Content Marketing
Stop hoping your content gets picked up and start creating pieces that'll actually convert and impact your bottom line.
What’s the secret to content marketing? It has to add value. It’s obvious really, because if you’re not getting anything from it, you stop reading. Maybe you’re guilty of hitting send and hoping for traffic and links. Or publishing something for the sake of it. Or targeting too broad an audience. Or making it all about you.
Ultimately a half-hearted approach won’t cut it - and you know that. But you don’t have the time, resources or willpower to do a good enough job yourself. Contrast does.
We manage the content marketing for our sister companies, testing our strategies on our own brands and scaling what works (some of them actually generate over £1 million a year). Which means we know how to create valuable, relevant and consistent content that not only boosts your SEO efforts, but keeps bringing in revenue long after it’s gone live. Helping you achieve sustainable (and profitable) growth.
Because content marketing is like an iceberg. On the surface there’s this super smart idea. But underneath it is the mountain of research and data, the well-researched strategy and the masses of promotion. And that’s exactly what we take off your hands.
Specialising in content marketing, we’ve helped a range of businesses achieve things like:
→ 50+ brand mentions including BBC, ITV and Derby Telegraph, plus local TV and industry links for garden and grounds retailer, ARB & Grounds.
→ A 50% lift in inbound enquiries in less than 6 months for construction company, Muck-Truck.
→ Generated multi-millions in organic revenue for garden furniture company, Internet Gardener.
Our Content Marketing Services
From building a solid strategy and getting to know your customers, to crafting ideas and promoting them, we can take care of your content marketing from start to finish. And we make sure they actually have an impact on your bottom line.
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Content Audit
To see how your website content is currently performing, a content audit is the best place to start. This is so we can gather all the data we need to help highlight content pieces that need more fine-tuning. For example, articles that have more than one angle or web content that’s thin and getting no traction. Everything we do is led by data, so every decision we make is informed and centred on enhancing your performance.
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Competitor Analysis
There’s no point in reinventing the wheel to help speed up the insights phase. But it’s worth looking at what your direct and indirect competitors do. We’ll try to reverse engineer their content and look at what worked and what didn’t. We’ll also highlight potential content gaps between you and your competitors. Using this data means we can take inspiration from their strategy (not copy it) because you’re not a leader yet.
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Customer Profiling
Creating ideal customer personas is crucial when creating your content marketing strategy. You’ll be able to get a clear idea of who your target customers are and the type of content that’ll resonate with them most. To do this, we’ll work with your team to build out these profiles by looking at multiple data sources and, more importantly, speaking with your end customers.
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Content Strategy
The key to all content marketing: the strategy. Once you’ve got a solid understanding of your customers and the market, you can build out a content strategy based on your current position in the market and your business goals. This’ll include many of the services we mention here, so we can create a strategy that builds off each of these stepping stones and ties them all together.
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Content Ideation
With a thorough understanding of your target audience and the content that's been successful or not for your competitors, we’ll be able to come up with more goal-oriented ideas for potential content topics. We follow a process that encourages us to think outside the box and compile a range of well-explored ideas. This’ll also factor in keyword research and the success of these previous content pieces based on traffic, links and social shares using third party data.
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Content Creation
It’s easy to get one great idea, but it’s a lot harder to produce ongoing ideas. Not to mention time-consuming to create them. Simply leave it to us. Fuelled by a solid strategy, we can produce content that’s tailored to your business and packed with value. Once the written content’s been finalised, it’ll be passed onto our specialist team to make sure it fits your brand or needs any design, development or videography assets. Then you get the final sign off before it’s published.
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Outreach
Hitting publish isn’t the same as outreaching. To help with the medium to long-term success of your content, we need to secure coverage and build strong links to your pieces. With the amount of content already out there, it’s not always going to immediately start ranking in the top results. But it’s not completely out of reach! We’ll aim to secure a handful of topically relevant and quality links through rigorous yet intelligent outreach.
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Social Promotion
Social promotion is more than just sending a few Tweets out. To get faster results, we like to use paid social promotion to drive targeted traffic based on your ideal customer personas. Basically we get the right people to click on your content. This way you can start to see conversions quicker - whether this be lead generation or sales.
Our Approach
We don’t take stabs in the dark, we’re led by data. We start from the top by first understanding your industry, customers and business goals. Because without this knowledge it really would just be a stab in the dark.
We’ll go through your existing content to see if there’s anything we can adapt and reuse, as well as analyse what you’re doing well and not-so-well. Then we’ll use all this data to build a content strategy and accompanying content calendar that’s designed to bring in more traffic, more links and more conversions. Prefer to talk it through? Let’s chat.
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Content Ideation
Data doesn’t lie, which is why we start by digging into yours to get a solid understanding of the type of content that resonates with your target audience. After we’ve gathered enough data and got a better perspective on the scope of the work, we'll put our heads together and come up with a selection of content ideas. Our ideas will be cross-checked against the data to make sure everything aligns with the objectives. Then working alongside you, we’ll make sure they fit with your business values and follow your brand guidelines.
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Content Creation
By this stage we’ll already have a clear picture of where the content opportunities are and have developed a structured plan. So we’ll work on executing the strategy and creating good-looking content that gives your audience value they never knew they needed. From educational whitepapers and surveys to professional videos and infographics, there’s not much we can’t create. Whatever the piece, we’ll work with you to make sure it hits all your objectives.
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Content Promotion
The final step is getting your content seen by the right people. We do a mix of manual outreach (to try and drive referral traffic to your new content) and link building (to help your content rank better and drive more organic traffic). But while you’re waiting for those results to kick in, we do some paid advertising through social media to try and push through more conversions faster. Giving your content the best possible chance at getting picked up.
Want to stop crossing your fingers and create content that actually converts?
“The work that Contrast have done in a short space of time is nothing short of breathtaking.”
- Ryan Hamill, Sales Director, AirPOS
It all starts with a conversation. Talk to us on 0115 882 8000 or fill in the form below and we’ll help get your business where it needs to be.