In June 2016, Diego Gomes, Rock Content’s CEO, wrote an article about how a single blog post helped us generate R$436,000 (Brazilian Reais) in new deals over just 16 months.
The article’s goal was to show that a Content Marketing strategy involves much more than just having a blog and posting frequently. It can bring actual results, creating benefits in the medium and long term.
One year after reporting that, the famous Digital Marketing Guide post had provided almost half a million Reais towards Rock’s revenue.
We are now back here to update this figure. In this article, we will show that a well-made Content Marketing strategy never stops generating results!
The Multiplying Power of Evergreen Content
In December 2014, the Rock Content marketing team identified a golden opportunity: to write an article focused on the keyword “Digital Marketing“, for our Portuguese blog.
Besides being the keyword with the highest search volume within the marketing segment and having a high cost per click, “Digital Marketing” also represents one of the first searches performed by one of our primary buyer personas.
Therefore, such an article made a lot of sense for our blog strategy!
We are aware that every published blog post is an opportunity to generate more business. And when we published the article on Digital Marketing, we were sure that it would always bring new clients to Rock Content while it was on our blog.
And it was exactly what happened.
That’s the beauty of evergreen content. Unlike a news article, for example, evergreen content deals with a subject that will not lose its relevance any time soon. And so, just by posting it once on your blog, it can bring results for many, many years.
Two and a half years after being published on our blog, the post “What is Digital Marketing” had already brought 1.8 million reais in new business.
The first part of this story covered the effort involved in writing and updating the article. Now, we will tell you about the mathematics of what came next.
Get Your Calculator Ready
One of the most exciting aspects of Content Marketing is that you can easily monitor all the results and even predict most of them.
So, for us, it was not a surprise that this article generated almost R$2 million in revenue. We know that every blog post is a new opportunity to earn more.
The logic is not complex: the better-positioned your article is for a certain keyword, the greater are the odds that you will attract visitors to that article and convert those readers into customers.
And when the keyword has a high search volume, it’s even better!
According to studies, on average, 30% of people who search for a keyword end up clicking on the first result.
The keyword “Digital Marketing” is present in about 60 thousand searches every month.
Assuming that 30% of the 60,000 people who search for “Digital Marketing” every month click on the first result, which is our article, we can already guarantee at least 18,000 hits per month, just on the Digital Marketing post.
If we were investing in Google Ads to get the same amount of hits per month, we would be spending more than 53 thousand reais since the cost per click for the keyword “Digital Marketing” is around R$5.90.
This means that any effort costing less than R$53,000 per month would already mean profit for us. And producing this article, improving it, optimizing it for SEO, and taking actions to convert visitors into customers — although a laborious task — certainly costs less than that!
From visitors to customers: Part 1 — Generating Leads
In May 2015, our article reached the first position for the query “Digital Marketing”.
We already had a good volume of hits from then on, and the next challenge was to monetize those visitors. That is, to collect contact information and invest in lead generation and lead nurturing.
We relied on a few different approaches to turn a visitor to our blog post into a lead.
Initial Offer
The lead generation strategy of our blog posts starts with a pop-up. When someone visits the blog for the first time, they are offered one of our most popular free materials, the “Secrets of Organic Traffic” guide, through a pop-up that fills the entire screen.
By doing this, we were able to grow our email base and identify visitors who are interested in learning more about traffic acquisition. After all, this is just one of the many subjects we cover in our blog!
5% of visitors who access the Digital Marketing blog post convert on the pop-up offer.
For us, this number is satisfactory, but not enough! That’s why we rely on other lead generation strategies throughout the blog post.
Offers That Complement The Reading
The Digital Marketing article is far from short. Nearing 6,000 words covers several topics in this vast universe, from basic concepts to tips on choosing a Digital Marketing agency.
Therefore, there are several opportunities to include CTAs throughout the text, leading to other materials that go deeper into the article’s subjects. And we have a library full of Digital Marketing materials!
We have included, in strategic spots in the text, references to materials such as:
- Social Media Marketing Kit;
- Ebook: Marketing in Videos;
- Encyclopedia of Content Marketing;
- The Complete Guide to Digital Marketing!
In total, the article has seven CTAs for downloading materials from Rock Content.
And what does that mean?
The visitor who reads the article and decides to download one of the materials offered becomes a lead for Rock Content. To access an ebook or kit, they need to provide some information, such as name and email.
Out of the 377,570 visitors that came to know our blog through the Digital Marketing article, 4,815 downloaded some material and became leads.
In other words, we were able to generate almost 5,000 business opportunities for the company!
From Visitors To Customers: Part 2 — Nurturing Leads
In every company, each new lead acquired represents a new business opportunity.
After all, that person is seeking information about the company’s area of expertise and indicates that they are looking for a solution to some problem.
In the case of Rock Content, someone who downloads our materials on Digital Marketing is demonstrating that they are struggling with some part of the process. Otherwise, they wouldn’t need to be wasting time looking for educational materials.
Every lead is a potential customer, but not all of them are at the right time to buy a product or be approached by a sales team, either because of lack of information or because they are just at the beginning of their buyer’s journey.
And that’s why we invest in nurturing all the leads we generate through the Digital Marketing blog post, sending emails suggesting complementary materials, and clarifying how Rock Content’s services can help a company acquire more customers through Digital Marketing.
The nurturing flow that targets these leads ends with an email inviting them to talk to a Rock Content consultant to understand how we can help them.
The person who requests this contact is, in our view, the most qualified lead there is: the Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL).
After all, they have already gone through many stages in their buyer journey, and now it’s time for our consultants to deal with them.
From all the visitors who got to know the Content Marketing blog through the Digital Marketing post, 1,273 ended up requesting contact from Rock Content.
What happens next?
From Visitors To Clients: Part 3 — Converting Leads Into Clients
Including leads and MQLs, Rock Content’s sales team had 6,000 prospects to evaluate, identify promising opportunities, and make contact. And that only includes the ones that came from the Digital Marketing blog post!
To work on these leads, we have an inside sales team with about 50 consultants, who are all specialists in Inbound Marketing.
Every Rock Content client goes through a consultative sales process before acquiring our services. Therefore, none of our content generates revenue “alone”.
We depend on a good team of consultants to carry out the entire sales process!
All consultants in our sales team are trained to qualify the leads they receive from marketing, based on the information the lead provided when downloading our materials (such as company name, number of employees, company website, and the lead’s job title).
Thus, only the leads with the most potential to become Rock Content clients need to be contacted — optimizing time and increasing sales operations’ productivity.
From the leads that came from the Digital Marketing blog post, 85 became Rock Content clients.
Considering average monthly earnings of R$1,770, we were able to generate R$1,805,400 of annual revenue. With just one blog post!
This is the 31-month life story of an article that was key to Rock Content’s marketing strategy — and continues to be!
Writing a blog post might be easy — after all, it is just words on a blog page.
But make no mistake.
As you can see, producing and posting an article is just the tip of the iceberg. Getting a blog to generate real revenue requires a massive task force of spreading the content, updating it, refining technical aspects of SEO, building a lead generation and nurturing strategy, and having an exceptional team of consultants to address the leads created.
And that’s just for one blog post. Now multiply that by 10, 100, 1,000.
If you think you’ll never be able to do the same kind of work with your blog, don’t lose hope!
Instead, start with small steps, making improvements here and there, including a CTA, focusing your efforts first on the articles that bring the most traffic to your blog, and so on.
Content Marketing is a strategy developed little by little.
And we can’t end this article without saying that you can count on us!
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