A great content marketing model isn’t born; it’s grafted. It evolves, and it is the product of many minds, many problems, and many experiments. You can’t just land an amazing and intuitive content strategy — you have to go through some trial and error.
At Intero Digital Content & PR Division, we have spent over a decade developing and refining our content marketing model. The core of this model remains the same as when we were founded: the idea of taking industry expertise and turning it into consumable, engaging content that is search-optimized, drives leads, and establishes thought leadership. But the methods we use to accomplish this have evolved and grown over time as we've worked with clients across the globe and in a plethora of industries.
Why Does Our Content Marketing Model Work?
Writing is an art and a science. Remember in school when some students would just be able to dish out a well-formed essay in an hour while others were still wringing their hands over a title? Or some days, you would think you had written an A-grade paper only to find out that you’d missed a crucial piece of information and all your fancy prose landed you a C?
While most people can write a piece of content, depending on time constraints and writing expertise, the final outcome and time needed can vary greatly. With 67% of marketers reporting that their team is being asked to do more this year but with the same resources, it might make sense to have a partner take on the whole content marketing puzzle. We take a client’s hard-won expertise and pair it with content strategy, SEO, and high-quality writing and design that engage readers.
In our content marketing model, strategy always comes first, and everything else flows from it. This way, every aspect of your content can feel coherent and connected. By grounding content with strategy, we can focus your content marketing results on the business goals you’re actually trying to accomplish. Once we understand your goals, we get to work. To name a few services, we can do a technical website audit to make sure there’s nothing hindering lead generation and SEO; we can perform extensive keyword research to ensure that we’re choosing the most effective topics and making sure they're discoverable by your target audience, and we can nurture relationships with the publications and editors that make the most sense for you.
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Not sure where you should focus your content marketing efforts?
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How Much Time We Can Save You in 10 Areas
We’re at a moment when two-thirds of marketers are increasing their content budgets. But with a lot of other concerns on their plates, outsourcing to a content marketing agency partner can make sense and save a lot of money compared to trying to build a skilled team in-house. Outsourcing has increased in the content marketing arena over the past year — now, 75% of large companies are choosing this approach for their content efforts.
Depending on the services you need, you could discover that you could save your team many hours that they could put to better use within your company. What’s more, by using our highly evolved, trusted model, you can skip the part of the process where you make costly missteps — and you can tap into a team of content marketing professionals who can accomplish more in less time than if you tried to tackle these efforts on your own.
Let's take a look at how much time Intero Digital Content & PR Division can save your company on 10 content marketing tactics.
(Keep in mind that these numbers are the amount of time a team of multiple seasoned pros from multiple disciplines would spend on these deliverables. Marketers with less experience would likely need to spend more time to do this themselves and could be missing key aspects of a successful content strategy.)
1. SEO Blog Posts
SEO blog posts are a core part of a content marketing strategy. They offer visitors original content on a consistent basis, giving them reasons to keep returning to your site and seeking you out as a helpful voice. We help create blog posts that we know will be interesting and engaging to your target audiences while also weaving in strategies to boost your SEO and lead generation efforts.
How much time could we save you?
6 hours per blog post
What could you get?
Let’s take one SEO blog post as an example. We published a blog post about pitching content to publication editors back in 2014. Since then, this blog post has generated 77,367 views and 168 new contacts (read: leads). Plus, it was involved in securing two new clients for our company.
2. SEO Pillar Blog Posts
A pillar blog post does all the good work of an SEO blog post and then some. Optimized for search, it acts as a kind of content hub, bringing together multiple takes on a topic. It’s a place where visitors can land and get all the information they need and then be directed to other related content. We use keyword research to find the best topic to base the pillar post around, and then we form topic clusters that sit around the core content, further reinforcing those keywords and educating the audience.
How much time could we save you?
11 hours per pillar post
What could you get?
We worked with our client ProSource to develop a pillar post based on a foundation of intentional keyword research. Within four months of us implementing our strategy, the company gained a 138% increase in organic page views and increased the number of domains linking to the site by 285%.
3. Guest-Contributed Articles
These pieces of earned media elevate a content marketing strategy by building credibility and bringing your brand into new circles. Because of the list of publication relationships we've cultivated, we’re a leading creator of guest-contributed articles. We take your unique insights, identify content gaps in your industry, and position your take to fill those gaps.
How much time could we save you?
9.5 hours per article
What could you get?
A guest-contributed article can drive awareness for your brand and boost your reputation as a thought leader. For our client eLearning Industry, we delivered a range of guest posts that accumulated in a strategy to position the company as a leading authority. As we delivered on this plan, the eLearning site garnered a 92% increase in new users, with a year-over-year increase of 259%, while the first-page keyword rankings for the site rose from 352 to 846.
4. Public Relations
Public relations brings together multiple tactics for increasing the kind of third-party validation that will earn your company credibility, introduce you to new audiences, and potentially boost your domain authority. Press mentions, podcast appearances, interviews, guest quotes — all these opportunities can build trust in your brand.
How much time could we save you?
5.5 hours for each pitch campaign and 2 hours for monthly PR strategy maintenance
What could you get?
When we worked with Heartbeat on a public relations strategy, we helped the company earn seven press mentions within two months in highly influential publications. One particular mention in Mashable gained the company an increased follower count and four new sales deals.
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Ready to learn more about how modern PR can elevate your strategy?
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5. Whitepapers
Whitepapers are comprehensive dives into an area of your expertise. This long-form content engages readers in a deeper way and can help them address their own pain points or learn more about what your company has to offer. We work with clients to create high-quality gated content, including whitepapers, that takes readers from strangers into strong leads by sharing your valuable insights with them in exchange for their contact information.
How much time could we save you?
23.5 hours per whitepaper
What could you get?
Since we published our whitepaper "The State of Digital Media 2021," it has brought in 429 form submissions and 143 new contacts, and it has influenced three sales.
6. Infographics
Infographics are an eye-catching way of presenting information in a clear, easily consumable format. They’re wonderful for engaging your target audience quickly, educating them, and nurturing them into valuable leads. We take your expertise, and our designers mold it into high-quality infographics.
How much time could we save you?
9.5 hours per infographic
What could you get?
We generated 1,674 views, six form submissions, and three new leads from our infographic “What Makes a Piece of Digital Content Successful?”
7. Case Studies
Case studies provide real-life examples of how you have helped your customers solve their pain points. They offer testimonials and anecdotal evidence that you can do what you say you can do, and they’re hugely valuable for showcasing previous successes and building trust with leads.
How much time could we save you?
10 hours per case study
What could you get?
Publishing engaging, educational case studies can nurture leads and prime members of your target audience to take action. This all leads to you closing more sales. Our sales team uses our case studies in sales conversations every day to illustrate how we've helped clients achieve their goals, and it allows leads to visualize how we might be able to help them, too.
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Looking for case studies that prove the effectiveness of content marketing?
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8. Content Audit
A content audit can highlight all the areas of improvement that exist in your current content marketing strategy. We perform a detailed review of your content, and we take competitors’ content into account, too. From there, we spotlight opportunities that you could take that would win you measurable results.
How much time could we save you?
35.5 hours per content audit
What could you get?
We performed an audit on our own content, and we found that one of our 2014 blog posts, “How to Pitch Your Content to Editors,” had the potential to be earning us organic traffic but had started to rank lower in search results over time. After we updated the blog post, we started seeing a lower bounce rate, started ranking for highly relevant keywords, and brought in 26 brand-new contacts.
9. Keyword Research
Keyword research is a foundational activity at Intero Digital Content & PR Division in that it forms the basis for the other content marketing services we do for clients. It helps companies harness SEO to start creating content that will answer their audience's questions and address their pain points. Creating this highly relevant content helps companies make measurable progress toward their content marketing goals.
How much time could we save you?
5.5 hours per quarter
What could you get?
Tap into our highly developed keyword research services, and you can analyze your website's current rankings and identify actions you can take to markedly improve content marketing ROI. With an SEO strategy from us, including keyword research, Ascend Venture Capital saw a 166% rise in organic traffic.
10. Technical Website Audit
A technical website audit allows you to see precisely where your website is letting you down and where the opportunities are for strategic updates and pieces of content that will attract your target audience, provide a great experience, and engage visitors enough to actually take action on your website.
How much time could we save you?
14.5 hours per technical audit
What could you get?
When you sign on for Intero Digital Content & PR Division’s audit services, we evaluate your site from top to bottom and make actionable recommendations to help you boost your website's SEO and lead generation potential.
Content marketing is an art and a science. And at this crucial moment in the life of your company, you need to access both the art and the science of content marketing in order to improve every aspect of your strategy.
Entrusting a partner to audit and take action on your content might be the surest strategy. Lean on our expertise, and we’ll lean on yours to create content that brings your business new leads, new deals, and new horizons.
Whether you're ready to explore partnering with an agency on your content marketing efforts or you're not sure whether it's the right next step for you, set up a free consultation with our team today to discuss your options!
