1 MASARYK UNIVERSITY FACULTY OF INFORMATICS Effectiveness of Content Marketing for Photographers Diploma thesis Dinara Khusainova Brno, 2015
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MASARYK UNIVERSITY
FACULTY OF INFORMATICS
Effectiveness of Content Marketing for Photographers
Diploma thesis
Dinara Khusainova
Brno, 2015
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Declaration
I hereby declare that I am the sole author of this thesis and that no part of
this thesis has been published or submitted for publication. I also declare
that my thesis does not infringe upon anyone’s copyright nor violate any
proprietary rights and that any materials from the work of other authors
included in my thesis are fully acknowledged in accordance with the
standard referencing practices.
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Acknowledgment
I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my advisor Dalia
Krikščiūnienė, for being so helpful during my work on the thesis and for
her valuable comments. My deepest gratitude also goes to my family,
especially to my parents, who always support me and to my boyfriend
Miroslav for his feedbacks and kind support rendered.
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Abstract
The aim of the thesis is a detailed study of content marketing as a new
trend of online marketing. It is focused on learning existing content
marketing methods and approaches, and proposing individual content
marketing strategy for a photography business of the author. The thesis
also provides analysis of software tools used in content marketing and
several case studies demonstrating content marketing techniques.
Keywords
Content Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Photography, Blogging,
Search Engine Optimization
Thesis Supervisor: Dalia Krikščiūnienė, Ph.D
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Table of Contents Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 7
Relevance of the Topic ................................................................................................. 7
The Goal of the Thesis .................................................................................................. 9
1. Background of Content Marketing ............................................................................. 12
1.1 The Definition and the History of Content Marketing.......................................... 13
1.1.1 The Definition of Content Marketing ............................................................ 13
1.1.2 The History of Content Marketing ................................................................. 15
1.2 The Importance for the Purposes of Online Marketing ....................................... 17
1.3 Content Marketing Worldwide ............................................................................. 19
2. Content Marketing Process ........................................................................................ 21
2.1 Research and Analysis .......................................................................................... 22
2.1.1 The Motivation Related to a Business Plan ................................................... 23
2.1.2 Audience Research ........................................................................................ 24
2.1.3 Competitive Research .................................................................................... 29
2.1.4 Keyword Research ......................................................................................... 31
2.1.5 Content Audit ................................................................................................ 34
2.1.6 Google Analytics Data .................................................................................... 37
2.2 Content Marketing Strategy ................................................................................. 38
2.2.1 Content Ideas ................................................................................................. 40
2.2.2 Content Formats ............................................................................................ 41
2.2.3 Editorial Calendar .......................................................................................... 42
2.3 Content Creation .................................................................................................. 44
2.3.1 Content Management System ....................................................................... 44
2.3.2 Search Engine Optimization .......................................................................... 46
2.3.3 Influencer Marketing ..................................................................................... 50
2.4 Socialization and Content Distribution ................................................................. 51
2.4.1 Socialization ................................................................................................... 51
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2.4.2 Content Distribution ...................................................................................... 53
2.4.3 Link Building ................................................................................................... 55
2.4.5 Content Repurposing ..................................................................................... 57
2.5 Measurement Practice ......................................................................................... 58
2.5.1 Content Marketing Metrics ........................................................................... 59
2.5.2 Content Marketing Analytic Tools ................................................................. 63
3. Practical Application of the Strategy .......................................................................... 65
3.1 Case Study Lighthousing ....................................................................................... 65
3.2 Lighthousing Content Marketing Strategy ........................................................... 67
3.3 Measuring the Effectiveness of the Strategy ....................................................... 72
3.4 The Follow-up Content Marketing Plan................................................................ 75
Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 77
References ...................................................................................................................... 78
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Introduction
Relevance of the Topic
Content marketing is a relatively new trend in online marketing, which
has become very popular in recent years. Content marketing involves,
primarily, creation and distribution of content for the purpose of
increasing the effectiveness of company’s marketing efforts, it also helps
to establish strong relationships with customers and confirms the
competence of the company in particular area.
Adequate content today is also the main purpose why people use the
Internet. Every day people are looking for new interesting, entertaining
and useful information, therefore companies and marketers have to
extend their online activities by providing valuable information free of
charge. However, it is not enough to create content on any topic that
seems to be interesting and publish it online. Content marketing cannot
bring expected results without carefully planned activities.
The latter half of the 20th century and the early 2000's were quite
competitive times for marketers, as they have been trying to use all
existing media channels to promote themselves and their goods and
services. As the dominant form of communication for many years was
"one-to-many" [1], mainly the companies with adequate funds provided
the information about brands and their products for a mass
consumption. Therefore, customers were able to make their decisions
based only on the information they obtained. However, people did not
have a wide range of choice, because smaller marketers were inaccessible
for them.
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Throughout its history, marketing has been using the purchase funnel [1]
marketing model, which illustrates the theoretical customer journey
towards the purchase of a product or services. The purchase funnel is
represented by four main stages: Attention, Interest, Desire, Action
(AIDA) [1]. Companies invest money in order to appeal to a wide
audience. Consequently, some people who respond to an advertising
campaign, become company clients. It means that the larger was the
campaign, the more people reacted to it. Thus, the main purpose of the
classical purchase funnel marketing model was to gain solvent
customers. But the appearance of the Internet changed the situation
radically. The customer is now allowed to choose whatever he would
like to buy and whenever he would like to buy it. Capabilities of
information technologies, in short, gave more power to ordinary
customers. Nowadays “flashy” advertising no longer has ascendancy
over potential and existing customers, and the classical purchase funnel
marketing model may seem too narrow today.
Recently a well-known marketing research firm Forrester came up with a
concept called “the customer lifecycle” [2]. It assumes that customer’s
decision is now influenced by many factors like reviews on websites,
recommendations from family and friends, expert opinions and
competitor’s offers. There is a current need for a new marketing
approach, the one that will be focused on educating and interacting with
customer at all points along the journey. This is the point when content
marketing should be announced, because its main advantages are:
• Online presence of the enterprise & sharing knowledge via
Internet
• Reaching customers by knowing their preferences
• Using of strategic planning for implementing content marketing
• Measuring effectiveness of the efforts
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The content marketing topic is important for various kinds of business,
both large and small, as well as for the artists who are trying to promote
their work mainly on websites or blogs. And photographers fall into this
categories, too. When it comes to communication with a potential
customer, the photography business does not differ much from the
other businesses. A photographer that would like to sell his work should
realize that in the modern age of the Internet there is a huge potential to
build his own community for educating people, getting them interested
in his work and consequently gaining clients, who would like to work
with him.
The scientific problem of the thesis: how to employ the domain
knowledge of the business area for getting active and profitable response
of the customers to the online content. This problem is analyzed by
applying content marketing approach. Content marketing is tightly
related to service science and carries interdisciplinary approach, as it
joins knowledge from various areas of enterprise (online marketing,
customer reach, IT, training and outsourcing skills). It requires
professional management of various resources: financial investment,
human resource training, IT competence both in the areas of online
marketing and analytics.
The Goal of the Thesis
At the moment, there are many books, articles and studies concerning
content marketing. Therefore, the main goal of the thesis is to study
popular methods and adapt existing useful practices to a real business plan in
order to create an individual, tailor-made content marketing strategy that will
help to increase the effectiveness of marketing efforts of the photographers using
a personal website or a blog.
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The tasks for reaching this goal are:
1. To analyze the scientific research works related to the conceptual
framework of content marketing and its place in the marketing
theoretical development.
2. To analyze the IT solutions for implementation of content
marketing.
3. To design the content marketing process model for effective
monitoring of content marketing strategy.
4. To experimentally test the viability of the model for the
photography business case.
The structure and outline of the thesis contains three parts. In the first
one, the theoretical aspects of content marketing are explained. It is
essential to look into the matter of content marketing, as we want to use
it in a real business. The second part clarifies the organization of the
content marketing process. This part is a core of the thesis, because it
illustrates all the important parts each content marketing strategy should
have, regardless of a company’s size, purpose and budget. The third part
is practical: the knowledge gained in the second part is mapped onto
existing photography business in order to help to create an individual
content marketing strategy and to discover the ways to increase the
effectiveness of marketing efforts of the photographers by using content
marketing. An already existing photography blog was changed in the
process of working on the thesis, as some techniques were applied on it.
The theoretical originality of the thesis is based on integrating the
marketing and IT methods, as they allow not only developing content
marketing strategy, but also proposing methodology for evaluating its
effectiveness with the help of analytical tools.
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The practical novelty includes embedding content marketing elements
and analytics to the photography website which, besides as experimental
research, serves also as practical implementation of the proposed
solution.
Methodology of the thesis includes several procedures. The main
method is the analysis that allowed examining available sources and
then choosing particular techniques for the practical part. The next
important method is the experimental one. A few questionnaires were
created for the blog’s readers in social networks. It is essential to let
people contribute to the content they would like to read and see.
Additionally to the website, a small webpage was created, through
which clients could make a request for a photoshoot. All the data
obtained during experiments was properly collected and analyzed with
the help of a few installed analytical tools and services1.
Taking into account the above mentioned goals, the main output of the
thesis is to discover the most successful techniques and approaches in
content marketing which can help photographers to increase the
effectiveness of their marketing efforts.
1 Metrics and analytical tools are described in the section 2.5
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1. Background of Content Marketing
For people who are not familiar with marketing yet, this term may sound
too sector-specific. However, there is no need to investigate professional
literature in order to create an overall picture of content marketing and
to understand its main principles. Paying attention to the everyday
information around, like, for instance, in a tramway in the morning or
while reading daily news on the Internet is enough. Nevertheless, people
learned to ignore most of advertisements, since the life is full of it. What
type of information could attract their attention then? What we would
think about, for example, an interesting magazine article written by a
travel agent, where he gives pieces of advice concerning family
recreation? Although we are not planning to go on vacation at the
present moment, we will likely notice writer's professionalism and
probably will mention the article to some friends later. And next time
while planning the vacation with a family, it is more possible that exactly
this particular travel agent will be chosen.
This example shows, in short, how content marketing could work. And it
is difficult to disagree with the fact that content marketing can help any
marketers, regardless of the available budget, to adapt to a contemporary
market overfilled by advertising and useless information. Still, before
starting using content marketing in the business, it is important to
understand its fundamentals.
Every innovation has its own development history. Content marketing is
not an exception. In this section, I will provide basic definitions of
content marketing and will make an attempt to focus on the main stages
of the content marketing development, from the beginning of the human
history and up to the present. I will also reveal to what extent the role of
content marketing is important for achieving online marketing goals, as
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the thesis research is elaborating on content marketing in the context of
online marketing. In the end, I will provide a short survey of the present
situation in this area worldwide.
1.1 The Definition and the History of Content Marketing
1.1.1 The Definition of Content Marketing
Any expert dealing with content marketing would provide a different
definition of it, as it depends on the personal role in content marketing,
the particular field of work and the goals to achieve with the help
content marketing. There are several the most common definitions of
content marketing provided by leading specialists (Table №1).
Joe Pulizzi (The
Content Marketing
Institute)
Content marketing is a strategic marketing
approach focused on creating and distributing
valuable, relevant, and consistent content to
attract and retain a clearly-defined audience —
and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer
action [3].
Copyblogger.com Content Marketing means creating and sharing
valuable free content to attract and convert
prospects into customers, and customers into
repeat buyers. The type of content you share is
closely related to what you sell; in other words,
you’re educating people so that they know, like,
and trust you enough to do business with you [4].
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Michael Brenner (B2B
Marketing Insider)
Content marketing is about delivering the content
your audience is seeking in all the places they are
searching for it. It is the effective combination of
created, curated and syndicated content [5].
Robert Rose (The
Content Marketing
Institute)
Content Marketing is owning, as opposed to
renting media. It’s a marketing process to attract
and retain customers by consistently creating and
curating content in order to change or enhance a
consumer behavior [6].
Table № 1. Definitions of content marketing.
The definitions presented in the scientific literature highlight several
main aspects of content marketing (Figure №1):
Figure № 1. Main aspects of content marketing [own graphic].
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Lately content marketing became more popular among both large and
small companies and marketers. The main attraction is the seeming
simplicity of its application; however, not many marketers apply it well,
because there is no ready-made solution that can guarantee the success.
Nevertheless, with the potential of the Internet each person that would
like to promote his products or services can achieve progress with the
help of the content marketing.
1.1.2 The History of Content Marketing
To gain a better understanding of content marketing, it is worth to
review the history of marketing itself. Dave Kerpen, the author of a book
"Likeable Social Media" assumes that one of the first forms of marketing
was word-of-mouth, "when Eve said to Adam, “You’ve got to try this apple”,
and the first marketing interaction in the history of the world had taken place. It
was simple and effective, from one trusted person’s lips to another’s ears, and
resulted in a successful, if free, “transaction” [7]. However, for many years,
until in XV century Johann Gutenberg invented printing using movable
type, the above-mentioned word-of-mouth was the main marketing
engine for marketers. People always trusted friends' or relatives'
recommendations concerning specific products and services.
Consequently, for every marketer at any times what people are saying
about their products was very important.
As for the content marketing history, one might assume that it begins in
the cavemen times, when our ancestors created cave wall paintings to
leave a concrete message describing, for example, a way to defend
oneself against the wild beast by a spear [8]. But, nevertheless, for many
years marketers did not have a chance to promote their businesses to
many people, and only the Gutenberg’s invention gave them this
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opportunity. After the first printed periodical came out in XVII century,
and then first commercials appeared in newspapers, marketing began to
gather pace. Among the first companies which started to use content
marketing in their business was John Deer – a large-scale producer of
agricultural, construction, forestry and turf care equipment. In 1985 they
started to publish a magazine for the customers called "The Furrow". The
content featured in “The Furrow” was educational, and it was focused
on teaching farmers how to be more fruitful business owners — a
quintessential example of content marketing [8].
In 1900, shortly after the John Deer's company, Michelin Tires released a
400-page guide aimed at helping drivers maintain their cars. It covered
basic maintenance, accommodations, and other travel tips. After 35,000
copies were distributed free of charge, the company began selling the
books for a profit [9]. In the XX century content marketing was actively
used by many big and small companies like Nike or Coca-Cola and
helped them to yield favourable results. An important step in doing
content marketing online was made by Microsoft. In 2004 the company
launched the first major corporate blog called Channel 9. This brought
content marketing to the next level of its development history. Figure
№1 shows that at the present day only 10% of B2C (business-to-
customer) marketers do not use content marketing [10].
As is evident from the foregoing, the underlying activities, which build
the background to content marketing, started well even before Internet
age, but from year to year, the amount of marketers using content
marketing in their businesses increases even more rapidly. It concerns
also the quality and usefulness of the information offered to potential
and existing customers. Today, in a world of digital, it is quite hard to
imagine a successful company without a personal website or a profile in
social networks. Internet made the use of content marketing in business
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more than just available. It helps with a rapid growth of this sphere and
changes the way people thought about marketing.
Figure № 2. The percentage of B2C marketers using content marketing [10].
1.2 The Importance for the Purposes of Online Marketing
Online marketing, which is also called internet marketing or online
advertising, refers to a set of powerful tools and methodologies used for
promoting products and services through the Internet. It includes a
wider range of marketing elements than traditional business marketing
due to the extra channels and marketing mechanisms available on the
Internet [11].
The media used in online marketing can be divided into three groups:
Paid, Owned and Earned [12]. Paid media include channels like Google
Adwords, Facebook paid ads, and display marketing. Owned media, as
domain knowledge, encompass channels like website, list of customers
for sending e-mails, and a blog that has an active readership. Earned
media consists of organic press (social media accounts, mentions on
other blogs). Altogether, these make up the foundation of online
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marketing. While content marketing is dealing mainly with owned
media (a company’s blog, a website); it’s possible to make the whole big
online marketing machine work. A well-made content marketing
strategy is aimed at engaging people, and it leads to the creation of the
own audience of loyal customers.
In case when the marketer waves using content marketing and keeps
pushing advertising to people, regardless of his company’s reputation,
he will most likely fail. Firstly, all these aggressive methods again
remind of the era of “flashy” advertising, but people have already
learned to ignore most of them. Secondly, even if the customer has
decided to buy some product on the Internet, he will apparently conduct
a small research on the product and the company by looking for
comments, reviews etc.
Nowadays people wish to see comprehensive information about the
products they would like to buy, so that they are able to make a proper
choice. Comparing to the classical paid search, content marketing is an
asset that will provide ROI (Return on Investments) [13] for a long
period of time after it is created, whereas advertising stops sending
traffic as soon as a marketer stops paying the bill (Figure №3).
Figure №3. Ownership benefits [14].
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Content marketing becomes an essential part of the company’s strategy,
which means a part of investment strategy, allocation of budget and
other resources: human, time, selected content media channels, IT tools,
customer reach tools, and also investment to analysis of effectiveness of
the strategy.
1.3 Content Marketing Worldwide
The number of marketers interested in content marketing increases with
time. According to the statistics by Google Trends service, in February
2015 the amount of search queries containing "content marketing"
reached its historical peak (Figure №4).
Figure №4. Google Trends statistics on search query "content marketing" [15].
Additionally, statistics posted on Curata.com claim that 71% of
marketers increase investment in content marketing [16]. That is to say
that more companies are ready to appropriate their money for content
marketing and change their previous marketing strategies. The changes
have touched employees, too - now 43% of companies have an executive
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in their organization who is directly responsible for an overall content
marketing strategy (statistics as of December 2014) [16]. Great attention
paid to content marketing facilitated the establishment of the companies
offering content marketing as an outsourcing. In 2010 The Content
Marketing Institute (CMI) [17], the leading specialist for content
marketing regarded as the foremost authority in the sphere, was
founded. They publish books, run conferences and webinars. Experts
from CMI offer consultations for marketers in the sphere of content
marketing. Recently some companies offering content marketing services
started to produce their own content marketing platforms. These
platforms concentrate to the aspect of marketing and to the IT
infrastructure for online presence and spreading, getting feedbacks from
customers and increasing visibility by search engine optimization (SEO).
During the last few years, the situation in this sphere in Czech Republic
has changed as well. The amount of companies specializing on content
marketing has increased. Moreover, a huge step forward is The
Marketing Festival [18], which was firstly launched in 2013. Events like
this enable to boost the level of competency of the Czech specialists, and
also attract new marketers interested in modern marketing trends.
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2. Content Marketing Process
There are many different methods for organizing content marketing
activities, all of which eventually narrow down to the fact that the whole
process is divided into several stages. The leading provider of content
marketing software Kapost offers, for example, to build a Content
Marketing Machine that outputs compelling, relevant content that
attracts leads at the top of the purchase funnel and leads them down it
[19]. This machine includes the following elements: plan, team, production,
ideas, audience development, conversion, measure & optimize. Authors from
The Content Marketing Institute, in their turn, wrote an e-book called
"The CMI content marketing framework. 7 building blocks to success", in
which, based on their experience and the experience of their clients, they
offer a framework form that includes seven components: plan, audience,
story, channels, process, conversations, and measurement. They view these
elements as the building blocks of a broader methodology - framework
marketers can regularly reference as they build their own content
marketing programs [20].
Based on different variants of organization of content marketing
activities, I took their main ideas and created my own version of the
content marketing process, which better suits to the goals I established in
the beginning of the thesis. The whole process is divided into 5 parts
which I will consider in this section in order of their application.
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2.1 Research and Analysis
Conducting research and analysis should always be the first procedures
for every marketer, especially for those who just started doing business.
Here we can draw an analogy with any sphere that requires sequential
approach, for instance, with medicine. When a doctor has to cure a man,
he would never start a treatment with using random techniques, hoping
that one of them will cure the patient. In the first place, the doctor has to
examine the patient, run necessary tests and begin the treatment only
after the illness was diagnosed. The same is true for any kind of
marketing. Marketer should begin with a detailed study of the market
and customer needs. Therefore, what exactly content marketing research
gives? Firstly, marketer will know how well his business goals are
related to the real situation on the market in a particular area, what are
competitors' strengths and weaknesses, and, most importantly, how his
audience looks like and what are peoples’ needs and desires. Doing
content marketing research will help to create a picture of an ideal
customer, hence it will be easier to continue the work, because all the
following activities are based on data obtained during content marketing
research.
Aiming to learn more about the techniques and methods of content
marketing research and analysis, I came to conclusion that today there is
not only a great amount of them, but there is also different software that
can facilitate the process greatly. At this research stage, the main thing is
not to miss anything, because the more precise information is gathered,
the more successful can be the content marketing strategy. Based on
recommendations of experts in content marketing, I created a graphic
illustrating the elements that are worth paying attention to while doing
the research and carried out a detailed study on each of them (Figure
№5).
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Figure №5. Content marketing research [own graphic].
2.1.1 The Motivation Related to a Business Plan
Proper motivation is an important aspect at this stage. Beginning with
the content marketing research, marketer should conduct an audit of a
business plan: check whether the overall business objectives have
changed and review mission and strategy as a whole. Content marketing
strategy should also meet main business goals. Such audit and refreshing
of the business plan will give necessary motivation for the further actions
at this stage. And it is worth to note that the proper motivation consists
not only of creation of profit, but, what is more important, of helping
people and providing them a certain value.
In my particular case, I did not have a documented business plan at the
beginning, thus I had to create one which includes the business
description, mission, main business objectives and financial aspects. This
documented plan helped me to follow the methods I considered in my
thesis work, especially in this research part.
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2.1.2 Audience Research
Audience is not an abstract definition. These are real people who spend
their time online - at work or in their free time. As of year 2014, the
world population is now more than 7 billion people, 40.4% of who have
Internet access [21]. The main goal of the audience research is to identify
the audience among millions of Internet users and get to know them. If
the research is done properly, 30% of success is already reached in
accomplishing content marketing objectives.
The most appropriate way to start the audience research is to prepare
interviews with existing customers, but surveys and questionnaires set in
right places will be helpful, too. For the purposes of this research it is
necessary to create a chart that contains a few questions aimed to divide
the audience into several segments in the future. This chart may include
basic demographic data (such as age, sex, marital status), more detailed
information (education level, occupation, income level), as well as issues
related to a specific area (Figure №6).
On the Internet there are a lot of web services for creating tailored polls
and surveys. On Facebook or Vkontakte (the largest social network for
Russian-speaking users [22]) it is possible to create a poll and post it on
your personal page or on a community page. If marketer already has a
client database, he might use it to send emails with surveys to the
customers. Alternatively, marketer can address some influencers that
have a wide audience of readers and ask them to help with the research.
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Figure №6. Example of an interview checklist [own graphic].
Besides traditional marketing tools for providing audience research,
there is a helpful way to collect valuable information about the audience
- to become a part of the communities in which potential customers are
active. Depending on the audience, it is possible to find a variety of them
in large social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest or YouTube.
There are plenty of different affinity groups, so it could be easy to find
the right ones and start the research.
At the beginning, it is not primarily important to join the conversations,
but carefully observe, listen, and try to understand the audience’s
mindset. A lot of content marketers also consider that listening is a key
research activity and it must be done before planning any following
work [23]. This step will give marketer some valuable information about
people’s current interests, needs and problems, because Internet is the
place where individuals are not afraid to express their views or to
complain about something. Marketer should also notice audience’s
positive and negative experiences with competition as it might be useful
for creating individual strategy later.
In the introduction to his popular book "Likeable Social Media" Dave
Kerpen described the following real life story:
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I was standing in line to check in at Las Vegas' then-trendiest hotel in town, the Aria,
for nearly an hour (...). Frustrated, I pulled out my BlackBerry and tweeted, "No Vegas
hotel could be worth this long wait. Over an hour to check in at the Aria." Interestingly
enough, the Aria didn't tweet back to me, but a competitor did. Just two minutes later I
saw a tweet from the Rio Hotel: "Sorry about the bad experience, Dave. Hope the rest of
your stay in Vegas goes well." Guess where I ended up staying the next time I went to
Las Vegas. The hotel used social media to listen and to be responsive, showing a little
empathy to the right person at the right time. An ad or a push-marketing message
simply wouldn't have worked. But its ability to listen, to respond, and be empathic did
[7]. This example clearly shows that it is important to be present in social
networks nowadays, especially for startups, and to listen, observe and
help people without being obtrusive and materialistic.
In photography business, the Internet nowadays is an indispensable tool
for gaining clients. The majority of potential customers begin their search
for a photographer on the Internet; the smaller part is guided by friends’
and relatives’ recommendations. Recently I conducted a survey for
members of the group Pozor!Brno [24] on Vkontakte. The members of the
group are mostly young people studying or working in Brno, Czech
Republic, and all of them might need a photographer in the future (the
group has 1,690 members, 690 of which live in Brno). 102 people
responded to the survey and the following statements were discovered.
To the question “Which factors are guiding you in choosing a photographer?”
67 people responded “My own preference”. This means that they choose a
photographer judging by his works exposed on the Internet (since,
otherwise, it is difficult to find out the content most photographers are
shooting). 23 people answered “Friends’ and relatives’ recommendations”,
in other words, people trust their friends’ and relatives’ experiences with
particular photographers, which confirms the undeniable force of word-
of-mouth marketing.
Social networking as an essential tool for conducting research and
building the own audience is still underestimated by many small
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businesses. It is not enough to be present on the Internet, maintain a
dynamic website and expect that people will find you. Furthermore, in
such professions like photographer or graphic designer, the results are
evaluated primarily visually. Therefore, being present on social
networking websites is incredibly important for canvassing the
customers.
2.1.2.1 Buyer Personas
Content creation cannot be performed without a reference to the
audience, for which the content is going to be produced. In the previous
section I explained that the audience research gives marketer highly
valuable data about existing and potential customers, but this data could
be also used for creating buyer personas, which are going to help
marketer to produce more targeted content. From the audience’s
perspective, content targeted towards a persona is more likely to
resonate because it speaks to a specific persona instead of the general
population [25].
The term "buyer persona" originates from marketing and means, in
common, "a semi-fictional representation of an ideal customer based on market
research and real data about existing customers" [25]. Some authors suggest
more detailed definitions, like, for example, Tony Zambito, a leading
authority in buyer insights and buyer personas. He defines buyer
personas as "research-based archetypal (modeled) representations of who
buyers are, what they are trying to accomplish, what goals drive their behavior,
how they think, how they buy, and why they make buying decisions" [26].
According to the definitions, buyer persona is not simply a description of
the buyer; it is a detailed, researched-based representation of him. Thus,
the aim of researching and modeling buyer personas is to help marketer
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gain deeper understanding of buyers and their buying behaviors. As a
result, well-created personas will lead to successful content marketing
and, respectively, to better ROI.
Persona's prototype could be the existing customer that represents some
group of other customers. If gaining more clients is not the only one goal
in content marketing, then it does not have to be based on real
customers, but on people that are going to consume the content [27].
The final personas’ profiles should include minimally the following
parts:
• Name (giving names to buyer personas simplifies the process of
theirs application in the future)
• Background (basic details about an ideal customer: demographics,
education, job, income, location, hobbies)
• Challenges/problem area (persona’s challenges, emotions which
accompany those challenges)
• Main sources of information (where persona does his or her
research before purchasing, which previous source of content was
used)
• Preferred content medium (the way persona likes to absorb a
content)
• Quotes (actual quotes gathered during interviews will enliven
personas)
• The solution of persona’s problems
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2.1.3 Competitive Research
Regardless of a field in which marketer works or plans to create his
business, competitive research should always be included in this first
content marketing research step. This will not only allow to get
acquainted with the market from the inside, but will also help to build an
individual content marketing strategy, based on competitors’ advantages
and disadvantages.
The optimal way to start with the competitive research is to begin with
popular search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Seznam in Czech
Republic [28], and Yandex in Russia [29]. This will help to identify the
major competitors that are present online. Since my thesis is focused on
content marketing on the Internet, I do not consider traditional
marketing channels (printed TV, etc.). In addition to search engines, for
more in-depth competitive monitoring, the following services can be
used:
• Google Trends [15] (A public web facility of Google Inc. that
allows to see what people have been searching for with Google
[30])
• Google Alerts [31] (another web facility of Google Inc. that
monitors the Web for words and phrases)
There are also many commercial web services that simplify the
competitive research process, such as SpyFu [32] - this web service
exposes the competitors' search marketing formula, helps to define their
keyword strategy, organic search rank and every ad variation the
competitor is using.
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For gained data to be properly collected and systematized, it is
recommended to set a framework for this purpose. Simple spreadsheet
in Microsoft Excel will meet the requirements for that. It is necessary to
create multiple columns describing the competitor:
• Name (and location if relevant) and URL
• The products and services the competitor is offering
• The content they are publishing on their website, blog and on
social networking sites
• Their social media strategy
• Their SEO strategy
• Their level of social success
• The competitor's overall strengths and weaknesses [19]
Concerning content marketing, the third column is the most crucial. The
analysis of the content the competitors are publishing on their blogs and
social networks helps to understand what their content marketing
strategies are, who they are trying to engage and how well they manage
it. The competitive research is not a one-time activity; it should be
included in the future content marketing plan and be constantly
updated, according to the competitors’ changes. Thus, marketer will
have up to date information on the latest trends in content marketing in
his field and will be able to move his own strategy to the next level.
For photographers, the competitive research is particularly useful when
analyzing their competitors’ activities in social media: the way they
promote products and offers and the way they communicate with the
audience. Of course, social media success is not always aligned with the
quality of photographs, but rather with the active promotion. As a result,
this may mislead beginner photographers that did not gain enough
experience and do not have a good portfolio yet, but are trying to
succeed in social media in every way. Therefore, photographer has to
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decide on the content marketing strategy, what results he’d like to
achieve, and what metrics have a bigger value for him. For example, one
photographer’s group on a social networking website might contain
about 1000 members, who joined the group accidentally. On the other
hand, there is a group with just 200 members, and all of them were
acquired by photographer as a result of a careful analysis of the market.
The possibility that the second group contains more potential customers
than the first one is more realistic.
2.1.4 Keyword Research
Statistically, 93 % of online experiences begin with a search engine, and
search is the №1 driver of traffic to content sites, beating social media by
more than 300% [33]. Therefore, to be reachable online for existing and
potential customers, it is reasonable to include the keyword research into
this step.
A keyword, in the context of search engine optimization, is a particular
word or phrase that describes the contents of a Web page. Keywords are
intended to act as shortcuts that sum up the entire page. Keywords form
part of the Web page’s metadata and help search engines match the page
with an appropriate search query [34]. Conducting keywords research
will not only help the marketer to optimize effectively a website or a blog
for search engines, but will also allow clear understanding of the
customers' wants, modern trends and, perhaps, finding some problems
and gaps on the market.
As the first step, it is necessary to gather a list of keywords that people
can use in searching for the information in the particular sphere. The list
can include old keywords that have been used by marketer earlier, as
well as those that he would like to use in the future. This list of keywords
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must be checked on a level of popularity and competition. For this
purpose we can use a tool by Google - Google Adwords/keyword
planner [35]. The tool allows analyzing search volume for the list of
keywords, get the traffic forecast, determine the level of competition and
then to create advertising campaigns.
It is vital to note all the indicators the tool offers, because if there is a
large number of pages targeting the keywords, then it would be more
difficult to rank them. A perfect keyword is one that has lots of searches
(high popularity) and very few people actively trying to rank for it (low
competition) [19]. Keyword planner is also able to suggest a list of
related keywords that might be useful for the research.
Activities of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) also include the concept
of targeting so-called long-tail keywords. These keywords are not
always longer, but they are more specific and have very low search
volume. Visitors are more likely to use them when they are closer to a
point-of-purchase [36]. The term "Long-Tail" relates to the section of a
chart that SEO marketers often use for visualization keyword strategy. A
graph below, created by Rand Fishkin (one of the leading visionaries in
the SEO industry) is one of those charts that represents the global search
demand curve (Figure №7).
According to the graph, top keywords (shown as “fat head” and
“chunky middle”) represent only 30 % of all keywords, but give a lot of
traffic, while the rest of the keywords do not get that much searches, but
represent the remaining 70% of the global search demand together.
33
Figure №7. The search demand curve [37].
It is worth remembering about the long-tail keywords while conducting
the research, because this type of keywords will bring better quality
traffic and higher conversion rate. Long-tail keywords are also less
competitive and it would be easier to rank for them in search engines.
Concerning photography business, both general and more specific
keywords are important for search engine optimization. The first thing a
person will do when searching for a photographer in his city is typing
“Photographer in <place>“or “Photoshoot in <place>” in search queries.
These keywords are very popular and competitive, as almost each
photographer is trying to rank for them in organic search or by buying
ads. But it is necessary to use both popular and long-tail keywords in a
keywords strategy to become “visible” for customers. I ran a few of the
most relevant for my business keywords in Keyword planner tool [35] to
find out how popular and competitive they are (Figure №8).
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Figure №8. Example of running keywords in the Keyword planner tool [35].
The results were expectable - almost every photographer is trying to
optimize his website for these keywords and it would be very hard to
rank for them organically. However, nowadays Google’s search
algorithms are more focused on relevant valuable content. In other
words, content marketing is crucial for search engine optimization, too.
2.1.5 Content Audit
Content audit is an important step in this large-scale research stage. It
involves viewing all the content on a website and assessing their relative
strengths and weaknesses in order to prioritize future marketing
activities [38]. Content audit is also crucial for understanding and
evaluating the performance of the content against business goals, user
needs, editorial standards, and performance factors such as search
engine optimization and content use or web analytics [39]. It is essential
in the cases when marketer has already produced some content, but is
not sure if the content works.
The content audit process includes content inventory and content analysis.
The content inventory helps the marketer to collect all data about the
35
content in one place, so all the following work will be easier and more
efficient. But before conducting content audit, marketer should answer
the question: what is the reason for undergoing the process? Content
audit can pursue the following objectives:
• For improving search engine optimization (SEO)
• For content marketing [39]
If in the first case content marketing data can be omitted, for content
marketing it is better to consider SEO, too.
As mentioned above, the content audit process starts with the content
inventory, which is in fact a very time-consuming activity. But it also
depends on the amount of produced content which includes social
media accounts, owned websites, blogs, and guest posts. The main
output of the content inventory process is a spreadsheet representing all
content that had been produced. The spreadsheet may include
quantitative and qualitative content parameters. The quantitative
parameters are page URL, date audited, page title, website category, language,
page meta description, content type (text, images, video, audio, infographic),
keywords, word count, alt tags, internal links, target audience (or buyer
persona), call-to-action, number of views, social activity (likes, shares,
comments). The list of parameters may vary depending on objectives. The
qualitative parameters sound more like questions:
• What is the main purpose of a particular piece of content?
Is it useful for a customer?
• Does it contain branding and related tone of communication?
• Does it have some grammar or stylistic mistakes?
• Is the content evergreen or is it outdated?
• Is the content well-formatted?
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We can add one more qualitative parameter to this list, which is no less
important - To which stage of a buying process does the content belong? These
stages are awareness, consideration and decision, and each piece of
content should have been produced with the specific purpose [40].
To make the whole process of collecting content data easier, there are
many paid and free tools designed to help with it, for example,
Screaming Frog SEO Spider [41]. It is a small desktop program which can
be installed locally on PC, Mac or Linux machine and which tracks
websites’ links, images, CSS, scripts and applications from an SEO
perspective (Figure №9).
Eventually, it presents data in tabs by type and allows user to filter for
common SEO issues or export the data into Excel. Collected in such way,
information can be very useful for filling in the content audit
spreadsheet.
Figure №9. The Screaming Frog SEO Spider software installed locally on PC [41].
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Once the spreadsheet is completed, it is required to conclude on the
results of the content inventory: whether some content does not work
anymore and has to be removed, or if it requires some improvements. In
any case, the content audit has to be conducted before planning further
content marketing activities.
Concerning photography business, doing content audit is a reasonable
activity. The widely used channels for distribution photographers’
content are personal websites, blogs, social media profiles, communities
and websites specializing in publishing professional photography works,
for example, 500px [42] and Flickr [43]. Content audit should focus
primarily on published online portfolio, information about the
photographer (it should be relevant), and correspondence to SEO. In
general, content audit for photographers would not differ much from the
standard scheme described above in this section.
2.1.6 Google Analytics Data
Google Analytics [44] is one of the most convenient traffic analysis web
services. As on first quarter of 2015, this service is used by 51.3% of all
websites, which means that its sustainability is proven-in-use by the
majority of top website owners (Figure №10). If marketer has Google
Analytics tool installed on his website for some time and has the
knowledge of current analytical data, it would be useful to save it before
composing the content marketing strategy. Thus, evaluation of the
effectiveness of the strategy will be easier [45].
Depending on the goals, different metrics might be saved. The following
are the most common: the total number of visits, number of page views,
average session duration, bounce rate, the number of new & returning users,
conversion rate, and external links.
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Figure №10. Google Analytics popular website verticals [46].
2.2 Content Marketing Strategy
Previous step consisted in gathering necessary information about the
audience, the competitors, past online activities and produced content. In
reliance on research data, a marketer would make up his personal
content marketing strategy, a plan, according to which the targeted
content will be produced. In short, the content marketing strategy is a
combination of research data and evaluation of it in the form of a content
marketing plan.
Based on survey conducted by The Content Marketing Institute in 2014,
83% of B2B marketers have a content marketing strategy, which means
that at the present time businesses are taking content marketing
seriously and planning their activities in this marketing sector ahead. But
only 35% have documented it [47].
The strategy doesn’t necessarily have to be a single written document,
but this format will help to structure the data and plan the following
content marketing steps more effective. Documented content marketing
strategy allows a marketer to contribute in it in any time in the future, as
the situation on the market or his own goals change.
39
Figure №11. Percentage of B2B marketers who have a content marketing strategy [47].
Developing the strategy is a time-consuming work, but with well
gathered research data this process can be easier. In addition to the
general information about the content marketing goals, the output
document will include the following elements (Figure №12):
Figure №12. Important parts of the content marketing strategy [44].
The first three elements had been done during the Research & Analysis
stage, and the results of these studies need to be added to the content
marketing strategy. The next element called “Content ideas” contain
results of the keyword research, a list of ideas that are in accordance with
the main content marketing goals, and content formats suitable for
different buyer personas. The essence of elements “Content
40
propagation” and “Measurement and evaluation” I will examine in
related sections of the thesis work. And finally the Editorial calendar -
the main output of the entire content marketing strategy. This document
presents conclusions made after conducted research work in a form of
categorized calendar with additional important information.
2.2.1 Content Ideas
The undeniable source of content topics for the future are the results of
audience research (the results of surveys, interviews with existing
clients) as well as the outputs from the competitive research
(competitors’ weaknesses, identified information gaps on the market).
And also the results of the conducted content audit which can show the
lack of a particular kind of content or topic untouched. Furthermore,
after doing properly the keyword research, a marketer should have a list
of keywords that will prove useful for a process of generating content
ideas. In addition to these data a few other resources can be used. Two
leading content marketing authors Joe Pulizzi and Newt Barrett
published an eBook called “Get Content. Get Customers” [49] in which
they proposed a new method that could help with generating content
ideas depending on four groups of questions that each piece of content
have to answer. This method is called the B.E.S.T. formula, which stands
for Behavioral, Essential, Strategic and Targeted marketing.
• Behavioral - Everything we communicate with our customers has a
purpose. What do we want them to do?
• Essential - Deliver information that our best prospects need to
succeed at work or in life
• Strategic - Our content marketing efforts must be an integral part
of our overall business strategy
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• Targeted - We must identify targeted buyers precisely so that we
can create truly relevant content [4]
The authors consider that by using the B.E.S.T. formula marketers can
achieve measurable results. I’m convinced that every method used on
this stage may be helpful, as the more questions a marketer will ask
himself, the more relevant and valuable content he will be able to create.
2.2.2 Content Formats
The content can be presented online in different formats. Depending on
audience’s needs and preferences, available resources and skills, the
following most popular content formats may be chosen:
1. Blog article (a text posted on a website or on social media
websites)
2. Video (can be embedded on a website or posted on video hosting
services)
3. Images (posted on a website or on image hosting services)
4. E-book (a digital publication that is downloadable as PDF)
5. Infographic (a combination of a graphical and textual information
presented in an entertaining way)
6. E-newsletters (publications distributed by e-mail to an opt-in list
of subscribers)
When we select and plan formats for the content, we should pay
attention to the fact that not every content format requires strict
consistency in publishing. If a company maintain a blog, it is desirable to
publish mainly blog articles. But, for example, e-books which though are
very popular among blog readers don’t need to be published that often,
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they rather appear as a result of several articles and studies. The process
of choosing the content format is closely connected with the
Measurement and Evaluation phase. By using available analytical tools
it’s possible to determine the level of success of each content format. In
that way it can emerge that a long article on blog hasn’t met its goals, but
when later it was remade into infographic, the results are better.
Figure №13. Consistency of producing the content [50].
2.2.3 Editorial Calendar
As an output of the content marketing strategy, the editorial calendar has
to be based on all the elements considered before. For developing of the
calendar a marketer can use traditional tools such as spreadsheets in
Microsoft Excel or Google Drive [51]. Because of a freedom these tools
offer, the traditional approach is more flexible. A user can create any big
and categorized calendar and share it with the people working on
content producing. There is also a modern way to design the calendar by
using plugins for different CMS (Content Management System).
Currently the “Editorial Calendar” [52] is the most popular plugin for
the Wordpress websites. It has been downloaded by 562 897 users in all
time. [53] The plugin gives a user an overview of the blog and when each
43
post will be published. But if a marketer is going to create his own
spreadsheet using traditional software, there are several essential
elements to a successful editorial calendar:
1. The date (when the piece of content will be published)
2. The headline and the topic
3. The author
4. The content format
5. The keywords and tags
6. The call-to-action
7. The buyer persona, buying stage
8. The delivery channels
9. The current status of the content
Figure №14. The Editorial Calendar plugin [52].
In case of using the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, we can create multiple
tabs in one file where each tab is designed for specific calendar - the
main editorial calendar, the calendar with ideas, and one for social media
publications.
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2.3 Content Creation
At the stage of content creation the main process baseline is the content
marketing strategy, which spells out the buyer personas, the content
ideas, the preferable formats and the distribution channels. This stage
includes the selection of a suitable Content Management System (CMS)
and the establishment of the process of creating content with additional
plugins installed within the CMS. Also, this step provides for the actions
necessary for SEO optimization of an each piece of content, as these
aspects should be taken into account while working on the content. An
important part of this step is also such a technique as content
repurposing, which helps to increase the efficiency of already created
content.
2.3.1 Content Management System
When creating content, all the available data should be taken into
account, so the content can relate to the company’s and audience’s needs.
However, it would be difficult to establish the process on a permanent
basis and to optimize the content for a further distribution without an
appropriate CMS.
Content Management System, also called a Web Manager System is a
software or a group or suite of applications and tools that enable
multiple users with different permission levels to seamlessly create, edit,
review and publish website content without the need to have HTML
knowledge [54]. Today there are three most popular CMS among
websites’ owners - Wordpress [52], Drupal [55] and Joomla [56]. Current
statistics says that 60,6% of the websites use none of the content
management systems, but among the rest of websites the Wordpress
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CMS leads the way with 23,8%, that is a content management market
share of 60,3% [57].
Figure №15. Usage of content management systems for websites [57].
The process of choosing the appropriate CMS is closely linked with
available technical skills, required website functionality and goals
established in the content marketing strategy. In case of a simple web
page or a blog, the best solution would be the Wordpress CMS. But if
there is a need to build a bigger website with required scalability and
complex content organization or, for example, with an e-shop, the
Drupal could be more suitable. Otherwise, the third CMS Joomla which
was designed to perform as a community platform and bundles an
opportunity to develop a complex website with less effort, can be a good
choice. All these three content management systems have a large
developers’ and users’ community; therefore they come with high
quality detailed documentation. With both Wordpress and Joomla a user
can order a wide range of services and options off the menu to suit his
needs, with Drupal, he will be able to build any website, with all the
privileges of customization that entails [58].
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As the most popular CMS among bloggers is by Wordpress, I’d like to
take a look more closely at this system. A website based on the
Wordpress CMS can be individually adjusted by adding different
plugins to a simple frame, so it becomes more versatile and flexible
publishing system. A Wordpress Plugin is a program, or a set of one or
more functions, written in the PHP scripting language, that adds a
specific set of features or services to the Wordpress weblog, which can be
seamlessly integrated with the weblog using access points and methods
provided by the Wordpress Plugin Application Program Interface (API)
[59]. There is a wide variety of both free and paid plugins that allow
adding some useful functionality to the website. For the purposes of
Content Marketing, the most indispensable plugins are for search engine
optimization, for social media sharing and, if a marketer would like to,
for scheduling the content - The Editorial Calendar plugin [52].
2.3.2 Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a methodology of strategies,
techniques and tactics used to increase the amount of visitors to a
website by obtaining a high-ranking placement in the search results page
of a search engine (SERP) [60].
There are many opinions on the Internet concerning relationships
between SEO and content marketing these days. Some people keep
talking about decreased effectiveness of SEO because of the rapid
development of content marketing. In a recently published article in
“The Guardian” the author said that “Google's preference for content
marketing raises the question of whether the objectivity of algorithms
can account for the subjectivity of quality” [61]. Many SEO experts
started to be nervous when content marketing gathered pace. But despite
47
all arguments saying that glory days of search engine optimization are
behind, it’s obvious that all advantages of content marketing are
meaningless since SEO techniques are unused. In a broader context these
two complement each other: SEO states the requirements and content
marketing fulfill them, SEO demands content and content marketing is
content [62]. The main difference between them is that SEO is narrower
and more technical, while content marketing is broader and more
holistic.
An effective content marketing strategy include a SEO strategy which
describes a plan of optimization of produced content in accordance with
recent changes made in functionality of search engines. Primarily it
concerns the algorithms they use for ranking websites. A few years ago,
to tell search engine that the webpage contains information relevant to
the search query, it was sometimes enough to add keywords to the Meta
description of the page.
Figure №16. Example of a Meta description of a webpage.
A search engine by Google is now using a big amount of different
ranking algorithms, among which the oldest one is the PageRank link
analysis algorithm. It assigns a numeric value representing how
important a page is on the web. Google explains that when one webpage
links to another, it’s effectively casting a vote for the other page [63].
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Besides PageRank there are few important algorithms able to affect page
ranking: Panda (was released in February 2011), Penguin (April 2012),
Hummingbird (August 2013). All these three algorithms dictate terms for
the content to be good ranked in Google search engine. All of them are
aimed at providing a user with high quality and verified content.
In 2011, one of Google’s employees wrote in the Webmaster center blog
an article with a list of questions by which Google is guiding in
developing their search algorithms. All points listed in the article can be
used as rules in content marketing strategy. Among these questions are
the following:
• Would you trust the information presented in this article?
• Does the site have duplicate, overlapping, or redundant articles
on the same or similar topics with slightly different keyword
variations?
• Does this article have spelling, stylistic, or factual errors?
• Does the page provide substantial value when compared to other
pages in search results?
• Does this article have an excessive amount of ads that distract
from or interfere with the main content?
• Are the articles short, unsubstantial, or otherwise lacking in
helpful specifics [64]?
Consequently, if a marketer would be guided by similar characteristics
of the content, there is a high probability that his website will be ranked
well. But in addition to these wide rules, a few more technical
specifications concerning SEO are needed to be added in content
marketing strategy. Despite the fact that principles of working with SEO
have changed, keywords are still an important part of optimization of
the content for search engines. In the past, Google has been concentrated
on the exact keyword match, now on a topical match. The keyword list
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composed during the research stage would play an important role in the
process of content creation. Through the example of a standard web
page, or a blog post, the target keyword should be included into the:
• Page Title. It is a text that will show up in a browser tab and then
at the top of a Google search listing.
• URL. The keyword should be included in the slug of an URL.
• Meta Description. It is a short text describing of each page’s
contents, which can help search engine to match a query. It is also
will be visible to people who find a website via search engine.
• Content. The keyword should be mentioned within the content of
a post, and, better, included in various sub-headlines.
Within the Wordpress CMS, adding SEO data to pages is easier with
using the “Wordpress SEO” plugin developed by Yoast [65]. The plugin
allows a user to optimize a post to a particular keyword by checking
whether this word appears in all parts of the page. It’s is also able to
adjust the post for social sharing and make a whole SEO analysis of the
page.
Figure №17. Wordpress SEO plugin by Yoast installed on a blog [66].
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New trends in the development of search engines show that now SEO
and content marketing are closely related to each other and it’s not
necessary to separate these two areas, but rather try to understand how
to make content marketing more effective with the help of SEO
techniques.
2.3.3 Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is a part of a whole online marketing system. An
influential person is someone who is recognized as a thought leader or
expert on a topic. People listen to them when it comes to that topic. An
influencer can change someone’s behavior or inspire them to consider to
new ideas [66]. Collaboration with influencers can be conducted on each
content marketing stage from research and content planning on out to
content creation and distribution. Their role in content marketing is high-
value, because these persons are able to boost each activity a marketer is
doing.
Influencers come in many varieties and are motivated by different
things. A Traackr company that has created an influencer management
platform called Traackr recently published their guide explaining
different types of influencers, each of whose comes laden with various
sizes of metrics for a size (audience size), resonance (engagement power)
and relevance (contextual fit) [67]. Thus the Expert Influencer’s type has
a big resonance, but a small audience, as opposed to The Celebrity,
which disposes the big amount of followers, but has not so big
engagement power and contextual fit. Each type of influencer may affect
content marketing when collaboration is doing in a right way.
Particularly on this step of content creation the influencers’ value can be
expressed in many ways:
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1. By getting inspired by influencers’ content
2. By involving influencers in content creation
3. By supporting influencers’ content
4. By co-creating content
The range of possibilities of involving influencers in content creation is
wide and might advance the overall content marketing strategy and
marketing efforts respectively.
2.4 Socialization and Content Distribution
2.4.1 Socialization
Social networks play an undeniably large role in business today.
Originally designed for communication, they can help to establish a
contact with customers, as well as to build own audience of people
interested in company’s products or services. Content marketing should
include the creating and maintaining of social networks profiles, as these
places allow a marketer to make a statement about his content.
Regardless of the specific social media website, each of them enables to
create a corporate profile containing basic information. The emphasis
should be placed on the quality of this information, rather than on the
quantity. No less important are graphics elements such as logotype and
photographs. Poor quality of these elements could reduce the credibility
of the company and the overall company’s impression. Maintaining
social media profiles should be a regular activity done in accordance
with the company’s image and audience’s preferences. An important
part of these activities is the communication with customers, answering
their questions, reacting to positive and negative feedbacks.
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A good example showing that social networking websites can be a part
of a Customer Relationship Management system (CRM) is a chain of
small cafes in Brno called "Trdlokafe" [68]. They maintain a profile on
Facebook where a person responsible for social media replies on
customers’ questions, reacts on their feedbacks and complaints. Once a
customer leaves his opinion concerning the product, this person
immediately reacts to it letting the customer know that a company cares
about clients and the quality of service. If all complaints and customers’
comments are ignoring by employee, it would reduce the overall
company’s credibility.
Figure №18. Case study “Trdlokafe” [68].
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2.4.2 Content Distribution
As was mentioned in the section 2.1 of the thesis, content can be
distributed through three types of channels: Owned, Earned and Paid.
All channels could be used for distributing the same piece of content
[69]. But the owned and the earned channels are more significant for
content marketing, as this discipline is focused on creating valuable
content and promoting it to people with the purpose to engage and
educate them, so the earned media are the natural consequence of
marketer’s efforts.
High quality, useful content has no use without appropriate promotion,
and Social media websites has become the most suitable tool in it. In
addition to maintaining social media profiles it’s important to give a
website’s visitor a chance to express his opinion upon the content. To do
this, a marketer can install different features allowing consumer to
interact with the content via his own social media profiles. For example,
to comment an article by signing in Facebook account [70] or share the
content with a friend. Thus, the website will always be "visible" in social
networks. Especially for photographs and graphics, the Pinterest plugin
can be installed [71]. It allows visitors to save a specific image from the
website into their own Pinterest account. The saved image will always be
accompanied by a reference to the source, which is a good additional
channel for content distribution carried by the readers themselves.
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Figure №19. Social media plugins installed on a website [72].
In addition to connecting websites with social media, social networking
websites provide an opportunity to maintain corporate accounts, which
aren’t only a great source of traffic, but also a platform for publishing of
a separate content designed specifically for a particular social network.
At the moment, the largest social networking site is Facebook,
numbering 1 310 000 000 of monthly active users [73]. According to a
study published by Shareholic in January 2015, Facebook drives a ¼ of
overall traffic, and its share of traffic swelled 277.26% (18.10 percentage
points) since December 2011 [74].
With the determining social networks strategy the channel plan will be
helpful. It might include specific goals that would be achieved with a
certain social media as well as metrics specifically designed for this
channel. Since each individual social network differs, the composition of
the audience will vary, too. People who prefer to communicate with
friend and be aware of new things are likely to use such networks like
Facebook, Vkontakte or Instagram. On the other hand, no less important
can be a segment of people interested in business, IT, finance, and
spending more time on, for instance, LinkedIn. In short, each individual
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social channel attracts different audiences, so the content distribution
should be carried out in an appropriate format suiting to this particular
audience.
Figure №20. Social media traffic referrals statistics by Shareaholic [74].
2.4.3 Link Building
An important role in content distribution plays the Link Building
technique, which title clearly speaks for itself. This technique consists in
is gaining back links from reliable sources that affects website’s
ranking in search engines. Link building is one of the basic SEO
concepts, but it’s also closely linked to content marketing, as the key
element for obtaining external links is publishing informative, valuable
content. Link-related factors are the major part of search engines’
ranking criteria [75]. Through links, search engines can not only analyze
the popularity of websites based on the number of popularity of pages
linking to them, but also important metrics like trust, spam and
authority. Trustworthy sites tend to link to other trusted sites, while
spam websites receive a small amount of links from trusted sources [76].
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Since it’s hard to define precise metrics used by search engines in
evaluating the links, some factors are well-known by SEO experts.
Among them are the popularity of a website linking to ours, links from
websites within a topic-specific community, the anchor text, links from highly-
trusted domains, the freshness of gained links, and the social sharing. Even
though social media shares aren’t as valuable as normal links from the
other website, they are able to support the popularity level, which
matters in search engines ranking, too. Link building can be performed
both by a publisher and by people, who would like to refer to a valuable
content.
Figure №21. Link sources in Link Building [77].
The figure №21 above shows the simplicity level of the gaining backlinks
to a website. The publisher himself can conduct a link building
campaign, which would include a strategy of building backlinks to his
website by producing guest posts, commenting on competitors’ websites
or sector-specific forums, sending email to clients and applying to
influencers. But the hardest part of this pyramid is to gain links from
high authority websites, since it’s possible only by providing related,
useful content, which people would like to link to.
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2.4.5 Content Repurposing
Already published and promoted content have an opportunity to target
more readers and potential clients if content repurposing will be
conducted. It doesn’t mean that a marketer have to continually reuse an
old piece of content, but rather alter it to make the content fresh and
appealing to a new audience.
There are many approaches that could be used for content repurposing.
One of them is optimizing the content for a different buyer’s journey
stage or a buyer’s persona. A common structure of a buyer’s journey
includes the Awareness stage, the Consideration stage and the Decision
stage. People in each stage have their own set of distinct behaviors,
information needs, and knowledge consumption preferences [78].
Therefore, an article which was written, for example, for Persona 2 in the
Awareness stage could be changed into daily tips format to move this
persona on the next stage of the journey.
Figure №22. Content repurposing [78].
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Content can be also repurposed for different technologies and channels
which readers use to consume this content. Based on analytic data, it’s
possible to define which types of devices are used more often, and what
type of content and a channel these consumers prefer.
2.5 Measurement Practice
The content marketing process - is a system of marketing activities which
every marketer and a company establish for themselves individually.
Each part of this process is responsible for the execution of a certain
stage on the way to getting the desired results. In order to ascertain
whether the whole process and its particular parts are moving in a right
direction, the specific measurement practice is required. This practice is
built on four cornerstones:
Figure №23. Four parts of the measurement practice [own graphic].
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They are four distinctive disciplines, and they are important because,
together, they connect the dots between observation, data collection, the
development of insights, and the conversion of data into business
intelligence [79].
• The Monitoring consists of establishing listening outputs and
using them. The role of its activity relative to measurement is the
identification and sorting of data, which have to be measured. In
forthright terms, this process qualifies data without quantifying it.
• The Measurement process then is the systematic assignment of
an empirical value by using most essential metrics. It focuses on
hard numbers to any point of interest relating to the content
marketing strategy.
• The Analysis step is the interpretation of the measured and
quantified data, with the aim of drawing insights from it. The
object of properly focused analysis is to create a comprehensive
narrative for the whole content marketing program’s over time.
• The Report of analyzed data could be made for a person
responsible for making further decisions, or for a marketer
himself, to get the general outlook on how good the content
marketing activities were established.
2.5.1 Content Marketing Metrics
The major deficiencies in content marketing can be the creation and
distribution of the content without using measuring indicators of its
effectiveness, or focusing on an entirely different metrics than are
necessary for the business in accordance with the content marketing
strategy. Since the purpose of an each strategy varies, there is a need of
applying different metrics.
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Metrics are being defined as the parameters or measures of quantitative
assessment used for measurement, comparison or to track performance or
production [80]. At the moment, there are many analytical tools allowing
to precisely monitoring these indicators, but besides choosing the right
tool, marketers have to define which metrics suit their strategy best of
all.
The first part of the measurement practice, the monitoring, supposes the
maintaining of a list of everything a marketer must measure. All existing
content marketing metrics can relate either to a Performance or
Operations group. The metrics from the Performance group are divided
into four subgroups, according to major stages in the customer journey
(purchase funnel) [1]:
Figure №24. Content marketing performance metrics [own graphic].
Consumption Metrics
This set of metrics allows defining how the content is consuming by
visitors, what kind of content and distribution channels is preferred, and
how the content pursues its objectives. The most used consumption
metrics are:
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• Page views, Unique visitors, Average time on site, Bounce Rate,
Number of visits, % returning, Session duration, Page Depth – for
a website/blog
• Followers, Group members, Link clickthroughs, Engagement,
Reach – for social media
• Clicks, Open rate, RSS subscribers, Unsubscribes – for email
Sharing Metrics
These metrics are aimed to keep track of how the audience is engaged,
and how the content is useful, entertaining and informational, so people
want to share it. Among these metrics are:
• Social media link shares, Retweets, Comments, Likes
Lead Metrics
They show how is content supporting demand generation in terms of
lead generation and lead nurturing (middle-of-the-funnel) [81]:
• New leads generated, Existing leads touched, Content score
Sales Metrics
These metrics give a marketer the information about closed sales, and
how the content is influencing bottom-of-the-funnel result:
• Number of sales, Average size of the sale, Sales velocity
The metrics from the Operations group include production metrics, cost
metrics and ROI metric. Here a marketer doesn’t measure the content’s
performance, but the output and efficiency of the content supply chain [82].
It is crucial for businesses to define what the overall content marketing
costs are, do all content marketing activities help a company to generate
profit.
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Production Metrics
They allow having a look at how the available financial, time and human
resources are being spent on producing content. This set of metrics
includes:
• The amount of time needed to publish a piece of content, The
content frequency level (this metric can be shown as a number of
days between posts and is demonstrating if the frequency of
content publishing is enough for readers to consume the content)
Cost Metrics
These are focused only on financial aspects of content marketing
activities and include:
• Production costs per a piece of content, Distribution costs per post
(social media promoting, link building activities, influencer
marketing)
Return on Investments Metric
This metric summarize the overall effectiveness of content marketing
activities. It is traditionally expressed as a ratio, percentage, or a
relationship between investment and return. The universal formula for
computing ROI looks like the following:
ROI = (gain from investment - cost of investment) ÷ cost of investment
All of the above-considered metrics aim the goal of doing content
marketing, which is focused at bringing marketing efficiency to the
whole business. Only by applying appropriate metrics, regular collecting
data and analyzing the results, we can see whether all spent on content
marketing resources were worthwhile, and what in process is needed to
be improved or even changed.
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2.5.2 Content Marketing Analytic Tools
Every year the number of analytical, measurement and assessment tools
is increasing. There are many both free and commercial tools providing
for marketers, and selecting just one of them is difficult. In addition to
separate web services, there are online insights tool integrated right in
social networking websites. All of them offer an expanded list of
common measuring indicators, as well as specific to a particular platform
metrics (Facebook Insights [83]).
As was mentions in the section 2.1.6 of the thesis, at the moment, Google
Analytics is the most convenient tool, which is used by 51.3% of all
websites. Google Analytics is composed of several components: admin’s
dashboard, different parts presenting analytic data based on users’
segments, integration with Google Adwords web service, e-commerce
analysis, and many other functionalities enabling to monitor, measure,
analyze and report important data.
Figure №25. Example of the Google Analytics report [44].
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Google Analytics works by including a JavaScript code block right on
pages of the website. Google explains the functionality of this web
service: “When users to the website view a page, this code references a
JavaScript file which tent executes the tracking operation for GA. The
tracking operation retrieves data about the page request through various
means and sends this information to the Analytics server via a list of
parameters attached to a single-pixel image request” [84].
The web service allows a marketer not only to monitor and measure
common marketing metrics, but to customize the system, develop own
analytical dashboards, set custom filters and even control goals
accomplishment. To measure, for instance, the amount of sales, sent
orders or eBook downloads (if the website provides this type of
services), it is needed to create separate pages, to which the customers
will be forwarded after finishing the action. Google Analytics provides
an opportunity to create goals for these types of actions, thus to study
out the amount of, for example, downloaded eBooks will be easier.
Besides Google Analytics, in this sphere a marketer can find other tools,
too. Russian company Yandex developed similar analytic tool, called
Yandex.Metrica [85], which is free available and provides a wide range
of functions and options.
Figure №26. Example of the Yandex.Metrica report [85].
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3. Practical Application of the Strategy
3.1 Case Study Lighthousing
In this practical part of the thesis work I would like to introduce the
object of the experiment – The Lighthousing photo blog [86]. Content
marketing is a big system composed of a plurality of components,
actions, methods and approaches. This discipline requires a wide range
of skills from different areas – IT, soft skills, marketing and management.
While individually content marketing methods present no problems and
seem to be easy in theoretical spectrum, to apply the entire set of content
marketing practices to a real business case is a fairly difficult task.
Nevertheless, the third part of the thesis is devoted to the practical
application of proven content marketing methods for the purpose of
achieving main goals of this discipline:
• Reaching customers by delivering content
• Educating customers for gaining their trust
• Changing customers’ behavior by delivering content
• Creating strategy for effective content
Photo business at present times is very closely linked with the Internet,
social media and the presentation of own works in a global network.
Commercial photographers have got a task to draw the audience’s and,
consequentially, potential clients’ attention to their photographs. In
addition to presenting high-quality portfolio, photographers have to
learn understanding the audience’s behavior and preferences,
conducting conversations with those who interested, gaining audience’s
trust and strengthen own reputation by providing people with valuable
targeted information. More and more photographers today are starting
their photo blogs, create communities on social networks and actively
participate in a virtual communication with the audience. Most of them
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do not realize that these activities are content marketing itself: they are
providing quality content, increase the online “visibility” for potential
clients and retain currents. However, to achieve better efficiency, the
purposeful strategy with concrete tasks and goals is needed. Therefore, I
decided to conduct an experiment, in which I’ll test gained during
writing the thesis knowledge with my own small photo business.
Figure №27. The main landing page of the Lighthousing photo blog [86].
The Lighthousing photo blog (Figure №27) was created in 2013 as a
website intended to be used as a virtual place for publishing my current
photographs, traveling and cooking notes. As the website started to
grow, I decided to extend it with the gallery and add more portraits
photo shoots into the blog section. Since the Content Management
System is by Wordpress, it allowed me to change the website
functionality depending on friends’ and other readers’ feedbacks very
quickly by installing specific plugins. In autumn 2014 the main redesign
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of the web was conducted – currently Lighthousing is being presented,
mainly, as a photography website with a separated portfolio and basic
contact information. To rise to higher level and start using the website as
a main tool for gaining clients, I decided to design own content
marketing strategy aiming to aware potential clients, create
Lighthousing community and, consequentially, to increase my
marketing efforts and get photo shoot orders.
3.2 Lighthousing Content Marketing Strategy
For the purpose of the practical part, the individual content marketing
strategy has been proposed. It is based on main aspects considered in the
thesis with adding specific for this case objectives. Experimental period:
20.04.2015 – 19.05.2015.
Business Model
Web address – http://www.lighthousing.eu/
The Lighthousing blog is owned by me. Its primary goals are: presenting
my photography works with a purpose to attract interested people and
potential clients and publishing photo reports from different trips across
South Moravian region with an aim to create bigger community of
young people. The content of the website is focusing on two groups of
readers:
• Young women, couples, families living in Brno, Czech Republic
(since I’m specializing primarily on these types of portraits)
• Students from East European states (Ukraine, Belorussia,
Kazakhstan, Russia)
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Concerning personal photo shoots, there is now specified price, because
each case is different. Therefore, after the potential clients contact me, we
discuss the price together.
Business goals: Gain new clients, build own audience of returning visitors
and followers, involve influencers.
Target Audience
Photo shoots: Young women mainly aged 15 to 30; Couples and families
with children; Russian and English-speaking people interesting in
photography.
Traveling articles: People from East European states living in Czech
Republic, who are willing to know more about the South Moravian
Region and Brno, as well as about interesting people living there;
Russian and English-speaking people interesting in traveling and Czech
Republic.
The Goal of the Strategy
Content Marketing Goals: Increase traffic, increase the amount of returning
users, reduce bounce rate, and gain new clients with the help of content
marketing methods.
Metrics: The amount of Sessions, Bounce Rate, Session Duration,
Engagement.
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Social Media Presence and Strategy
Presence on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lighthousing.eu. An
open page for the Czech and English-speaking audience. It is focused on
content distribution and publishing last photography works. The
amount of likes before the strategy (April 2015) – 107 likes.
Strategy for Facebook: Promoting content each time it is published on
Lighthousing blog within a month to gain new visitors and retain
returning visitors.
Goals: Increase the amount of content shares and likes by personalizing
each post on the timeline (tagging people, supporting comments),
increase traffic from Facebook.
Metrics: The amount of shares and likes gained within a month.
Figure №28. Lighthousing’ page on Facebook [87].
Presence on Vkontakte: http://vk.com/lighthousing_photography. An open
group for the Russian-speaking audience, which is focused on blog
content distribution and awareness of me as a portrait photographer and
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blogger. The amount of group members before the strategy (April 2015)
– 104 people.
Strategy for Vkontakte: Promoting content each time it is published on
Lighthousing blog within a month to gain new visitors and retain
returning visitors. Building a community of people interested in
traveling across the South Moravian region.
Goals: Increase the amount of group members and likes by targeting new
audiences, increase traffic from Vkontakte.
Metrics: The amount of members and likes gained within a month.
Figure №29. Lighthousing’ community page on Vkontakte [88].
Content Planning
In order to turn over the content marketing process, an editorial calendar
is needed. Therefore, to be able to plan content publishing, I’ve created
the calendar in the Google Calendar web service [89].
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The proposed strategy provides publishing the content three times a
week – 12 blog posts altogether.
Figure №30. Editorial calendar for Lighthousing [89].
Content Distribution
Main channel for distributing content are social media – Vkontakte,
Facebook. To increase the effectiveness of these channels, the influencer
marketing was used. Besides social networking websites, I used some of
link building techniques – commenting on other blogs, websites and
communities. In accordance with the context the blog is operating – the
photography, a few photography websites was used as an additional
portfolio and an opportunity to touch new visitors’ segments. These
were Fotopatracka.cz [90] and Megapixel.cz [91].
Search Engine Optimization
Taking into consideration that the primary audience of the blog and the
languages the blog is written in are Russian and English, after
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conducting keyword research it has emerged that optimizing the content
for Czech keywords is impossible. To optimize the content for two
languages I’ve used the Wordpress SEO plugin, which was described in
more details in the section 2.3.2 “Search Engine Optimization”.
3.3 Measuring the Effectiveness of the Strategy
Analytical tool used for monitoring, measurement, reporting – Google
Analytics. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the strategy, I used
analytical data for the previous month, when I did not any content
marketing efforts.
Content Marketing Goal №1: To increase the traffic:
• Before content marketing
Figure №31. The amount of sessions before content marketing [44].
• After content marketing
Figure №32. The amount of sessions after content marketing [44].
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Content Marketing Goal №2: Increase the amount of returning users:
• Before content marketing: New Users - 274, Returning Users - 59
• After content marketing: New Users - 510, Returning Users - 110
Content Marketing Goal №3: Reduce bounce rate:
• Before content marketing: 51, 21%
• After content marketing: 66, 29 %
Content Marketing Goal №3: Gain new clients:
• Before content marketing: 0 clients
• After content marketing: 5 new clients (2 portrait photoshoot, 1
family photo shoot, 2 weddings)
Social Media Goal №1: Increase the amount of page likes on Facebook:
• Before content marketing: 102 likes
• After content marketing: 112 likes
Social Media Goal №2: Increase the amount of posts shares and likes on
Facebook:
• Before content marketing: 25 likes
• After content marketing: 121 likes
Social Media Goal №3: Increase traffic from Facebook:
• Before content marketing: 143 sessions
• After content marketing: 184 sessions
Social Media Goal №4: Increase the amount of group members in
Vkontakte:
• Before content marketing: 104 members
• After content marketing: 137 group members
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Social Media Goal №5: Increase traffic from Vkontakte:
• Before content marketing: 142 sessions
• After content marketing: 244 sessions
Social Media Goal №6: Increase the amount of post likes in Vkontakte:
• Before content marketing: 59 likes
• After content marketing: 307 likes
Summary
The application of the proposed strategy has shown that to increase the
effectiveness of marketing efforts of photographers, it is needed to
conduct decent content marketing research before starting producing the
content. Only after researched people’s needs and preferences, a
marketer can achieve the goals. As a result of the strategy I was able to
attract new readers’ segments and gain 5 new clients. Concerning
content marketing goals, I also managed to engage the readers and
increased the amount of returning users. Distribution channels Facebook
and Vkontakte have been proven as a good choice for propagation and
gaining new traffic to the blog.
Despite the fact that the created strategy was effective, one goal was not
been achieved – the reduction of Bounce Rate. It can be changed by
adding more attractive element to the page (related posts plugin, internal
links, call to action method [92]).
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3.4 The Follow-up Content Marketing Plan
At the moment, the content marketing strategy satisfied my expectations.
In the future I am going to keep the strategy and continue to build blog’s
readership. Also, one feature will be added to the website – a small page
for clients and me, as a photographer [93]. The page allows clients to
send photoshoot orders and a photographer to view these orders and
manipulate them. The application has been developed within the
framework of the course PV249 Development with Ruby [94].
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Figure №33. Lighthousing web application developed in Ruby on Rails [93].
77
Conclusion
The assigned goals of the thesis were consisted in analyzing the scientific
research works related to content marketing, designing and testing the
content marketing process model for a real photography website. I
would like to specify that before writing this thesis no content marketing
approaches were applied to this website, so the practical novelty of the
thesis has a great value for me. The theoretical originality of the thesis
was based on integrating marketing and IT methods: a big amount of
data related content marketing has been studied during my work on the
thesis. And these are the conclusion of my research and the experiment:
1. Content Marketing is a wide discipline combining marketing,
management, IT and finance methods and approaches. It is possible to
basically understand them without previous skills in these fields,
because there is a lot of useful professional information on the Internet.
2. To apply theoretical knowledge on a real business case, there is a need
to change it individually for an each case, because no every business is
the same, especially, in photography.
3. Social media networks are crucial for each marketer and a company.
No content marketing program or online marketing program can be
conducted without using them.
4. Photography business needs to be more engaged with popular
distribution channels and social media. These are the biggest source of
potential clients.
5. Providing valuable content is a new main course for marketers to
pursue. Today only content marketing can help companies to gain
customers’ trust and increase the effectiveness of their marketing efforts,
consequentially.
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7>
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