We've recently been doing our budgets for next year, including our online marketing spend. This includes the usual suspects (e-mail, search, affiliate, online PR etc.). 

However, as we've analysed our performance for this year, and are looking at where best to invest for next year, we're realising that actually we might get more 'bang for our buck' by investing in further quality content rather than 'marketing' per se.

For most forms of online marketing you'll typically be looking at CPM, CPC or CPA type financial models. Ideally, you'll track these through to actual customers so you also get more of a feel for quality (e.g. lifetime value) of customers delivered by each type of marketing activity. In fact, if you're doing your tracking properly it doesn't really make any difference whether you're looking CPM vs. CPC vs. CPA and so on - they're just slightly different mathmetical takes on the same thing.

We're finding that rather than investing £X in, say, paid search marketing, we can invest that same amount in content, and related PR (online and offline), and generate a higher ROI (lower CPC, lower CPA, better conversions etc.). Not only that but, in doing so, we have generated a futher intellectual property asset, with organic links that continue to deliver value. 

A lot of companies talk about "link building strategies" where they go out (or pay an agency to do so) and ask people to link to them to help them with their natural search rankings. But why should they link to you? And why go to the effort of doing all this research and asking? If you create some great content and do a bit of PR then the links will come to you.

My point is this - how many online marketing or e-commerce managers out there are looking at content as potentially their best form of marketing? 

Any experiences / thoughts you can add?

Ashley Friedlein
CEO, E-consultancy.com

I can say unequivocally that our content is king for us, simply as we are an online retailer with lots of Editorial that drives sales. (Exactly how is another matter...)

With a decent analytics tool you can assign conversion rates and £ value to specific pages or groups of pages by measuring value of the traffic that passes through them and converts. Im assuming that HBX can do this? Coremetrics certainly can :p

The above would allow you to look at the value gained from all conversions on a site. However how then would you measure the value of New customers?
For instance a customer visits from Google and buys an e-consultancy article.
Can you credit the Google ad or the quality of the content they purchased with the acquisition? The purchase wouldnt have occured without ad and it wouldnt have occured without the content.
So maybe the answer to my mind is that you have to credit both with the sale..

Seems to me chicken-egg?

jon

Ken, In addition to the four benefits, you have listed, (all of which are very valuable):

Content is attractive to potential customers.

Content is attractive to search engines.

Content persuades other sites to link to yours.

Content attracts media attention.

which define the "passive" side of creating content within a business, there is the "active" side of content usage which has, possibly the most significant role to play in driving sales / ROI.

My experience in the value of Content as one of the Founders of  www.Net-a-porter.com, where the original concept was to setup an online "magazine" in a web page form which facilitated buying via clicking on the Content was that it rapidly became apparent that many visitors are not interested in Content but are very interested in buying the products.

This does not remove the importance of creating Content for those customers (potential or actual) who are interested in Content, and for the very valuable reasons you have defined which give Content value.

There is an “active” purpose to Content generation which is in addition to the “passive points” and has a universal effect on all customers who have subscribed to an email list.

If a web business utilizes "new content" in a pro “active” way as an excuse/justification for making a direct customer contact via email, the website has an extremely effective selling tool, which instead of being interpreted as a naked commercial sales email, (potentially creating high unsubscribe rates) the customer contact is viewed in a much more low key way of potentially providing useful information, as well as opportunity to see commercial products.

Therefore irrespective of any debate over what % of a website’s customers are interested in the “Content”, one universal value to the e-commerce business is that that it provides camouflage for an excuse to remind all (of today’s busy, and easily distracted) customers about the availability of the website’s services, and many of the email recipients who do not view content pages when visiting the website, will respond to a content led email by visiting the website after having received the blended email which contains both content and products and buy products which were not featured within either the content or the email.

A final point about Content value is that it is a huge driver within the process of convincing a potential browser to leave an email address with website, which once achieved is a very significant step in converting a casual browser to a first time buyer.

Given the choice between signing up for a torrent of direct product sales emails, and an “Editorial newsletter” (which happens to feature product, and  product types within the Content), I know which drives the most successful response metrics and which is then in turn the first step to using new Content within the emailing operation.

Kind regards

Mark Quinn-Newall
www.threethink.com

On 13:27:53 7 November 2005 Ashley wrote:

We've recently been doing our budgets for next year, including our online marketing spend. This includes the usual suspects (e-mail, search, affiliate, online PR etc.). 

However, as we've analysed our performance for this year, and are looking at where best to invest for next year, we're realising that actually we might get more 'bang for our buck' by investing in further quality content rather than 'marketing' per se.

For most forms of online marketing you'll typically be looking at CPM, CPC or CPA type financial models. Ideally, you'll track these through to actual customers so you also get more of a feel for quality (e.g. lifetime value) of customers delivered by each type of marketing activity. In fact, if you're doing your tracking properly it doesn't really make any difference whether you're looking CPM vs. CPC vs. CPA and so on - they're just slightly different mathmetical takes on the same thing.

We're finding that rather than investing £X in, say, paid search marketing, we can invest that same amount in content, and related PR (online and offline), and generate a higher ROI (lower CPC, lower CPA, better conversions etc.). Not only that but, in doing so, we have generated a futher intellectual property asset, with organic links that continue to deliver value. 

A lot of companies talk about "link building strategies" where they go out (or pay an agency to do so) and ask people to link to them to help them with their natural search rankings. But why should they link to you? And why go to the effort of doing all this research and asking? If you create some great content and do a bit of PR then the links will come to you.

My point is this - how many online marketing or e-commerce managers out there are looking at content as potentially their best form of marketing? 

Any experiences / thoughts you can add?

Ashley Friedlein
CEO, E-consultancy.com

Hi Ashley, Content Marketing on the web seems to be more developed in the US where it has developed from the old custom publishing business.   Junta24 are an agency specialising in Content Marketing services and their blog is a good source of information.  It's also something we are developing with our B2B advertisers helping them produce content which engages potential customers for them (white papers, case studies etc) and delivers leads.

http://blog.junta42.com/content_marketing_blog/

Regards

Andrew Findlater