Louise is responsible for AMPLYFI’s marketing activities, including social media, content creation and events. Prior to joining AMPLYFI, Louise obtained a Bachelor’s degree in English Language from Cardiff University.
Every day across the internet:
- 4.4 million new blog posts are published
- 767 million LinkedIn feed updates are viewed
- 95 million posts are shared on Instagram
Despite these stats, the average time people spend on a company’s website is only 54 seconds.
In the modern marketing world, creating high quality content that captures attention is difficult. With the amount of content growing by the minute, the industry is saturated and overpopulated. Unique insights are a necessity to make your content stand out and generate interest.
So, how can you create valuable content that helps you to hit your targets?
I work in Marketing at a tech company called AMPLYFI and content is a key part of my role. I’m familiar with the difficulties of content marketing and wanted to share how I grew our content creation using AI, contributing to:
- Over 10% quarter on quarter website traffic growth.
- A 9% social media engagement rate, which is triple the industry average.
- 66% increase in content views.
For context, at AMPLYFI we have created a research platform that generates insights by reading data at scale and uncovering links & trends. Whatever topic you’re interested in, our AI platform can read and analyse related documents and show you the whole landscape of discussion. It finds everything from connected companies to the media sentiment and global hotspots of discussion. Earlier this year we created a new marketing strategy that incorporated insights from our own platform as a key asset for social media and digital publishing – and spoiler alert, it’s had great results. I want to share how I used AI to boost my content marketing and show you how you can do the same.
In my opinion, there are 3 main barriers to excelling at content marketing: cost, time and unique insights.
1. Good content costs.
Paying for tools to create the content and accompanying graphics can be a massive hit to your budget. Whatever your strategy, content is an investment. You need to consider the cost of market research tools, graphic design software / services and even your people’s time.
Did you know marketers spend over 25% of their budget on content marketing alone? It definitely pays to have high quality content, but this can stack up quickly. A good example of this is graphic design. Graphics can often be key to high-quality content; professional graphs, branded assets and relevant cover images can go a long way to make your piece stand out.
But all of the above comes with a cost. For example, with the graphic design service we currently use, the average cost of a graphic is $21. Let’s say you want to publish 6 written content pieces per month. Alongside the copy you’ll want a feature image and perhaps a minimum of 3 more images in the body. That’s already $504. On top of this, you may want some engaging graphics for social media. If you want to post frequently, say 4 graphics per week for a month, that’s another $336. Already it’s almost $1k just for graphics, let alone any other resources or tools you need to help with writing, creating or publishing the content.
Also, this calculation is just for one example, and no two content pieces are the same. What if you want to do more in a month? What if one blog requires more visuals? What if you’re creating more longer form, graphic-reliant content? This is all going to add up extremely quickly and you need an affordable and advanced pipeline of graphics to meet your needs.
2. Content is time-consuming.
Every piece of content I create broadly goes through these steps; planning, writing, editing, graphic design, internal reviews, publishing, promoting, reviewing analytics. Whilst it may take up just one sentence here, this process often takes multiple weeks (or even months) and each step has countless stages within it. It’s no wonder that B2B content marketers spend 82% of their time just on content creation – having to plan a content calendar, come up with unique perspectives and then actually execute on the creation takes a lot of time and effort.
3. Standing out from the crowd.
Fundamentally, it’s not even just about making the content, it’s about making valuable content. What does your audience care about? How can you engage with them? What are other people saying on the topic?
It can often feel impossible to know where to start. What content already exists on the topic? What can you add to the conversation? Market research is often needed as a basis to understand a landscape, topic or audience before any content is even created.
Also, content channels (especially social media) move fast. If you’re trying to be responsive to topical events in the news as a way to boost traffic, it can be difficult to create high quality content in time. I don’t want our marketing to appear as ‘one of those brands’ just jumping on a bandwagon, which means I need to find valuable and unique perspectives. But, in the time you spend finding a good angle and creating the content, the potential traffic has likely drifted away into the next wave of trending news stories.
The goal is to give your audience something different, something interesting and something that makes them convert. If it can also be time and cost-effective then it’s a winning formula.
Here’s how I started using AMPLYFI’s research platform to solve this problem.
Data is great for building unique content – it can position you as a credible source, show your audience something they haven’t seen before and be a catalyst for engaging discussions on social media and beyond. Unfortunately, data can be extremely difficult to find, understand and present. At AMPLYFI we’re experts in creating insight from data – we reduce all these barriers to give you the engaging outputs that you need.
AMPLYFI is a fairly small company, we have around 50 employees and I am the only member of the marketing team. Earlier this year we decided to test a new marketing strategy, which featured regular, short insights from our tool in our social media and digital content. Our platform enables us to create insights on any topic – so using this to fuel our content marketing felt like a no-brainer.
We began by creating long-form articles consisting of a few engaging graphics from our tool and commentary around the insights. This written content is impactful and has so many great angles, all driven through data from our tool. Everything from fast fashion, to the rise of blockchain and analysing energy market dynamics:
The insights provide unique perspectives, which solve the problem of standing out from the crowd, as well as being easy and quick to produce.
The graphics often showcase interesting trends and give great pointers for what to write about. I’ve even found that if I just have a broad topic in mind, the graphics reveal emerging areas that whole content pieces can be built around, giving me ideas for angles I’d never find by trawling news articles manually.
Over on social media, this approach has been a game-changer.
Social media is now the catalyst for so much marketing activity. Someone scrolling on LinkedIn seeing your post could be your next successful client or even employee, so you have to make the best impression.
We realised that the best engagement on our social media came from using our data-driven insights to explore a popular topic that our audience would find interesting.
Fast-forward to today. We now post graphics straight from our tool on a range of topics. We’re proactive, planned and regular in our posting. Best of all – the posts are performing well.
I spoke earlier about how vital it can be to jump on trends and topical discussions, but also how difficult it is to be responsive. This problem has been completely transformed and here you can see some examples of what our social content now looks like…
These days, I’ll look into notable events, days and celebrations that are coming up. We cover everything from the Olympics to the Love Island final, rail strikes and pancake day. We capture people’s attention with short, snappy and digestible insights, these perform especially well when they’re showing a completely new data-driven perspective. This method is the most effective that we have used.
The process is simple, quick and easy. I speak to our research team, submit a brief for the topic and they go away and create the insights. They’ll then get back with a few insights, ready to use, graphics done and with impactful angles – a world away from the time-consuming content creation process I was familiar with. It’s also massively reduced our graphic design bills. This streamlined process has allowed me to boost our other marketing activities- I’ve been working on more creative publishing, video editing and hosting events for example.
The impact of this has been massive – boosting our traffic, engagement, brand awareness and lead generation. Before implementing this strategy, whilst we were already above average for industry engagement rates on LinkedIn, we’ve been able to increase our engagement by 45% while still growing the volume of posts and web traffic. We’ve also had over 10% growth of web traffic quarter to quarter, and the average time people are spending on our written content has soared – it is now 100% higher than our site average. Compared to the same period last year, we’ve seen 66% more views of our content as well.
Our one person marketing team now feels like a mature research team of five times the size. I can now create a content marketing strategy with the maturity of a larger organisation.
If you would like to learn more about how our AI-driven insights can be used in content marketing, a member of our team would be more than happy to walk you through some real-life examples. Simply get in touch here:
