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The Wired Plus Journey So Far

You will be relieved to know that we are still afloat amidst the amount of content we have created this week !  If you’re confused as to what I’m talking about, check out last week’s blog post.

Wired Plus has come a long way since the start of our journey to disrupt the Marketing CRM marketplace in February this year.  We decided on our message, how we were going to promote our brand and a content strategy which suits not just our needs but crucially, the needs of our audience.  Although these actions seemed hard work at the time, they provided the foundations for our business to grow.

The road to this point has not been smooth and we have faced many challenges.  Some that we expected, some that we didn’t.  The main issue that we had to overcome was an under-performing website which we changed and optimised until we were happy with it.  We have tinkered with our marketing strategy since then and have started to reap the rewards.

Focusing on Adding Value

In the last six months, we have focused a lot on the value that we can give to our clients.  When working for our clients, we make sure that every action we take adds value to their business.  Client projects naturally take priority over our own as they are essential for our business.  As a result, we focused on using techniques that would work for them and achieved some fantastic results along the way.

By looking at our own work we identified inefficiencies.  We weren’t driving relevant traffic or achieving engagement on our blog posts.  These were two distinct problems, but they all stemmed from the same cause.

Although we used the right tools and techniques we didn’t pay the same close attention to our strategy as we would if it were a client project.  We weren’t specific and focused enough on our approach and it cost us.

Here’s how we rectified the problem…

Changing Our Approach to Blogging

Recently, we changed the type of blog posts we were creating, adapting to align with reader behaviours.

The first key decision that we made was that we wanted to target higher engagement with our blog posts.  For our purposes, ‘engagement’ is defined as comments and shares of the content on social media sites.

On a practical level, we wrote all of our content for our buyer personas.  We were preaching to the converted all of the time.  This reduced our opportunities to reach new audiences with our content.  As Rand Fishkin discusses in his Sparktoro blog post, content marketing relies on content distribution and that only comes when you write for the types of people who are going to share your content.  These people are rarely your buyer personas.

He defines the people you should target as the ‘Broad Media & Influencers’.  In truth, we started to do this with the creation of the Wired Plus Journey and Wired TV.

Ultimately, we want to increase the number of subscriptions that we receive from our content.  A handful of people have subscribed to receive marketing updates at the time of writing.  To make it easier for future subscribers to receive our marketing collateral, we have changed the type of form that they use on the Marketing Hub.  We are currently in the process of trialing a new subscription form!  Why not give it a try for yourself :

Driving Website Traffic

However, to achieve all this, we needed to drive traffic.  Before, we would create a long and detailed content piece and promote it through our social media channels.  If we received traffic it was by chance.  We weren’t leading the conversation.  Our approach was dis-organised and too focused on ourselves.

We didn’t just need to find any website traffic, we needed to find relevant website traffic.  People needed to come to our Marketing Hub and use it as we intended – as a series of resources to drive effective decision making and business growth.

Looking at our social media feeds was like looking through a catalogue of our posts.  There was no discussion, simply a list of our own content that we had decided to promote.

Turning our focus towards generating conversation with our content gives us greater scope to promote the brand’s message to potential clients.  Although we are no longer writing directly for our buyer personas, the potential audience of our blog posts is significantly increased by the change.

A More Productive Content Week

To achieve our KPIs in each of the areas outlined above, we needed to structure our week.  That structure was created with a content distribution plan, outlining how long we would take creating content pieces and how and where we would distribute it.

Our content plan clearly outlines when content needs to be published and the target we are aiming to achieve.  For example, on a Friday, we need the Journey to be published no later than 10am, after that point, we focus on engaging people in the post.  We’ve set time aside to contact and connect with real people, whether through social media or in person.

The plan is not set in stone.  Of course, ad-hoc tasks may need completing at short notice.  The way we have structured our day means that we can easily swap tasks around but the deadlines are set to ensure that we achieve our goals.

Until Next Week

Of course, all the progress we have made would not have been possible without you, our readers. Thank you!

We are planning more exciting content for next week.  Why not subscribe to make sure you don’t miss out?

Until next week!

The post How A Specific Marketing Approach Helped Us Grow appeared first on Wired Plus Marketing Hub.