Results: 220% Growth in Non-branded Keyword Traffic for 6 months, 100% Growth in Facebook Fans for 4 months
Back in October 2012 we started working on a new project – content marketing for an educational institution. We promised an article each week as well as social media management. And we expected non-branded traffic growth.
Content marketing strategy:
Target: The client was offering medical education. Our target audience was students interested in a career in health care. That is why we needed a content strategy related to health care and medical jobs.
Here is what our content strategy looked like:
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Occupational guides – where we explained the potential for finding a job on graduating from university.
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Job perspectives – where we discussed the new jobs and salaries offered for different educational programs.
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Guest blogging about medical apps. We found popular medical sites where we could publish guest articles. We established that app-related articles got a huge number of shares and so we focused on that.
Social media management
We were managing the client’s profiles in Facebook, Twitter and Google+. In order to keep the profiles active, we did content curation of 4-5 high-quality pieces per day and shared them on the profiles – up to 10 times a day on Twitter and up to 2-3 times per day on Facebook and Google+.
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With tools like Followerwonk we identified the best time for content sharing and potential influencers we could target.
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With BufferApp we scheduled the posts evenly throughout the day
Content promotion
Every week we released a new article either on the client’s blog or on an external site. We tried to promote these articles as much as we could – Google+ communities and LinkedIn groups were among the top referral sources.
Result: Non-branded keywords traffic growth
We started seeing over 10% traffic growth for non-branded keywords from the second month of our campaign. The client reported an increase in the number of leads as well, which meant the traffic we brought was well targeted.
Non-branded keyword traffic Jan-Jul 2013
Extra #1: Newsletter with social media buttons
In the fourth month of the campaign we started thinking of ways to increase the social media fan base. For Facebook it is known that a growth in fans is usually achieved via ad campaigns or games.
Here we had more potential – we had a base of students and we knew they are active in social media. We needed to somehow introduce them to the Facebook page of the university.
We decided to launch a monthly newsletter. We created it with the paid version of paper.li and it included the top 3 articles we released during the month. It also contained the top curated pieces. The tool arranged the articles automatically into categories and the design of the newsletter was very decent.
Manually, we added a bar with the social media follow buttons on top of the letter.
Result: Facebook fans growth
The open rate of the newsletter was very good – 35-40%. The clickthrough rate – 4-5%.
Our main goal – the growth of the Facebook fans was reached – in the fourth month after the launch of the newsletter we doubled our fan base from 211 fans in January to 417 fans at the end of July.
Extra #2: Questionnaire to students
By month 6 we started searching for new topics for content. Having a list of the students’ emails, we decided to send them a questionnaire to ask them about their experience while studying and after graduation.
Around 10% of the students filled in the questionnaire. With their direct feedback from more than 10 different university programs, we could now add firsthand comments to our program guides.
If you would like to test the content marketing for your website, please, feel free to contact us.
Kate Proykova
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