of content would attract your target customers, and then incorporate those into your strategy accordingly.

Any piece of content you create should have the following important characteristics:

• Your content has to be informative
• It must be practical, functional and tactical
• The content should have a specific purpose 
• It should also be outcome-oriented

Understanding exactly what content is and how it fits into the growth of your startup will be the key to your content marketing success. 

Related Content: What’s the Right Content for Each Stage of the Marketing Funnel?

Marketing on a Startup Budget

If you are getting ready to create a content marketing strategy for your startup, the first thing you need to look at is your budget so that you can set realistic expectations. 

Creating content may be a lot more cost-effective than other means of marketing, but it still costs money – especially if you want high-quality, great-performing content. 

The majority of large companies can afford to splurge on a variety of marketing methods, but if you are working with a small startup budget, then it’s particularly important to be innovative in your content strategy. 

Here are some of the questions you need to answer: 

• Do you have sufficient resources to allocate for your startup’s content marketing strategy without affecting your other core business processes? 
• Do you have the time to creating and implementing your business’s content strategy? 
• Do you have the necessary skills to get the job done well, or do you need to hire qualified professionals to assist you? 

You need to invest a lot of time into executing and monitoring your content marketing. In addition to writing blog posts and creating other forms of content, you also need to do content promotion and outreach. 

And that’s not all. You also need to measure results, test the different options to see what works best, tweak, and improve your process – and then do it all again.

As you can see, a lot goes into implementing a great content marketing strategy. 

Here are some of the most familiar roles in content development: 

• Marketing Strategist: Plans the content you or your team will develop
• Content Writer(s): Use their expertise and skills to create desired content
• Content Editors: To proofread content and ensure accuracy of facts
• Content Promoters: To do outreach and promote your content on various channels
• Graphic Designers: Create eye-catching visual content for your business
• Videographers: They produce video content as per your business’s requirements
• Content Analysts: To analyze content performance and find what’s working best

Whether you’re doing everything by yourself and trying to make a little extra money blogging,, working with a team, or outsourcing, you still need to ensure that you have enough resources (time, money, skills, etc.) to get the job done and to get it done right. 

Content marketing is not something you can approach half-heartedly, otherwise, you’ll just be wasting your time. 

If you want to see real results, you’ll have to put in the time and/or money necessary to do so. So make sure you allocate the necessary resources and plan your strategy accordingly. 

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When It Comes to Content, Less Can Sometimes Be More

Most startups make the mistake of trying to be everywhere doing everything at the same time. For instance, they will try to create blog posts, videos, and social media posts, and promote them on every channel they can think of. 

When it comes to creating content, if you spread yourself too thin, then you’ll find it very hard to provide value to anyone, let alone see any real results from your marketing efforts. 

If you are just getting started with your business’s content strategy, it’s important to focus on just two or three tactics in the beginning.  After you master those few, you can then add more. However, you may not see the need to do so once you have a few successful tactics as you can easily scale your processes to get twice the results without putting in much additional effort. 

When considering the types of content strategies you can start with, play to your strengths. For example, if your forte is writing, then start with blogging. Choose a couple of channels for promoting your posts and focus on that until you have achieved good results before moving on to another strategy.

You can choose to start with guest blogging, email marketing, or any other content marketing strategy. But whatever you do, stick to one medium until you’ve mastered it. Once you have your systems in place for creating, publishing, and promoting content on a consistent basis, you can then branch out in a different direction. 

When considering which channels to start with, you must choose the ones where your target audience spends a lot of their time. For instance: 

• If your audience enjoys reading, you may want to start by producing e-books. 
• If they spend their time on social media, then focus your efforts there. 
• If they’re on YouTube, then instead of blogging, you may want to focus on creating useful and informative videos instead.  

No matter what you decide to start with, always make sure that the content is aligned with your business objectives.

Source

Understanding Your Audience Before You Start

Before you create your first piece of content for your startup, it’s important for you to understand your audience.

If you don’t know who you are creating the content for, then it’s going to be impossible for you to create content that caters to their needs and wants. If readers don’t find your content helpful, you won’t be able to generate any leads. 

The last thing you want is to spend all that time and money creating content that isn’t relevant to your target audience. 

So your next step is to get to know your audience by performing audience development and persona research.

Here are some of the most important characteristics to help you identify your relevant audience:

• Demographics: Find your target audience’s age, gender, location, ethnicity, income, job title, etc.
• Psychographics: Determine their hobbies, beliefs, interests, habits, etc.
• Pain Points: What problems are they facing in their lives that your product or services can solve?
• Challenges: What type of challenges do they face that make them search for your products or services?
• Seeking Information: Where is your target audience searching for solutions to the problems they are experiencing?
• Content Preference: What type of content format or structure do they prefer?
• Your Solutions: How can you help your target audience find and use the information they are looking for?

You need to create a primary audience for your content marketing strategy, as well as a secondary audience. The former should be made up of those who are most likely to buy your products or services. All your content should be targeted at them. 

Your secondary audience should be made up of those people who require a little more convincing before they can be part of your primary audience. This will require your content team to be a bit more strategic with the type of content they develop for this segment of your audience.

Once you’ve strategically identified the people you should target with your content, you will be able to easily determine the right ideas, topics, and keywords that you need to incorporate into your strategy.

Related Content: The Ultimate Guide to Developing Buyer Personas (with Templates!)

Analyze Your Competition

In addition to understanding your audience, you also need to understand your competition before you start creating content. 

You must study the ground to identify what’s currently working and what’s not, as well as any possible opportunities and problems that you might encounter in your own content marketing campaign. They are a lot of tools that you can use to help you in this regard, but I highly recommend using Ahrefs, a powerful, yet simple to learn software that allows you to gather useful data, clues, and insights on your competitors’ content strategies. 

With this tool, you will be able to spy on your competitors and get a good idea of how they are performing on the market. First off, look for your direct competitors. Once you know who you’re competing with, there’s a lot of information you can find out by simply paying attention to the type of feedback that they receive from customers. Pay particular attention to the relevant comments, ideas, and solutions that they get from your ideal audience. 

Ahrefs will help you gather data so that you can connect the dots and figure out how you can improve on the current state of affairs within your niche. 

Here are some things you can look for during your competitor analysis:

• Analyze your competition’s product strategy.
• Analyze their content marketing strategy (with the aim of identifying content gaps and opportunities for content improvement).
• Analyze their strategy for SEO.

Learn as much as you can about your competition. By looking at what they are doing, you will be able to develop exceptional marketplace understanding and better-inform your content strategies. 

Your final step is to put all the information you gathered to use to help you create a more advanced content marketing strategy for your startup. 

In the next section, we take a look at how you can come up with better content that will outperform your competitors in the area where it matters most – the search results.

Related Content: How to Conduct Smart Competitor Research for Better Customer Acquisition

Creating Content Better than Your Competition

Now that you know your competition’s strengths, weaknesses, and the opportunity gaps in their content marketing activity, you can start to create better content than theirs. 

It goes without saying that every piece of content you create should be of the highest quality, but here are some other tips to help you outrank your rivals: 

• Use the Skyscraper Framework: This involves creating content that builds on an existing topic or idea that has already been proven to be popular with your ideal audience.
• Fill Content Gaps: Create the types of content that have been ignored by your competitors.
• Include Eye-catching Visuals: Create and share better images and visuals in your content to make it more likely that your content pieces will outperform your competitors’.
• Increase Content Length: Research has shown that longer posts tend to outperform shorter ones.
• Reach Out to the Right People: Successful content marketing involves more than just writing or creating content. It’s also about doing cold outreach better than your competitors.
• Make Sharing Easy: Make it easy for your readers to share your content by including share buttons at the top of your posts.
• Make Your Content Snackable: Make your content easier for your readers to consume by using formatting best practices.
• Write Click-worthy Headlines: Create and test headlines to find the best-performing ones for your posts. 

By following these steps, you will be able to create high-quality, engaging content that will outrank and outperform your competitors.

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Content Marketing Tips for Startups to Keep in Mind

In addition to the steps above, here are a few more tips to follow when creating content for your startup:

• Set clear content marketing objectives 
• Make your goals measurable so you can track your success
• Make your goals achievable – aim high, but be realistic
• All the content you create should be targeted at your ideal audience 
• Make sure you cover all the different stages of the customer’s journey
• Set a timeline for achieving specific content marketing goals
• Spend more time promoting than you do creating the content
• Invest in effective content marketing tools like Ahrefs

Nurturing Content Success with Other Platforms

Social media, email marketing, video marketing, and analytics can help make successful content even better. Here’s how: 

Social Media

There are many different ways you can use social media to expand the success of your current marketing campaign. For instance, you can share every post you publish on your blog multiple times on social media. 

You can even repurpose each blog post into many different snippets, as well as other formats, and use those to appeal to different segments of your audience. For example, some members of your audience would rather watch a video or listen to a podcast than read a blog post.

Related Content: Social Media Marketing for Business Owners: How to Get Started in 2023

Email Marketing

Once you start creating high-quality content, you will be able to promote it effectively using various email marketing strategies. So, if you create an awesome blog post or video, share it with the people on your list. 

The main idea here is to feed high-quality content to your email subscribers with the aim of increasing conversion rates and maintaining consistency. Also, you can grow your email list by offering your epic content in exchange for your visitors’ names and emails.

Make sure you use a quality landing page builder as that is a prerequisite to gathering as many emails as possible.

Related Content: Best Lead Generation Tactics for Content, Email & Social Media Marketing

Video Marketing

YouTube is the world’s second-largest search engine and it’s a very effective channel for startups to grow their brand. Tens of millions of searches are made on YouTube daily and you can generate a steady stream of leads (and income) for your startup by incorporating videos into your content strategy. 

This has the added benefit of helping you rank in Google, as well, since the search giant is now featuring more and more videos in universal search results.  The quality of your videos is, of course, very important.  Not just to keep the attention of viewers, but to build credibility and get subscribers.

I realized this early on with my own YouTube channel, so I created this guide to help startups and individuals understand what the best YouTube editing software is.  

Related Content: A YouTube Video Marketing Guide to Increase Prospects in Your Funnel

Analytics

Measuring your effort is perhaps the most important step in executing a successful content marketing campaign. No matter what type of content you create for which channel, the only way to achieve consistent results is to know what’s working and what isn’t. And the only way you can know that is by monitoring the content you publish. 

Without analytics, there’s no way to know which types of content are effective and which ones you need to improve on. Measuring helps you analyze the effects of your content marketing campaign so that you can optimize your processes. 

Once you get improved results, you can then double your efforts and budget, in order to get double the results. 

Doing this will allow you to scale your business so you can experience explosive growth.

Related Content: Google Analytics for Content Marketing: How to Track and Improve Your ROI

Final Thoughts on Content Marketing

Hopefully, by now you understand the importance of content marketing for startups. You now know that the only way to outperform your competition is through the creation and implementation of an effective content marketing strategy. 

All that’s left is for you to test, measure, optimize and scale. 

This is a process that you will need to do on a consistent basis if you want to see consistent results.

Use this article as your resource to help you brainstorm ideas and come up with a content strategy that will help you outrank the competition and grow your startup. 

Get My Free Content Marketing Plan

The post Startup Content Marketing That’ll Help Your Company Grow📈 appeared first on Single Grain.

Nowadays, interactive content is the boss, with 93% of marketers rating interactive content as highly effective at educating prospective customers:

Today’s online shoppers want to interact with brands. They want to actively engage with products and services before making a purchase.

Consumers want to see product images, watch videos, and play around with different types of interactive content to get a feel for what it would be like to purchase a product or service.
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In this post, we’re going to show you how to make interactive content work for your business.

Let’s dive in!

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

What Is Interactive Content?

Interactive content is any type of content — such as calculators, assessments and interactive infographics, white papers and videos — that requires and encourages users to actively engage with it rather than passively consume it.

Over the years, there has been a litany of sources pointing to the supposed decline of the human attention span, putting us below the reputedly absent-minded goldfish. While many people bought into the concept of the eight-second attention span, the BBC and Ceros have since ripped the theory to shreds:

“Think about it. If our attention span is really 8 seconds, how are Netflix binges a thing? How was the hit of the summer a 45-minute long music video? Why are more people spending longer hours playing video games?”

Whatever your opinion on that matter, something we do know for sure is that modern-day consumers love interactive content, as proven by these stats:

• Visual content is 40x more likely to be shared on social media — and it increases conversion rates by 86%.
• 360-degree videos are watched 28.81% more, and double the viewers watched the video to 100%.
• People spend 4x as much time watching live videos than pre-recorded videos.

The Benefits of Using Interactive Content

As any good marketer would ask: Is interactive content worth the hype?

The short answer is yes.

Here are three good reasons why you should use interactive content in your marketing strategy:

Generate Higher Engagement Rates

80% of online users will watch a video, but only 20% will read the content.

Interactivity not only enhances conversions to 40-50%, but people just love to share cool, unique interactive content pieces, by as much as 28%:

Even the most basic types of interactive content can elicit a reaction, which immediately makes it more engaging than a written article — even a well-written one.

William Comcowich, CEO of CyberAlert, believes that:

“Content marketing is becoming less about the words you put on a page, and more about the experiences you create for the consumer.”

Competition is fierce, across all industries, and in all niches. Standing out isn’t easy, which makes it all the more important to optimize your content so that it offers a more engaging, immersive experience.

Quite often, brands offer interactive content as a lead magnet to collect email addresses. The people who subscribe to this tend to have a genuine interest in the brand. Therefore, they are more engaged and more likely to convert.

Related Content: How to Use Engagement Marketing to Acquire More Customers

Capture More Data

This is the data-driven age, in which the data we collect about online users is arguably the most valuable information for marketers. The more data you get — and the more accurate and relevant it is — the better you can optimize your marketing campaigns.

The problem for many companies is finding effective ways of getting data in a way that people trust and respect.

Data breaches like the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal have damaged the world’s trust in big corporations, making people cautious about sharing personal information online:

So how can interactive content help?

When you create immersive content that grabs a person’s attention and offers a personalized experience, you’ll find it easier to persuade people to provide their info. Users will enjoy the experience, and you will get valuable data for lead nurturing.

Increase Brand Loyalty

Quizzes, polls and surveys are a few examples of interactive content that you can use to capture lead data which, in turn, enables you to create personalized content. Follow the E.A.T. Principle to establish yourself as an expert:

• Expertise: the page needs to have quality content written by an expert writer
• Authority: the site itself needs to have some authority on the subject
• Trustworthiness: the site needs to have other authoritative links pointing to it from trusted sites

As you gather data through interactive content, you learn more about your audience, making it easier to create content they will love. This approach to highly targeted content marketing will soon establish trust and authority, so you can grow a bigger audience of people that come back time and time again.

Top 12 Best Types of Interactive Content

The benefits of interactive content are quite clear: It’s highly engaging for online users and acts as a powerful medium for marketers to collect valuable data for lead generation. Over time, these data insights will guide your content marketing efforts, helping you win loyal brand advocates.

With that in mind, it’s time to answer the all-important question: What are the best types of interactive content?

1) Interactive Infographics

Today, 40.2% of marketers say that infographics are the best visual format for audience engagement — more than videos, presentations, and data visualizations.

Pretty impressive. Just a few years ago, in 2017, infographics were merely considered the most shareable form of content. But these days there is much more competition, as just about everyone is creating infographics, so just publishing an infographic isn’t enough. Instead, you have to involve users by making including interactive content in your infographics.

Creating interactive infographics will demand more time and effort, but the pay-off is worth it, as you’ll have compelling content pieces that attract more attention and generate more social shares.

Don’t believe us? Take a look at these examples of interactive infographics and try telling us they aren’t engaging!

1) An Analysis of The Beatles

It doesn’t matter if you’re a fan of this iconic band or not, this infographic is a fantastic example of interactive content that is both fun and educational.

You can play around with the various elements to learn all about the band members and their contribution to writing the many hits that made The Beatles so famous.

2) The Daily Routines of Creative People

Feeling confused about how to structure your day? This interactive infographic (which is shareable but not embeddable) shows the daily routines of some of the world’s greatest minds in history.

You can filter each category by clicking on the little colored squares at the top (“sleep,” “creative work,” “day job/admin” and so on) to figure out when these inspirational artists focused on creative work when they exercised, and how much sleep they got (or didn’t get!).

3) Metoomentum

The trending hashtag #MeToo exploded across the globe between late 2017 and early 2018, encouraging millions of women to speak out about their experience of sexual assault.

This interactive infographic (also shareable but not embeddable) charts the growth of the movement as well as the intertwined network of tweets and conversations. Everything is cleverly represented in the form of a dandelion, with each seed showing an individual tweet.

Related Content: Why Infographics Are the Best Content Investment You’ll Ever Make

2) Interactive Video

According to Wyzowl, 85% of marketers use video as a marketing tool, surging from 61% just four years ago:

As Ann Handley, Chief Content Officer of MarketingProfs puts it:

“Video is more than something we can watch, leaning back in our chairs. It’s also increasingly something we can interact with – leaning forward, and engaged.”

So what about interactive video content?

Video is, by design, an immersive experience, making it one of the easiest types of interactive content to use in marketing. Video gives marketers creative freedom with their brand messaging, and lets them engage consumers in ways that text or still imagery can’t accomplish.

The report from Wyzowl revealed that interactive video is on the rise, with 21% of video marketers planning to include interactive video in their 2020 video marketing strategy, compared to 20% in 2018. More to the point:

When a viewer is interacting with a video, their attention stays in the content, resulting in a 591% lift in user activity.

Let’s take a look at some successful examples of interactive video content from the past year.

1) Know no Better

This music video from Major Lazer depicts a shy boy with a passion for dancing, hoping to win the girl of his dreams. The video has an interactive element, allowing viewers to click the screen to switch between “reality” and “dreams,” where you can watch the story unfold.

2) Scotland from the Sky

BBC Scotland created an immersive 360° video, focused on the valley of Glen Coe. This spectacular landscape is worth checking out, and this interactive video highlights why Scotland is often lauded as one of the most beautiful countries in the world.

Related Content: 12 Engaging Types of Video Content that Viewers Love to Watch

3) Polls and Surveys

Polls and surveys are some of the most commonly used types of interactive content, especially on social media. You can quickly set them up, and gear them to collect useful information from your audience, such as:

• Consumer feedback on your content, products, services or customer service
• Audience insights, including names, addresses, location, interests, etc.
• Purchasing preferences, like industries, favored brands, item categories or pricing

In case you’re wondering what the difference between a poll and survey is, let us clarify things:

A poll consists of only one multiple-choice question, while a survey contains multiple questions.

On a website, polls are generally situated on the lower part of the screen and are very discreet, requiring minimal interaction so they can quickly be completed. Surveys are more complex and require greater interaction.

As one of the oldest interactive content types around, polls and surveys have stood the test of time because people see them as unobtrusive, enticing and fun to complete.

The trick here is not to ask too much, as you may deterring people, and therefore wind up getting nothing at all. Check out the examples below to get an idea of what a successful survey looks like:

1) Netflix

Over the last decade, Netflix has evolved from a simple DVD delivery service to a tour de force in streaming content. At the heart of its success is fantastic marketing, which relies heavily on user feedback.

This interactive survey was featured in the brand’s email marketing drive, helping them gain the insights needed to improve the streaming content:

2) Hilton Hotels

If you want to see an example of surveying done right, look no further than Hilton Hotels. After every survey, Hilton conducts thorough data analysis, and then they react by taking consumer views on board. As a result, they now get a response rate of at least 30% on their surveys and their abandonment rate fell by 6% in a year:

4) Calculators

Interactive calculators are built to solve specific problems and provide immediate answers – giving users instant gratification. The nature of this design makes this type of interactive content perfect for lead generation, as it can provide quick wins for people in the middle stage of the buyer’s journey.

If a consumer is weighing their options, an interactive calculator might offer the insight into ROI or savings that they need to make the decision to purchase.

What’s great about interactive calculators is that they demand little effort from the user. Yet, in return, they offer pure data and zero fluff, giving users precise results on which to base their decision-making.

Below are two examples of successful calculators that delighted users and drove more leads for those who implement them:

1) HubSpot – Ads ROI Calculator

In paid advertising, nobody wants to throw their money away. Thanks to HubSpot, you can get clear projections on what kind of ROI to expect from your efforts.

Just enter your estimations for aspects like your monthly budget, targeted conversion rate, average sales price, and then the calculator will do the rest:

The results are broken down to offer insights on key metrics, including:

• Number of clicks
• Number of leads
• Cost per lead
• Value of a lead
• Expected revenue
• Expected profit
• Return on ad spend

With an interactive calculator like this on your site, you can glean insights about what users are trying to solve, whether it be a low budget, high costs or poor conversion rate.

2) Quartz at Work – How Much Is Your Job Offer Actually Worth?

Landing a new job is exciting – until you realize that you’ve accepted a salary that’s not all that great. Quartz at Work offers a simple calculator to help put a value on your time by taking into consideration salary, stock options, retirement accruals, and other job perks.

3) Single Grain’s Marketing ROI Calculator

Digital marketing agency Single Grain provides a handy marketing ROI calculator. Simple questions like “What is your average monthly traffic?” and “How many leads do you generate from your website every month?” will allow you to see some valuable metrics around your business.

Related Content: 5 Ways to Re-Engage Those Long-Lost Customers

5) Assessments

An assessment is a type of interactive content in which the user answers multiple questions in exchange for valuable insights based on the topic matter of the questions. It’s an objective form of getting quality feedback.

By its very nature, assessments allow creators to get plenty of information about the user. Interestingly, assessments are the most appreciated form of interactive content – regardless of what stage of the buyer’s journey the user is at – so this works out well for both parties.

Here are some examples of assessments:

1) Trunk Club

Trunk Club uses an interactive assessment to help men build a great wardrobe for any occasion. Users complete a style profile assessment by working through the questions to give their personal stylist a sense of their style and budget.

After the assessment, people can communicate directly with the stylist before reviewing items and making purchases.

2) SmartBug Media

If you’re having doubts about your inbound marketing strategy and whether it will have the impact you hope for in the year ahead, perhaps you should check out this tool from SmartBug.

The 15-minute assessment is a savvy use of one of the best types of interactive content, as it helps users look inwards at their marketing efforts, and helps SmartBug learn a lot about their leads.

6) Interactive E-books and White Papers

Next up are two types of interactive content that don’t get as much limelight as flashy infographics or video marketing: white papers and e-books.

E-books and white papers pack an abundance of information into a concise, compact design. But therein lies the problem, as modern-day consumers want an easy ride to instant gratification.

Is that the death of these long-form text-heavy behemoths of content marketing? Perhaps not yet.

The Content Marketing Institute found that 50% of B2B marketers ranked white papers in their top three channels for lead generation and sales. And 76% of buyers were willing to hand over their information in exchange for a white paper.

So if you can make interactive e-books and white papers, you take valuable pillar content pieces and immediately supercharge them to be more engaging, more fun and more shareable.

Take a look at how these brands succeeded when using these types of interactive content:

1) EIF

The EIF (European Investment Fund), which supports entrepreneurship and innovation, and has been financing small businesses in the EU and beyond for 25 years, put together what could have been a very dry white paper.

Instead, they turned their annual report into a colorful, interactive paper with catchy illustrations that is easy to skip around to different sections by clicking on the tabs along the top.

2) CodinGame

White papers have a reputation as being dull. It’s certainly possible for a highly technical document to turn into a snoozefest, especially when compared to shorter, more engaging types of content.

CodinGame did a great job on this interactive white paper, using animated charts and a slick design to break up all the information in a way that makes the document highly-readable and inviting.

Related Content: How to Boost Lead Generation and Authority with White Papers

7) Interactive Emails

In a post about the best types of interactive content, you may be surprised to find that email making an appearance. You may even think that good ol’ email is surely being sent out to pasture while innovative marketing technology takes over.

But you’d be wrong.

See, email has a unique value in that it allows you to communicate directly with people on a one-to-one basis, rather than as part of a public broadcast message (as in social media).

This inherent intimate design gives email an edge, even in the rapidly evolving digital landscape. Sure, it has its flaws, but email is not dead yet. Why? Because – you guessed it – we can make email interactive.

You can include interactive elements in your email, such as embedding videos, polls, charts, games and more to drive better open rates and engagement.

Campaign Monitor reports that:

Interactive email content boosts the click-to-open rate by up to 73%, and adding videos can increase click-through rates by as much as 300%.

Here are a couple of examples of interactive emails done right:

1) Tom Raffield – Furniture Designer

This interactive email from Tom Raffield uses gamification by asking recipients “Can you guess where we are going?” and then providing them with some clues. Recipients can use their mouse to roll over each clue and then reply with their answer.

2) Nike – Train Like a Pro

This retail sports giant cleverly uses tooltips in this email, allowing recipients to get more information about training with a simple rollover on the “plus” icons. This interactive element is easy to add, yet it makes the email fun and refreshing compared to simple text emails.

Related Content: How to Get More Responses From Your Cold Emails

8) Product Recommendations

ConversionXL defines recommendation engines as:

“Information-filtering tools that use algorithms and data to recommend the most relevant items to a particular user in a given context.”

Nowadays, virtually every online shopper uses some form of product recommendation engine. If you’ve ever been on Amazon, you’ve definitely used one – even if you didn’t realize it:

The retail juggernaut attributes a significant portion of its income to personalized product recommendations, which are driven by artificial intelligence and machine learning-based algorithms:

35% of Amazon’s revenue is generated by its recommendation engine.

So how can marketers create their own interactive product recommendation tool? The good news is you don’t have to have the resources of Jeff Bezos to do it, nor does it have to be a massive task that takes months to launch.

Here’s the secret: An interactive product recommendation engine is really just a quiz, cleverly crafted to direct people to your products and services.

Look right here to see how it’s done:

1) Pete & Pedro: Men’s Hair Styling Aid Tool

It’s not always easy to pick the right styling product. With this interactive tool from Pete & Pedro, you can quickly find the right product for you, based on your answers to a few short questions about your favored style, shine and hold.

2) Brooklyn Bicycle Co.

This bike manufacturer wanted to reach customers in a more personal way. When they teamed up with Macroscape, the marketing consulting firm turned to interactive content to drum up interest in the bicycle brand.

These interactive product recommendations make the shopping experience more enjoyable and immersive, which is great for consumers. It wasn’t too bad for Brooklyn Bicycle Co. either, as the campaign generated a 36% bump in conversions!

Related Content: Make Your Product Sing: The Importance of UX Writing

9) Data Visualizations

Did you know that the human mind can process an image 60,000 times faster than text?

We’re visual creatures, and marketers can leverage that to their benefit by taking something hard to digest – like vast chunks of data – and turning it into something aesthetically captivating…like a colorful visual report.

Here are some great examples of this.

1) Selfiexploratory

The “selfie” craze is so massive that Selfiecity.net decided to conduct a very in-depth international study about it. After collecting 3,840 selfies from participants in New York, São Paulo, London, Berlin, Moscow and Bangkok, the website published a data visualization report.

You can use the filters in this interactive content to narrow down the results. In the image below, the city filter is simply set to “New York City” (640 out of 3,840 selfies were taken). You can add the age or gender filter to further narrow the results down, or drill down as specific as pose and mood.

10) Diagnostic Tools

If you’re in the business of selling software, automated diagnostic tools are one of the best types of interactive content you can offer your audience.

Whether it’s a freemium version of your SaaS product or a bare-bones grading tool that evaluates a specific element of your prospects’ website, diagnostic tools are excellent for three reasons:

• They are authoritative, as they give people valuable data insights they can use.
• They instill trust, as people put great faith in their outcomes.
• They are easy-to-use, which keeps people coming back.

Here are a couple of popular interactive diagnostic tools you may have come across in the SEO realm:

1) AMI Headline Analyzer

In search engines, your headline is the bait that tempts people to click through to your website.

This interactive tool from the Advanced Marketing Institute gauges the emotional vs. intellectual impact of your headlines. It’s an excellent tool for crafting compelling headlines – and it’s also a little bit addictive!

2) Link Explorer

This tool from Moz was once known as Open Site Explorer. While the moniker has changed, the premise has not. Just type in your website domain, and then you can access regularly updated information about your website’s backlinks.

11) Contests

Who doesn’t love a good contest?

If you have prizes that people want, and an audience that will share your campaign, a contest can be one of the best types of interactive content. Not only will it grow brand awareness and engage the masses on social media, but it may also help you acquire lots of new email subscribers and potential new customers.

Brands have been running simple contests on social media for years, asking people to like, comment or share posts to enter. Now, with video, you can make contests a more interactive experience that thrives on user-generated content (UGC).

61% of people are more likely to interact with ads if they contain UGC.

Here’s a successful example:

1) Chubbies Man Model Search

Chubbies – a company that makes short shorts for men, “specifically, for Magnum P.I. aficionados and frat bros” – turned to UGC for this contest.

They encouraged men to submit photos of themselves wearing Chubbies shorts, announcing that the winner would get the chance to become a model for the brand. The contest generated almost 300,000 entries, creating a buzz with the many light-hearted, humorous submissions from people of all shapes and sizes.

Related Content: How to Boost Your Website Traffic with a Giveaway

12) Augmented Reality

Finally, we have to mention Extended Reality (XR). It’s not going away, you know. In fact, marketers are only getting started with it.

There are three types of XR:

• Virtual Reality (VR) – where users wear VR headsets to immerse themselves in a virtual world.
• Augmented Reality (AR) – layered graphics on a real-world environment.
• Mixed Reality (MR) – a blending of VR and AR, offering interactive content that people can manipulate.

Let’s take a look at how these types of interactive content in use today.

1) Sephora Virtual Artist

The average woman spends a lot on beauty products each year – $300,000 in her lifetime, according to beauty e-tailer SkinStore – so she wants to make sure that she’s getting the best products for her needs.

With Sephora’s AR tool, women can try products out without leaving their homes. The augmented reality uses filters to show women what the makeup products will look like:

2) Pokémon Go

If we’re talking about augmented reality, we have to mention Pokémon Go. The biggest AR game ever took over the planet in 2016 and has continued to captivate gamers ever since. Who would have thought interactive content based on the idea of capturing make-believe creatures on your smartphone would be so engaging?

Well, it was so popular that the game led to a spate of car crashes because people were so engrossed in the game that they unwittingly wandered into traffic. Reports on the craze revealed that 31 people were injured, and two died. Another two men fell off a cliff in California and survived (yes, seriously – fully grown, adult men were chasing Pokémon!).

We’re not suggesting you create dangerous AR content, just that you make it engaging!

Related Content: A Quick Guide on Combining Virtual Reality and Content Marketing

Final Word on Interactive Content

So, there you have the 12 best types of interactive content for your modern marketing strategy.

Sure, text-based content still has its place, as do emails, e-books, white papers and good old-fashioned blog articles. But the undeniable truth remains: People want to interact with brands, and they want more interactive content and immersive experiences.

And so, content as we know it is set for an interactive makeover.

Additional writing by CJ Haughey.

The post 12 Types of Interactive Content to Drive Better Engagement appeared first on Single Grain.