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Today’s post is a case study on content promotion from our friends at Hit Reach.
Building content assets that attract links can be an expensive business when you factor in all the costs from research to design, development and, finally, outreach.
Fortunately, we live in a world where there’s tons of great information already out there, and we don’t need to reinvent the wheel with every campaign. Curating useful content into a practical resource, putting everything people need into one place, is a great way to build cost effective content assets.
Case Study: liGo Electronics
For a recent liGo Electronics content asset, we decided to “chunk-up” to give the asset a broad reach and wide appeal whilst remaining relevant to the product ranges being sold.
The customer demographic of liGo is generally older adults aged 45-70 who are quite tech-savvy, so we decided to build a a guide which would provide details on how to save your smartphone battery across a range of makes and models. The guide provides support for almost 150 different handsets.
Content Promotion Strategy
I have written several times about the way in which I leverage Paid, Owned and Earned media promote content to give my content the best chances of earning links.
Owned Media
The client promoted the content via their owned media assets including their blog, email lists and social profiles. We also ensured that the content asset had the Twitter cards validated and the Facebook OGP metadata was implemented.
Paid Media
When we carry out a content promotion campaign we often utilise different paid channels to help us increase the reach of our content and give us the best chance of reaching our target audience as well as getting our content in front of power users and bloggers. For this campaign the best results came from Twitter and StumbleUpon.
StumbleUpon Paid Discovery
When I carry out StumbleUpon campaigns I like to build up custom audiences based on our outreach personas. Not surprisingly the content was well received by people in our target customer demographic (UK users aged 45+) and also with people aged 25-35 who like mobile phones, life hacks and gadgets. If you are new to StumbleUpon marketing then this guide is invaluable.
Laser Targeted Twitter Ads
For this campaign in order to keep the costs of promoting the content down we targeted a number of journalists and bloggers using the Twitter custom audience’s tool. If you haven’t used it yet there is a great tutorial by Patrick Hathaway.
We also created a second Twitter custom audience with a custom Topsy scraper which allowed us to find influential Twitter users who had shared similar content and target Twitter advertisements at them.
Earned Media
At Hit Reach we are huge fans of Buzzstream as it makes managing our outreach campaigns super easy by letting us tag and segment our link prospects as well as assign different team members to different sections of the project.
For this campaign we started out with over 300 link prospects who we wanted to get our content in front of. As we specialise in helping clients in the technology sector, we had a number of existing relationships which made getting this piece in front of them a little easier.
However, there were a few prospects especially in the mobile technology space who we had never spoken to before, so for this particular high level prospect I used the Information Gap technique. By asking for permission to send across a link you know that they will be more likely to actually click the link and see your content.
Here is the “cold outreach” template I used for this campaign:
Hi [First Name],
[Personalised section….]
I just wanted to let you know I have built an online tool which has over 100 different phones and you can select your phone to see which settings to change to improve battery life for that particular device.
Would it be ok to send across a link?
The Results
The asset was well received and was featured on the homepage of the Daily Mail online, the homepage of Digg, and was covered by Inc., Lifehacker and many more technology sites.
BBC Radio 2 picked up on the piece and invited liGo to chat live on air during their Drivetime show. Radio 2 currently has the highest number of total listeners in the UK at over 15.5 million, as well as being mentioned on BBC Radio 5 and London’s LBC radio station.
Future opportunities
As a big of fan of utilising content for link earning I am often frustrated by content assets that are short lived and act solely for a one-off event. If these assets fail to attract any attention, they fail hardest of all as once the event has passed it can be hard to repurpose or reuse the asset.
New Phone Releases
As we have committed to keeping this tool up to date it will be a piece of evergreen content that can be pushed out again and again as new phones or mobile operating systems come on to the market. This means that the client has a valuable content asset on their site which will continue to earn them links for many years to come.
We have made it so that people can link directly to a handset of their choice which will mean that people will be able to point other people to the information they are looking for whether that’s a blog post, forum post, email or social media.
International Outreach
As liGo carries out a significant amount of business in Europe we have had the content asset translated into German and Spanish (thanks to Altura Interactive) so that we can utilise the content for outreach on their other properties.
Content Upgrades
As the asset can be embedded, there will be opportunities for contacting people who have written about smartphone battery tips which we can offer to help them improve upon their content.
We’re now working on the next campaign for liGo which will hopefully eclipse this one by a long way.
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