How to do a content marketing audit in 8-steps (plus, best practices for fixing your content)

It’s the 80/20 rule of content marketing: 80% of results come from 20% of content. This is true for every website and for every content marketing audit I’ve ever done. A handful of articles pull in the largest percentage of traffic and conversions. Just look at your own data. A report of your top posts by traffic probably looks something like this. A few posts bring in a lot of traffic, while most articles drive little or no traffic.   If you calculate the conversion rate for each piece of content, you’ll see a similar curve. A few articles convert visitors at a high rate, while most articles convert few or no visitors.   A Content Audit for Finding the Top Performers If it’s true that 20% of articles create 80% of the results, then why aren’t we focused more on these performers? The problem is that we usually don’t know which articles are the real heroes. To find out, we need to do an audit. Here’s our content audit checklist. Use the links below to skip to the sections you want. ✪ Advanced Readers: Skip down to section seven for the deeper analysis. FINDING TRAFFIC CHAMPIONS 1. SEO: Content that attracts visitors from search 2. SEO: Content with declining search traffic 3. SEO: Content that has search ranking potential 4. Email: Campaigns that attract visitors 5. Email: Measuring the engagement of visitors from email campaigns 6. Social: Content that gets the shared the most FINDING CONVERSION CHAMPIONS 7. Content that converts visitors into leads at the greatest rate ACTIONS 8. What to do now that you know the strengths and weaknesses of each piece of content. This is a step-by-step guide for auditing content marketing [...]

April 17th, 2018|

Teach Clients What to Do — Not How to Do It, with Sam Mallikarjunan

Sam Mallikarjunan is a Marketing Fellow at HubSpot and former Head of Growth at HubSpot Labs, the somewhat-secret experimental arm of the world’s #1 Sales & Marketing platform. Sam teaches Advanced Digital Marketing at the Harvard Division of Continuing Education, and he is also the co-author of the book How To Sell Better Than Amazon (which, thanks to the publisher, is ironically available for purchase on Amazon).     What you’ll learn about in this episode: The way the internet has changed selling so that there’s almost too much information How salespeople can help consumers sift through the breadth of information out there Structuring sales calls so they’re all about asking the buyers questions about their business The power of inbound: competition where no one else is competing Learning to say no to bad revenue Why you need to build buyer personas — both for your ideal customers and customers that you don’t want to do business with because they’re going to cost you money Why clients need agencies to teach them what to do — not how to do it Getting involved with your client’s complete business — including the sales side of their business How to get your clients to treat your agency like a partner instead of a vendor The Golden Nugget: […]

November 20th, 2017|

Entrepreneurial you: building multiple income streams with Dorie Clark

“Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” That’s the standard advice of any investment advisor. But that investment can only happen once we’ve actually made the money. But maybe the concept of diversification is equally applicable to the first stage – making the income in the first place. Having multiple sources of income builds wealth more quickly and mitigates risks inherent in having just a single source. The logic of that seems simple enough.  But the execution – that’s a whole different animal. My podcast guest Dorie Clark has a very interesting perspective on this topic and I was excited to pick her brain for all of us. Her most recent book, Entrepreneurial You, is a blueprint for developing multiple income streams without losing your sanity. Building these income streams involves tough decision-making but it doesn’t have to mean you take huge risks along the way. Dorie suggests a more measured approach and walks us through some of the methods we can explore as we expand our ability to accumulate wealth. Dorie Clark is a marketing strategy consultant, professional speaker, and frequent contributor to the Harvard Business Review. She is also the author of Reinventing You and Stand Out, which was named the #1 Leadership Book of 2015 by Inc. magazine and one of the Top 10 Business Books of the Year by Forbes.  The New York Times described Clark as an “expert at self-reinvention and helping others make changes in their lives.” Clark consults and speaks for a diverse range of clients, including Google, the World Bank, Microsoft, Morgan Stanley, the Ford Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Yale University.     What you’ll learn about in this episode: Creating diverse income streams without jumping into big, new, risky ventures Guiding people through [...]

September 3rd, 2018|

If You Have Millennials In Your Agency, Follow These Three Tips

Millennials will soon take over as the leaders of the workforce, and we need to be ready for their preferences. They are used to more advanced technology than we had at their age, and their access to social media and other communication platforms during the Great Recession means they think of things like money and value in a much different way than generations before. My agency also recently surveyed 1,000 agency employees to learn more about this generation’s mindset. I draw upon my own experiences, our research, and other sources to help agency owners understand how to manage millennials. Create True Transparency: To millennials, real transparency means increased context fueled by the desire to engage and connect with those around you. So next time, tell your millennial employees what could be improved or how their efforts have helped the business grow. And don’t be afraid to be honest about why a competing agency might have won that valuable client (and what the team can do collectively to get better). Get to know your millennial team members as people, not just as employees. Ask about their interests outside of work, and inquire about their weekends on Monday mornings. These little connections can add up. Help Them See How They Fit Into Your Agency: Millennials have a lot of options in front of them, causing a struggle to make important decisions about their future, further leading to confusion about their identity and purpose. Social media platforms like Instagram and Twitter nurture this; younger generations always have someone to compare themselves too. Millennials are accused of being “job hoppers” because they always see greener grass on the other side. With all this in mind, leverage the compassionate side [...]

November 9th, 2019|

Niches Get You Riches: What Your Agency Marketing Strategy is Missing

There’s that word: niche. And you’re likely thinking: “One more consultant is telling me to eat my vegetables.” If you are an agency owner and have thus far resisted niching as part of your agency marketing strategy, think you don’t need it, or are tired of the topic, perhaps I can change your mind. Niching is perhaps the best form of marketing strategy that can help get your agency where you want it to be. Niching has helped me generate over $10,000,000 as an entrepreneur. It’s the same idea I’ve taught to over a thousand graduates of my agency accelerator. In one case, an agency owner attracted over 2,000 leads for her business in just a single year leveraging this strategy. My goal is to help our clients make their agencies more successful, work less, make more money, and create predictable business models so that their agencies are assets that could potentially be sold at some point in time. When Drew asked me to share my insights with his community at AMI, I was excited to be a part of what he’s created, and I hope that some of what I have to share proves beneficial to you. Hope Marketing Isn’t Good Enough Referrals and word of mouth are the number one strategy digital agency owners use to grow their businesses. I call this, “Hope marketing” and it really isn’t a strategy at all. It’s called: Not doing anything. Hope marketing is the reason so many digital agencies struggle with predictability and scale in their business. And it might be why you can’t get out of the marketing and sales seats. When I tell owners that word of mouth is "doing nothing," the response I [...]

May 9th, 2018|

Did you email me?

A couple years ago,  I updated my OS on my laptop and it literally ate any email sent to/from me after 2015. I went through several weeks of trying to get back to all of the people who had emailed me and never heard back.  They probably thought I had no manners but I promise — I was raised better than that. This illustrates a point that I teach regarding email. We depend on email too much and we assume it’s more reliable than it is. Which is ironic, given our own inboxes and how much clutter we dodge throughout the day. I was talking to an agency owner the other day and she was lamenting that their new business efforts are falling flat. As she described their efforts it was pretty clear that the problem was they were tossing the ball into the prospect’s court by email and then just waiting for it to bounce back. This is also a huge problem with your AEs. In our AE Bootcamps, one of the best practices I stress is not to just use email to shift the burden to the client/check the item off their To-Do list. Your AEs need to be adept at quickly accelerating a conversation beyond email. If you’re not coaching to the advantages and foibles of email with your team, you should be. If you’re not building out a more robust communication matrix with prospects and clients, you should be. If you would like your AEs to learn more about this best practice as well as many others, there is still time to sign up for one of our virtual AE Bootcamps here or here! This was originally published in the weekly [...]

August 17th, 2020|

Jeff Salzenstein

Jeff Salzenstein says we can feel balanced and less like we’re about to snap. Learn good habits for agency leaders with Jeff Salzenstein. Weary is a great word to describe a lot of agency leaders right now. It comes up again and again that we’re just tired, overworked, and running on fumes. It’s not our fault, but there are things we can do to get back to feeling a little more balanced and less like we’re about to snap. […]

December 5th, 2022|

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