Several clients who were not able to get traction through traditional advertising approached us about doing something different. They were sharp local and regional businesses that delivered a great product, but they felt their advertising wasn’t working for them anymore. That is, until we developed a proprietary content marketing system.

 

Today, everyone in advertising knows about content marketing. But in 2012, people were still confusing it with advertorials and native advertising. So it took a lot of meetings, a lot of emails and a lot of thumb wrestling, but eventually we got permission to put a blog on the KOMO Television website for our first content marketing client. The SEO juice from the links back to the client’s website was dramatic and almost instantaneous. We were not only producing effective content marketing but co-branding with an authority in the market.

 

We quickly expanded this practice to KING Television, KIRO Television and the Seattle Times. Since our blog posts were topical, entertaining, well written and designed to address customers’ pain points, they always passed muster with the editorial teams at the media outlets. We expanded the program to other clients. They loved seeing their company co-branded with news authorities, especially one (the Times) that had won nine Pulitzer Prizes. And the media outlets turned around and started selling this concept to their other clients – making a fortune, by the way.

 

Meanwhile, our traditional content marketing was blowing up. After A/B testing blog subjects and listening to what resonated with our community, we found a narrow list of topics that were absolute winners. We promoted our content through social media channels and on our client’s websites. We not only started generating a subscriber list but bolstered credibility with anyone evaluating our clients versus their competition. This was all done for a fraction of the client’s television advertising budget.

 

This proprietary content marketing system has also led to hundreds of millions of impressions, millions of clicks, and hundreds of thousands of visits. For one of our extremely niche clients, we earned over 3,000 page views in a day for a single post, and 10,000 page views in a week for a single post. It addresses every point of the customer’s journey, from broad awareness, consideration and preference to lead generation. Pretty powerful stuff if you’re not getting traction with traditional advertising.