“Content is every experience we create, not just blog posts.”
Oli Gardner, Founder at Be the Keynote.
A survey conducted by Semrush in 2021 found that 84% of B2B and B2C companies have a content marketing strategy in place. However, despite this high percentage, the question Oli Gardner seeks to answer is whether content marketing is beneficial to a brand or if it’s just a waste of time.
In his Turing Fest presentation, Oli identifies the faults in content marketing and points out how it can be improved and how you can resolve your content marketing problems by making the product more accessible for the user. You can check out the video below.
In order to determine whether content marketing has lost its cause, Oli did some digging and reached out to his peers. One of them was Andy Crestodina, Co-Founder and Chief Marketing Officer at Orbit Media.
In Andy’s experience, he noticed that 91.5% of website traffic was derived from blogs however, only 0.03% of them converted into sales.
Although this is such a small fraction, he was not let down by it. The reason being is the blog is what gets the potential consumer to the site.
“The content drives the links, which drives the authority, which drives the rankings, which drives qualified visitors who ceased for a ‘commercial intent’ keyphrase… and now you have a visitor who is highly likely to convert. Unlike your typical blog reader.”
Andy Crestodina, Co-Founder and Chief Marketing Officer at Orbit Media.
Although this is an excellent example of the benefits of content marketing, Oli was not 100% satisfied and continued digging. After writing numerous blogs and seeing the beneficial impact it had, he also realised it was not sustainable as it took up too much of his time.
That’s when Oli came up with the acronym M.O.M which stands for Marketing Optomoisaton Map.
Marketing Optimisation Map
M.O.M is a content marketing strategy specifically designed for creating product awareness, and it’s based on events.
“It doesn’t really look at what page someone goes to, but instead, it focuses on all the little micro-interactions someone does on their way to converting. So it’s about creating more interactive moments so that we can learn what people are deciding to do.”
Oli Gardner, Founder at Be the Keynote.
So if you have your product, you start by looking at your product awareness goals. For example, do people know it exists? What is the purpose of your product? How can your potential customer use it beyond what they initially imagined its purpose was? And so on.
There are three parts to M.O.M, these are:
Context
Content
Conversion
Context
For this ‘C’, there’s the context you know and the context you want to know. For example, through research, you may learn particular things about your audience. However, you must also look at what you can learn from your audience. This requires you to ask specific questions and then transform your content to suit the response to the question you asked. This helps create a super personalised experience for your users.
Content
Here you look into what type of interactive content you can use to answer your audience’s questions. Will your information be best presented as a blog, a video, an event or something else?
You must consider your audience, who they are, and what information you’re sharing with them to make the best decision regarding which type of interactive content will work best for them at that time.
Conversion
The third ‘C’ is conversion. This is based on all of the events. Here you end up with an event map of everything that was done. Upon observing it, you can ask questions such as, what are the events that happened for people who did convert and what happened for those who did not?
You can then use this information to guide your content strategy because you can see the behaviour that’s actually working and what’s falling flat.
Learn How To Upskill Your Content Marketing Efforts at Turing Fest 2022
Having a content marketing strategy that works requires a lot of in-depth research and understanding your audience.
For more insights into content marketing and how you can upskill your content marketing efforts, check out Oli Gardner’s talk on why content marketing is broken and M.O.M can fix it.
This post was provided by Kathryn Strachan, Managing Director of Copy House, an award-winning content marketing agency specialising in technology and FinTech, working with brands like Facebook, Klarna and Modulr by helping them build better relationships with their audience.
