The author's posts are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may no...

1. How Fractl Leveraged Content Marketing to Increase its
Referral Traffic 6,718%
The author's posts are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not
always reflect the views of Moz.
In October 2013, Fractl published a study on viral emotions on the Harvard Business Review. The
research was picked up by several high-authority publishers, catapulted our brand's authority,
increased our brand awareness, and drove dozens of qualified leads. To our expectation, we proved
that our client-facing, research-driven content marketing strategy could have the same long-term
impact on our own brand. Then, we were off to the races.
In early 2014, we launched a survey of more than 500 top-tier publishers. Then, we released a study
analyzing 2.6 billion social shares. By November 2014, we joined forces with influencer marketing
tool BuzzStream. To date, we've launched more than 10 industry research-driven marketing
campaigns, earning more than 180 pickups and 45,000 social shares.

2. The bottom-line impact? Fractl's referral traffic grew 6,718%, its total site traffic grew 4,396%, and
its contact list grew 1,900%.
Of course, this strategy wasn't launched without lessons along the way; here is what I learned:
I. Don't limit large-scale campaigns with narrow-scope ideas
Content marketing can be leveraged in every stage of the buying cycle. The biggest mistake most
marketers make is choosing a single idea that is too narrow and therefore limits their reach. The
second mistake marketers make is thinking that a single campaign will be the silver bullet that
increases every KPI they're tracking. The third mistake they make is not developing a diverse
content strategy that educates consumers in different stages of the buying cycle.

3. The best content marketing strategies focus on developing a long-term strategy for both on-site and
off-site content with a diverse content calendar that includes a variety of campaigns to target every
stage of the buying cycle:
Viral Campaigns - The idea is tangentially related to a brand, has a broad reach, and leverages a
strong emotional hook to encourage hyper-accelerated sharing and traffic.
Conversion-Driven Campaigns - The idea is hyper-targeted to a specific audience that is ready or
nearly ready to purchase.
Awareness Campaigns - The broad-scope idea designed to increase exposure to the brand and
attract and engage consumers who are at the top of the sales funnel.
On-Site Content - The multipurpose content is designed to build the brand and engage with the
target market.
When we first launched our co-branded strategy with BuzzStream, their tool was widely known as an
influencer marketing CRM. Naturally, the team wanted to focus on ideas that would help educate
their user base in influencer marketing tactics. Thus, the following campaigns were born:
21 Tips for Pitching Publishers and Writing Exceptional Subject Lines - ProBlogger
Publisher Pet Peeves - PR Daily
The PR Guide to Media Blogger Personalities - Social Media Explorer
These narrow-scope ideas spoke to a highly targeted audience, allowing us to secure pickups on
authoritative niche marketing blogs. However, by focusing on a narrow idea (e.g. pitching
publishers), we also limited our ability to reach larger top-tier publishers who prefer to cover digital
marketing as a whole (e.g. content creation and consumption).
By limiting our outreach to niche industry blogs, we also limited our ability to reach c-suite

4. executives who were not yet aware of the benefits of influencer marketing and likely read the larger
sites (e.g. Adweek) that spoke to the strategies they're currently using (e.g. traditional PR).
In January 2015, we revamped our co-branded strategy to speak to a larger audience:
Why People Unfollow Brands on Social Media - Adweek
The Emotion of Sound - The Next Web
Social Popularity by Content Type - HubSpot
In doing so, we further developed our content calendar by creating conversion-driven on-site content
while simultaneously leveraging our large-scope awareness campaigns to speak to a broad audience
of marketers. After we had enough data to go off of, we reevaluated our co-branded marketing mix
and came up with the following options for our content calendar:
Several months into our partnership, we found that our optional content mix was Option 1, which
allowed us to:
Build one awareness campaign and one large-scope campaign, which enabled us to secure both top-
tier placements and niche-industry placements
Offer a gated asset that created the opportunity to convert people into future costumers
Create on-site content that served to improve keyword rankings and offered evergreen content for
people to engage with
Your content mix may be different depending on the KPIs you're hoping to achieve and how
aggressive you want to be with your marketing.
PRO TIP: If you're a new brand looking for significant growth, develop an aggressive viral content
strategy like Rehabs.com. If you're an established brand looking to grow loyalty and engagement,
develop awareness campaigns, conversion campaigns, and an on-site content strategy like eBay.com.
II. Heavy research earns more press than knowledge curation

5. Now that you understand the importance of a diverse content strategy, how do you develop
campaigns that earn highly coveted top-tier pickups? You give publishers what they want. When we
surveyed 500 top-tier publishers, we found a whopping 39% want campaigns that feature exclusive
research.
In the beginning of our co-branded strategy, we cast a wide net of ideas that centered around heavy
research, data curation, and knowledge curation. As new campaigns launched, we tracked their
performance by the number of pickups, domain authority, and social shares. Three months into
production, we were able to analyze our results and continue to refine our strategy.
The pie chart on the right shows all of our campaigns divided into a category of heavy research, data

6. curation, and knowledge curation. The chart on the left sorts all of our campaigns based on
performance by social engagement, which has a high correlation to links. Lo and behold, our
publisher survey results rung true: The level of success of our co-branded campaigns had a high
correlation with heavy research-based ideas.
Takeaways
Heavy research-based campaigns have the highest engagement and syndication, because they bring
something new to the table.
Data curation has medium engagement, because it's an even split between unearthing new findings
and publishing data that might be assumed.
Knowledge curation has the lowest engagement, because this data can become widely known as the
industry ages and becomes more saturated.
So, now that we know publishers and audiences want more research, how do we give it to them?
III. Primary research can be either qualitative or quantitative, but we've found more success with
quantitative research
In our publisher survey, writers wanted to see more data-driven articles, infographics, and mixed-
media pieces, followed closely by data visualizations, images, videos, and interactive maps. What did
publishers want the least of? Press releases, interactive projects, quizzes, flipbooks, widgets, and
badges.

7. While articles might do well with qualitative results, most of the other top-ranked content formats
require a type of data visualization that is most valuable when it features quantifiable results.
PRO TIP: Before you begin campaign production, base your ideation on the specific publishers you
want your campaigns to be published on. Find out what resonates with those publishers using tools
like Buzzsumo, and then pitch those ideas to those editors before you ever develop your campaign.
Having publisher buy-in early on in the process guarantees a placement for your campaign, and it
allows you to work with the publisher to give them exactly what they want. What better way to build
a long-term, mutually beneficial relationship?
Now, before you run off to generate campaign ideas, it's important to leverage certain tools to
evaluate topic engagement on the sites you want to target. Some of my favorite tools include:
When it comes to developing primary research, a survey can be one of the easiest and quickest ways
to garner new data. Crowdflower.com, SurveyMonkey.com, and Amazon Mechanical Turk are some
of the most popular survey tools for developing your primary research. Average survey payments
range from 20-50 cents, based on the length of the survey. Always time yourself taking the survey,
and then try offering 5 cents per minute.
PRO TIP: An authoritative sample size is no less than 300 respondents, though most top-tier sites
prefer a sample size greater than 1,000 respondents. Submit surveys to
reddit.com/r/hitsworthturkingfor for additional hits.
If you're running a survey, the majority of your questions should have responses based on a scale,
versus straight "yes/no" answers. This allows you to curate more data to analyze and achieve a more
accurate response.
If you want to go the route of data curation, there are dozens of public and paid APIs that allow you
to unearth data in your field. Some of our favorite data sources include:

8. Think outside the box when coming up with your data visualizations; static infographics are quickly
becoming saturated. Try a new format, like any of these examples I pulled from Fractl's portfolio:
Now that you've finalized your perfect research-based campaign, how else can you optimize it to
increase your core metrics?
IV. Gated assets create a value-add and incentivize people to give you their information
When we launched our first marketing campaign, we didn't have a formal strategy for capturing our
engagement and converting it in our sales funnel. While we'd get a mention for Fractl in all of our
write-ups, we weren't offering any incentive for people to actually visit our website.
PRO TIP: Read our content marketing strategy guide to learn how to use Ann Arbor
www.seotraversecity.com-Ann Arbor Services-seotraversecity and content to increase your
customers.
See what I did there?
Creating a white paper, eBook, list, or any other gated asset that adds value to your original
research creates an incentive for people to go back to your website and continue engaging with your
brand. By gating the asset, you enable your team to capture the contact's information and further
nurture them in your sales funnel.
If you're conducting research, a best practice is to save at least a quarter of your findings to be
featured in your gated asset. Make it explicit in your guest posts that there is more information for
people to learn about if they click through. For example, below you'll see the call to action in our
Contently post, which led to the gated asset for our research on 2.6 billion shares.
While you should include a call to action for your gated asset in the intro text, you should also
include it on all of your graphic assets that could potentially be further syndicated without proper
attribution.
Word of caution: By putting your content behind a gate, you're asking your audience to trust you
with their personal information. If you betray a users trust, the damage to your brand can be severe
and lasting.
Be smart about how you use gated content and what you collect:
Beneath your form, create a subscription box that allows people to opt-in to receive your future
research. Only email the people who opt in, and only email them with what they opted into.

9. Get granular with your options allowing people to choose the specific research topics they want to
receive from your brand.
Email frequency and engagement are negatively correlated, so limit your number of email blasts
based on individual campaign engagement and overall audience engagement.
Collect the bare minimum information you need on your forms, such as name and email address.
Then, use smart fields to collect more data from people who are consistently engaging with your
brand.
Simplify your landing page to tell the user within the first five seconds: what the offer is; the value
and why they want to download it; exactly what you want them to do.
As you set up your landing pages, another thing you need to consider is optimizing the permalink
structure for Google rankings. Matt Cutts says it's best to use 3-5 words in the slug of your
permalink, for example:
Bad: research.frac.tl/a-study-on-two-billion-shares-reveals-which-publishers-dominate-social-media
Good: research.frac.tl/publisher-engagement-analysis
Since your word count is limited, you'll want to cut any superfluous words such as "and." Don't
forget to do some keyword research to determine which 3-5 words you should use based on traffic
data. Obviously you want to go after the words that have the largest traffic, but also evaluate for
long-tail opportunities.
V. Learning which publishers drive the most qualified lead flow is critical to your success
While our coverage on the Harvard Business Review built our authority, the website's visit-t-
-contact-conversion ratio hovered at a low 9%. Meanwhile, targeted industry sites converted at an
average rate of 25-45%, with some gold stars in the 60-90% range.
PRO TIP: While top-tier pickups expand your brand's reach and build its authority, niche marketing
blogs have a higher contact conversion ratio since their audience is already primed with the benefits
of content marketing.
So, how do you ensure that your publisher pickups drive brand awareness and convert leads?
You develop audience personas.
Audience personas are a characterization of your businesses ideal customer. Creating these
personas forces you to consider what your customers value, what they hope to achieve, what they
fear, and much more. By putting yourself in the shoes of your prospects, you can begin to get a
sense for where they get their news and which blogs they might read--allowing you to improve your
pitch targeting for brand awareness and conversions.
Most people recommend creating 3-5 audience personas, which should outline an individual's:
Job Title
Roles

10. Goals
Challenges
Age
Gender
Income
Education
Location
Story
Common objections
Elevator pitch
You can start to create these personas by:
Evaluating your current customers and their differences and commonalities
Vetting your social media http://www.searchenginejournal.com/ following for your average or most
engaged followers
Assessing your past customer inquires and what made a qualified lead versus an unqualified lead
Discussing the ideal client with your sales team or other qualified team members
Once you have a list of your customer personas, you can begin evaluating where these people might
hang out online. Use Buzzsumo's influencer tool to search for people in similar job functions to your
audience personas. Then, use the "view links shared" option to get a sense of where your personas
might be hanging out, too:

11. PRO TIP: Don't limit yourself by only developing personas for your ideal client. Developing personas
for unqualified leads allows you to determine which people and publishers you want to avoid, as
well.
If you want to increase your traffic, leads, and conversions, content marketing is one of the easiest,
fastest, and most cost-effective methods to organically earn your core metrics. What other tips do
you have for leveraging content marketing for sales?
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