We all know the phrase, “Good things come to those who wait.” And when it comes to content marketing, this idiom rings true. Content marketing can produce short-term results, but its true value is achieved over time.
Content Marketing Takes Time to Produce Results
It’s no surprise that marketers want to see results from their work immediately. We want to publish a campaign and see a quick return on our investment. Still, that rarely happens in content marketing.
It takes time to see results. We estimate that it takes the following:
- Six months to see results from on-site content marketing
- Six to 12 months to see results from off-site content marketing
While that may seem like a long time to wait to see content marketing results, there is good news: When content marketing begins to produce results, the returns are long-lasting and compounding.
Content Marketing Proves Lasting Value Over Time
When you work on content marketing, you don’t produce something that you use once and then toss aside; you create materials that are useful for years to come. Content marketing creates evergreen end products that continually serve a business.
You can create one piece of content and repurpose or completely reuse it year after year.
Content is an asset that never breaks down or needs to be thrown away. It’s affordable to maintain, and it provides lasting value over time.
Fill Website Real Estate
Each time you create a piece of content, you add a building block to your website. You develop a larger resource that becomes a more useful asset. Websites with a large amount of high-quality content perform better in search and have higher rates of user engagement. “Evergreen” content lasts forever – you create it one time and use it to provide value as long as your business exists.
Establish Authority and Build Trust
As a brand’s website grows, so does its reputation. Websites that are filled with dozens or even hundreds of pages of useful content appear more trustworthy, established, and dependable. Audiences are more likely to find and engage with websites that provide thorough and abundant resources.
Provide Resources for Repurposed and Republished Content
Content serves a lasting purpose in its original state. But businesses can also “recycle” old material. When you create a large resource of content, you can pull from that content to create new content. You can repurpose successful content to create something new. Or, you can republish content by updating it and re-releasing it.
Creating content takes time and resources. Luckily, the work does not produce one final product that will be used once and then thrown to the side. Once you create a piece of content, you can use it for years to come, reuse it in multiple ways, and even see its value grow over time.
Content Marketing Has Compounding Returns
Content has lasting value that provides compounding returns over time.
The longer the content exists and the more content you create, the higher your returns will be.
Like a good investment, content marketing has compounding returns that add up over time and continue to add more and more value. The more content you create, the better the returns will be on all of the other content that came before it.
Increase Inbound Links
By producing more on-site content, you increase the odds that your website will receive links. There are more pages for websites to link to. The more links your website receives, the better it is for your overall website. As the number of links grows, so will your website’s SEO power and ability to be found (and linked to) by more and more publications.
Improve SEO
The links that point back to your website increase your website’s search rankings and your growing library of content also boosts your SEO. Content and links are two important factors in improving a site’s SEO. Through content marketing, you build both content and links that compound over time, giving your website higher and higher rankings.
Increase Traffic
As you create more content, your website’s number of backlinks grows, the search rankings improve, and more audiences can find your content. Users will be more likely to find your site through search and links from other sites. Search engine and referral traffic lift is a byproduct of successful content marketing over a period of time.
Increase Page Views
When content is newly published, it typically has a spike in traffic. New content attracts initial views. But as the content exists over time, it will continue to receive a lasting stream of views. Tomasz Tunguz found that only one-third of the views on a blog post occured on the first day. The blog posts then generated between one and two times more traffic over time.
Produce a Higher ROI
You can see that continually publishing valuable content will have a profound long-term impact on your search engine rankings and audience engagement. This is a result of securing high-quality links, driving thousands of social engagement events, and increasing the overall notoriety of your brand. With these lasting and compounding returns, you get a higher ROI.
The return on your investment with content marketing continues to grow over time.
You can continue to see results even years after launching your campaigns, making content marketing a smart investment with lasting power and the possibility for returns much higher than with other promotional strategies.
We have seen first-hand how content marketing can produce lasting and compounding value in our client campaigns.
Movoto 6-Month Case Study
Real estate research and brokerage website Movoto approached Fractl when they were in the beginning stages of building and growing their digital presence.
We worked with them to create a six-month content marketing plan with the goals to:
- Showcase Movoto’s authority on local markets
- Increase brand recognition
- Drive traffic to the Movoto website
- Earn links back to on-site content
Fractl’s strategies for accomplishing each goal were to:
- Create content. Buying, selling, or renting a home is an inherently emotional experience, so we turned to our research on viral emotions to figure out how to identify with and engage the audience and Movoto’s prospective clients.
- Consistently release content on Movoto’s website. We executed a monthly calendar to release campaigns in a variety of dynamic formats.
- Promote content. Our PR specialists reached out to their networks to secure placements with established and authoritative voices on leading websites.
This wasn’t a short-term plan. We executed this strategy over six months, knowing it would take time to achieve the results Movoto wanted. To reach our goals, we would need time.
This long-term approach worked. We reached our goals after releasing 14 large-scale, multi-asset marketing campaigns over six months.
We increased brand awareness and industry authority for Movoto by spreading their content widely throughout the web. The content we created was mentioned on more than 1,700 websites, including Mashable, People, Glamour, Mental Floss, and Daily Mail. It was also shared over 1.7 million times.
The exposure took time, but it was worth it when we saw the powerful results from six months of content marketing.
eBay Deals 2-Year Case Study
eBay already had brand recognition in their industry before approaching us, but they wanted to build brand awareness and improve SEO for targeted categories in their newer vertical, eBay Deals.
We started with a six-month contract, which turned into a two-year relationship once eBay saw the success of our campaigns.
Our strategy focused on improving SEO and awareness for various eBay verticals. We created more than 60 content marketing campaigns that were highly relevant for targeting customers, and we connected that content with the influencers we knew would help get it in front of our ideal audience.
The long-term results of this strategy included year-over-year growth for sales, SEO clicks, and traffic.
Our eBay campaigns resulted in more than 2,000 featured stories and 75,000 social shares. The links gave their website nearly two million domain authority points and set a foundation that would lead to even more page views over time.
Recovery Brands 36-Month Case Study
Recovery Brands teamed up with Fractl when they were in the early stages of their business and wanted to build their digital presence. They hoped to accomplish a variety of goals for their new website, which focused on helping people and families find recovery from addiction.
Initial goals for Recovery Brands included:
- More traffic
- More authority
- More social media attention
We created a plan for them that would provide results within a year. We also looked at long-term goals and strategized to build on our initial results so we could keep boosting their brand over time.
Within one year, Fractl helped Recover Brands improve their traffic by 1,100 percent, receive four million page views, and land PR mentions in 1,200 feature stories.
We helped Recovery Brands achieve those results by:
- Creating research-heavy campaigns that aligned with their mission
- Using interesting content mediums such as motion graphics, mixed media, interactive features, quizzes, mobile applications, and long-form content
- Featuring attention-grabbing content that was both emotionally appealing and educational
The unique, exciting, and authoritative content caught the attention of both readers and publishers, which lead to many PR placements and mass exposure. We continued using this formula over the next three years and watched Recovery Brand’s success grow and compound with time.
By the end of the three-year period, we helped Recovery Brands go from a relatively unknown new brand to a company that was featured in more than 12,500 stories and mentioned on social media more than 1.2 million times.
In all three of these campaigns, we saw growth in brand awareness, improvements in SEO and traffic, an increased number of backlinks, and higher influence on social media channels. Some of that value was immediately noticeable, but most of it was achieved over time.
Content is an effective and powerful marketing strategy, but it is a long-term strategy with results that grow and compound year after year.
If you are about to embark on a new content marketing campaign, don’t focus on immediate results. Instead, set long-term goals and create plans that will provide lasting, compounding value for your brand for years to come.
Want to see how Fractl has used smart content marketing to produce valuable, lasting results for dozens of other clients? Check out our full library of client case studies to see how we plan our content marketing campaigns step by step.
