Content Marketing Case Studies
In marketing, as in most fields, you’re only as good as your last campaign. Let’s take a look at several case studies. These are both interesting and educational.
These extremely successful content marketing case studies compiled by Marketo include the tactics used, results measured, and why it matters to marketers.
Content Marketing Case Study #1:
Increasing Blog Referral Traffic by 58% with Onsite Marketing
In this case study, iSpionage describes how they managed to increase traffic by 58.09% in just one month by using an exit-intent popup and retargeting.
- Goal: Increase website traffic.
- Roadblock: Their blog was not producing enough traffic to their website.
- Insight: Most of their visitors were interested in knowing what their competitors’ keywords were.
- Tactic: Popup with a “yes” or “no” question to redirect exit traffic that had spent at least ten seconds on the blog.
- Results: The number of popup impressions was 4,144 in the period that was evaluated. The number of visitors who clicked on the “Yes” button and were redirected to the website was 227, with a CTR of 5.47%.
- Why it matters: They achieved an almost 5.5% conversion rate in only one month.
Via Marketo and iSpionage
Content Marketing Case Study #2:
Infographic Creates Over 11K Additional Website Visits in 2 Weeks
SEOTravel created a very clever piece of content that was extremely shareable and caused an increase of 11,000+ website visits in as little as two weeks.
- Goal: Increase the number of website visitors.
- Roadblock: The current content wasn’t getting the traffic intended.
- Insight: Resort that offers tailor-made holidays in Morocco could take advantage of the massive Game of Thrones buzz that was happening.
- Tactic:
- Identify something popular in the news and come up with an idea around it
- Create a tangible piece of mega content to send to journalists
- Find journalists that have covered similar pieces of content
- Tell those journalists about the new content
- Results:
- 11,304 more visits to the site in the two weeks following publishing the content compared to the two weeks before
- 12 days of all-time high traffic to the site
- A 245% increased in referral traffic compared to the same period the previous year
- Coverage and links in the Washington Post, Mashable, Business Insider, Yahoo, and many more top-tier publications
- More than 100 new domains linking to the site
- Why it matters: As well as the traffic increase, the website acquired vast numbers of links through the process and increased the strength of the domain, helping the site continue to grow in its organic search performance.
Via Marketo and CollegeRaptor
Content Marketing Case Study #3:
Quick Wins from Content Built with Publicly Available Data
In this content marketing case study, YesOptimist helped a startup, CollegeRaptor, to get from absolutely no organic traffic to 100K visitors per month in just one year.
- Goal: Generate backlinks to the website to help improve rankings and search visibility.
- Roadblock: The website is brand new and has no organic traffic.
- Insight: The content needed to focus on matching students with colleges. Creating an interesting infographic could produce linkbacks and increase website ranking.
- Tactic: Searched Wikipedia for common information on where U.S. senators went to college, completed an analysis, compiled an infographic map, and sent it to multiple outlets with links to the post.
- Results:
- Organic traffic grew to 100K visitors per month in just one year.
- Picked up by Washington Post, The Houston Chronicle in Texas, The Deseret News in Utah, Minnesota Public Radio, and Time magazine.
- The content was even cited for a U.S. Supreme Court case.
- Why it matters: Create content that delivers valuable insights with publicly available data with little to no cost.
Via Marketo and YesOptimist
Content Marketing Case Study #4:
Find the Right Content Topics for Less Exciting Industries
LawnStarter created content their audience cares about, even though it did not entirely focus on their product or service.
- Goal: Increase customers for a professional lawn care company
- Roadblock: The content marketing was based around what the company wanted to say, not really about what the audience wanted to read.
- Insight: By doing extensive research to understand their audience, they discovered content that potential customers would read by looking for influencers that the prospects listen to.
- Tactic: Create content your audience actually cares about, even if it’s not entirely focused on your product or service.
- Results: Steady audience growth as a result of creating marketing content that people want to read.
- Why it matters: The most obvious content for your audience is not always what they care about.
Content Marketing Case Study #5:
Scale Marketing with Content Loved by Search Engines
Fieldwire boosted the most high-potential pages with data-driven optimizations such as what keywords were they ranking for in order to gain higher conversion rates.
- Goal: Increase website visits.
- Roadblock: Company had a stronger focus on product and engineering but was lacking marketing-focused content.
- Insight: Shift marketing focus from conversion to traffic generation and rank in the top three search results for main keywords.
- Tactic: Boost the most high-potential pages with data-driven optimizations and new content for keywords and ranking difficulty. They combined these tactics with influencer outreach campaigns, resulting in boosting the new pages even more.
- Results: The optimized pages and posts, as well as the new content creation lead to higher conversion rates and additional search engine rankings. In just six months, they boosted all their primary keywords to top three positions, added 100 new keyword rankings, and increased 200 existing rankings.
- Why it matters: The initial efforts made helped Fieldwire grow their marketing efforts and saved them $10,000+ in Google AdWords buys.
Via Marketo and Fieldwire
Pretty impressive stuff! These real-life case studies demonstrate the value of content marketing. Wondering how you can leverage content marketing for your organization? We’re here to help! Reach out and let’s have a conversation about working toward your successful content marketing case study!
