I could talk to you about content marketing until I’m blue in the face but nothing beats success stories when it comes to conveying a point.
People love seeing and learning from examples.
I’ve analyzed four content marketing case studies and I’m bringing you the objectives, strategies, results and key takeaways so you can learn from what worked for these four businesses.
Let’s dig in!
Tresnic Media content marketing case study
Industry: Tresnic Media is a digital marketing agency
Objective: To enhance the online presence of Tresnic Media
Strategy: 50 blog posts in 25 business days
Results:
- Website Traffic Increase (overall traffic): 481%
- Search Traffic Increase: 427%
- Referral Traffic Increase: 440%
- Direct Traffic Increase: 570%
Key Takeaways:
1. Aggressive publishing schedule pays off
2. Make professional connections on social media platforms facilitated by your content
3. Prove your credibility by creating significant amount of high-quality content in a short period of time
4. Solve customer issues through blog posts and save on customer service time in the future by referring customers to blog posts that solve their problems
5. Creating a lot of content gives you a higher chance of one of your pieces going viral
1. Aggressive publishing schedule pays off
The impressive Tresnic Media’s content marketing campaign results were attributed in part to their aggressive publishing schedule of 2 posts every work-day for 5 weeks.
These kinds of results are backed up by studies such as this one that show percentages of bloggers who report strong results by publishing frequency.
68.8% of bloggers who publish content more often than once a day report strong results from their blogging activities.
2. Make professional connections on social media platforms facilitated by your content
At Tresnic Media, they reported quite an important benefit of creating content and that’s connecting with your peers through social media platforms.
They shared their content in various relevant LinkedIn groups and on Twitter and sparked interesting discussions around it.
Connecting with industry professionals can have a profound impact on your business.
3. Prove your credibility by creating a significant amount of high-quality content in a short period of time
Creating high-quality blog content is not easy even for marketing teams, let alone individual marketers.
Especially if your goal is to publish two posts per day.
They managed to do exactly that at Tresnic Media and they say it helped them prove their credibility to potential clients.
No surprise there.
Anyone who creates content for a living will be impressed by this feat and it will impact their perception of the organization or individual who pulled it off.
4. Solve customer issues through blog posts and save on customer service time in the future by referring customers to blog posts that solve their problems
Answering customer questions and solving their issues through blog posts is a clever way of doing customer service.
Sure, creating blog posts takes time, but imagine how much time you’ll be saving by referring 10 customers with the same issue to a single blog post that solves it for them.
All of a sudden, you start saving a lot of time on customer service.
Time that you can invest elsewhere, like creating more content.
5. Creating a lot of content gives you a higher chance of one of your pieces going viral
Content marketing is a numbers game.
You can’t really predict which post will be a winner and which will be a dud.
That’s why creating as many high-quality content pieces as possible is the name of the game.
With every content piece you publish, odds of hitting a home run shift in your favor.
Tresnic Media hit a home run with one of their posts that has gone viral and increased their website traffic by 1,000%.
Not only that, but that blog post helped them build more backlinks which in turn raised their domain strength and helped all the other pieces of content perform better too.
Pro tip: Double down on the content pieces that perform well and expand and enhance them as best you can to create something that won’t be topped by your competition for a long time.
Canva content marketing case study
Industry: Canva is a graphic design platform
Objectives: To drive 1 million sessions to Design School blog in a calendar month
Strategy: Publishing evergreen content that continues to drive traffic for months and even years and improving the existing content
Results: Initial objective to drive 1 million sessions in a calendar month achieved after 6 months
Key Takeaways:
1. Evergreen content keeps bringing in traffic for a long time
2. Paying attention to SEO pays off in terms of organic search traffic
3. For active blogs, doing content audits once a year delivers a better user experience
4. Publishing content consistently and reliably pays off
5. Scheduling articles weeks in advance helps alleviate stress and makes the entire operation of creating content much smoother
6. Coming up with a reliable system for assessing current writers and onboarding new ones when necessary is very useful
7. Blog artwork is important
1. Evergreen content keeps bringing in traffic for a long time
Evergreen content is content that doesn’t become obsolete easily.
For example, writing articles on trendy topics might get you traffic and social shares while people are interested in that topic.
But the moment the topic isn’t trendy anymore, the traffic goes back to zero.
Evergreen content, however, keeps attracting traffic for months and even years to come.
At Canva, they leaned heavily on the evergreen content to achieve their content marketing objective.
2. Paying attention to SEO pays off in terms of organic search traffic
SEO gives your content a fighting chance of ranking at the top of the SERPs where all the organic search engine traffic comes from.
There’s a saying that goes something like “if you have a dead body to get rid of, hide it on the second page of Google.”
Canva’s content marketing team realized that they need to create high-quality SEO-friendly content in order to attract organic traffic to their blog.
3. For active blogs, doing content audits once a year delivers a better user experience
For Canva, this content marketing case study began at a point where their blog already had a body of content.
The team audited the content that’s already published to help them decide:
- Which pieces they want to keep as is
- Which related pieces to combine into one
- Which pieces needed improving
- Which pieces are hopeless and should be scrapped
After a content audit, many improved pieces of content started performing better immediately.
They provided us with three such examples.
4. Publishing content consistently and reliably pays off
The team made a big effort to get to the point where they can publish a new article every workday.
While it might be impossible for individual marketers to maintain such an aggressive publishing schedule, going on offense every once in a while and cranking out an article a day is a great idea.
But even if you can’t publish that much content, stay consistent with your schedule no matter what it is.
Publishing consistency is something search engines pay attention to.
5. Scheduling articles weeks in advance helps alleviate stress and makes the entire operation of creating content much smoother
Having a plan is always better than winging it all the time.
No surprise there.
Frequently getting to a point where you don’t know what to write about can waste a lot of your time and mentally drain you.
Thinking ahead and even having a few finished articles scheduled for publishing can help you avoid a lot of stress.
That’s what Canva’s content marketing team found to be true too.
6. Coming up with a reliable system for assessing current writers and onboarding new ones when necessary is very useful
Canva’s team is comprised of freelance writers from all over the world.
To keep such an operation running, it’s important to be aware of pressure points so they can take action before things escalate.
Working with freelance writers usually requires testing quite a few of them before finding the right person for the task.
Having an onboarding system in place saves a lot of time in the long run.
7. Blog artwork is important
Canva being a graphic design platform puts an even greater pressure on the team to come up with beautiful designs and artwork to accompany their content.
Putting in a lot of time and effort to accomplish this had an interesting side effect in the fact that their content started performing very well on Pinterest.
And because Pinterest is also a search engine besides being a platform where visually appealing content does well, it started driving a lot of traffic to Canva’s blog.
It overtook Twitter as their second-biggest social contributor to traffic.
Codeless content marketing case study
Industry: Codeless is a content production company
Objective: Optimize old content to make it surge in rankings
Strategy: Rebuilding old content from the ground up and republishing it
Results:
- Increased average session duration by 281%
- Reduced post promotion CPC by 70%
- Content exit rate decreased by 23%
Key Takeaways:
1. ‘More’ content won’t work unless it’s also ‘better’ content
2. Determine if content is doing its job and figure out how to make it better with the least amount of effort to get the highest return
3. Rewrite from the ground up
4. Make content easier to consume
5. Headlines matter a lot
6. Multilingual content works well but is hard to do well
1. ‘More’ content won’t work unless it’s also ‘better’ content
Fierce competition in most industries and niches is pushing everyone into creating high-quality content if they want to get to the coveted first page spots in the SERPs.
Over are the days of cranking out as many 500-word articles as possible and seeing great results.
The team at Codeless recognized this.
They were left with two options – create new content that’s ‘better’ than what their competition has come up with or improve their old content that’s doing well but not extremely well.
They decided to do the latter and improve the content that’s sitting at the bottom of page one or top of page two on Google.
The team realized that it’s easier to get better results out of content that already has some “street cred” with Google than write new content from scratch.
2. Determine if content is doing its job and figure out how to make it better with the least amount of effort to get the highest return
The team performed a content audit by asking these two questions to determine how to improve the content pieces:
- Is this content doing its job? Why or why not?
- What do we do to correct that with the least amount of effort to yield the highest return?
Auditing your content like this can get tricky because if you could pinpoint the flaws in your content, you would have avoided them in the first place.
This is why doing the best you can to detach yourself from the fact that these content pieces are “your babies” is vital.
Luckily, people are able to assess content more objectively when they’re auditing older content like they did at Codeless.
3. Rewrite from the ground up
The content team at Codeless decided to rip apart some of their content and rebuilt it from the ground up.
For example, they took a 5-6k word article and reduced it down to 1569.
The team recognized that ‘long’ does not necessarily equal ‘good.’
This lines up with what Google recommends too.
Google focuses on comprehensiveness rather than word count.
Sure, comprehensive content tends to be longer, but that’s merely a guideline and not the rule.
4. Make content easier to consume
At Codeless, they recognize the importance of including custom images, videos, and audio into their content.
The saying “a picture is worth a thousand words” holds true when it comes to enhancing your content with multimedia.
Relevant images, video and audio content added to blog articles not only makes them easier to consume, but also contribute to important Google ranking factors like average session duration, dwell time, bounce rate, and more.
5. Headlines matter a lot and true winners are best discovered through testing instead of guessing
Copywriting is incredibly important.
When potential visitors stumble upon your 5,000-word article in the SERPs, they’re only exposed to the title and the meta tag.
Great copy has the true power to convert potential visitors into your audience members.
At Codeless, the team relies on testing various headlines until they discover true winners.
6. Multilingual content works well but is hard to do well
One way of expanding your sphere of influence is certainly targeting audiences in foreign languages.
Capturing context and voice through translation is tricky, however.
This is why the team relies, again, on testing different human translators to pinpoint the most suited people for the task.
It’s hard work but it’s also inevitable if you want to do it right, they say.
At this point, Codeless does translations in French, Italian, and Spanish.
T60 Productions content marketing case study
Industry: T60 Productions is a Chicago-based video production company
Objectives: To switch from a predominantly word-of-mouth-based growth to content marketing
Strategy: Creating fewer comprehensive audience-focused content pieces instead of cranking out 300-word articles every day
Results: 199% increase in website visitors in 2 years
Key Takeaways:
1. Short form blog posts (300 words or so) don’t work for SEO, but they can be a good way of answering questions and doing customer service
2. Providing value for free is at the core of content marketing
3. Blog less but more thoughtfully – focus on the audience
4. Comprehensive content trumps publishing frequency
5. Guest blogging is great for raising your domain’s backlink profile
6. Patience is a virtue
1. Short-form blog posts (300 words or so) don’t work for SEO, but they can be a good way of answering questions and doing customer service
A tiny bit of context: T60 Productions is owned by Tony Gnau and he was creating content for the company website on his own.
Tony was cranking out short-form blog posts every day in order to get as many pages on his domain as possible.
That’s what blogging used to look like 10+ years ago.
That strategy didn’t work particularly well back then either, and it sure as heck doesn’t work today.
Pro tip: a good way of saving a body of content like that is to combine related articles and create more comprehensive pieces.
2. Providing value for free is at the core of content marketing
Tony did a pro bono shoot for an event that ended up connecting him with people from Orbit Media Studios who knew a thing or two about content marketing.
People from Orbit Media Studios loved Tony’s work and offered to help him out with anything he needed.
After a single meeting, Tony was armed with a content marketing strategy that ended up working for him and his company, T60 Productions.
Providing value for free pays off sooner or later.
3. Blog less but more thoughtfully – focus on the audience
The advice that Tony got from Orbit Media Studios was to ease down on publishing frequency in favor of creating more comprehensive and meaty content.
Another advice Tony got was to focus on the audience.
And that’s the best advice anyone can get when it comes to content marketing.
It’s all about providing value to your audience and connecting them with the solutions to their problems.
4. Comprehensive content trumps publishing frequency
There’s nothing wrong with posting once a day if you’re able to create high-quality content that’s better than what your competition is coming up with, by the way.
But sacrificing quality in favor of quantity is a bad idea.
Pro tip: don’t chase perfection because it doesn’t exist, but don’t knowingly publish garbage either.
5. Guest blogging is great for raising your domain’s backlink profile
Guest blogging is writing articles that will be featured on someone else’s website.
The website gets free content and the guest blogger gets exposure to that audience as well as a backlink pointing back to his own website.
Backlinks are a very important ranking factor.
They indicate to Google that your content is worth sharing and bumping up in the SERPs.
This is why guest blogging is an important activity, especially for novice bloggers and new domains with weak backlink profiles.
6. Patience is a virtue
It took 2 years of continuous work for Tony to see the results he got from his content marketing efforts.
Content marketing is not for the “get rich quick” type of crowd.
What are Tony’s feelings on content marketing today?
“IT WORKS!“
And that’s a direct quote.
At the time of writing his case study, he was planning on doubling down and putting in even more work into content marketing.
Conclusion
Learning from other people’s experiences is one of the best ways to learn.
The consensus between the content marketers featured in this article is that content marketing works.
I hope you found value in these content marketing case study analyses and learned a thing or two.
Did you find any of these content marketing studies particularly interesting?