How To Own Your Audience

In one year, Wanna Pixel helped a client grow traffic by 2,000 percent.

And we took the client’s online sales from $0 to $6 million in two years.

How did we do this? Not by throwing money at Google Ads. And not by scattering magic keywords throughout the website (that idea became outdated at least 15 years ago).

This infographic gives you some statistics as to how our client benefited from a focused content marketing campaign.

What is a content marketing campaign? It’s a strategic plan using relevant information to form a connection between the value you offer and the value your audience is looking for. Stellar content marketing establishes trust. It’s built from the expertise you and the partners you work with have in your industry.

But developing truly valuable content is either expensive or time-consuming, right? Why spend a lot of money or time on content marketing when you can throw a smaller amount at advertising instead? A dollar’s a dollar, right?

It’s a fair question. After all, people might argue that ads are targeted at your audience, that you don’t have to pay for them unless someone clicks, and that ads take less time to write than a quality article.

Let’s take a look at how content-based marketing actually improves your returns, compared to spending the same money on advertising.

First, content written specifically for your organization is organically targeted toward your audience.

What does this mean? Organic traffic is when someone searches for a specific term via a search engine and websites that score high for keywords in that term rank near the top of the search results. Usually, there are a few ads above those top-ranking website results, so you might think the ads are a better option. But there’s an inherent trust established when your website shows up at the top of a page without you having bought that position from the search engine. Trust is important in any sector of the internet, but when it comes to people choosing which nonprofit organizations they want to invest in, trust is even more critical to your cause.

Second, cost per click ends up being more expensive over the long haul.

According to WordStream, the average CPC in AdWords across all industries is $2.32. And any niche market (such as social good) ups the ante. So, maybe you could pay for 50 average-cost clicks for the same cost you could get one quality article written about your organization. How does that make monetary sense? Well, what’s an article worth? A lot. That article doesn’t expire after a certain amount of time. You don’t have to pay for it again every 30 days or even every year. The information in it, if written well, can lead people to place their trust in your organization’s efforts over multiple years. And the pertinent keywords in such an article can earn you ongoing brownie points with search engines like Google. When their algorithms recognize that your website’s content aligns with your nonprofit’s mission and that people are spending time on your site reading that content, your search rankings climb constantly higher. It’s a snowball effect: the more relevant content you have, the more trust you build. That’s why Kapost is right when they say that “in content marketing, once you’ve built your audience, you own it, and it continues to generate marketing results.”

Third, though an article takes more time to write than an ad, the investment is well worth it.

This goes right along with Point Two. It’s not so much the amount you invest; it’s the returns you get out of that investment. Clearly, most people who are actively searching for what you have to offer want to know more than what your advertisement can tell them. People who invest in organizations either give because someone they trust recommended you (in which case, you didn’t need to advertise for them) or they are researching in order to make an educated decision about giving (in which case they want to know more than your ad can teach them). So if you have a well-written article that features pertinent ad-like blurbs that grab a reader’s attention on Google, Bing, Facebook, and Twitter and also offers a range of clear, quality information for anyone who clicks through to your site, then you are building a base of solid leads that will pay huge dividends over time. As Kapost affirms, “Content marketing gets three times the leads per dollar spent.”

In summary:

• Trust is inherently built through content marketing that ads cannot build
• Content marketing lets you own your audience
• Content marketing pays huge dividends over time

Plus:

• Content marketing leaders experience 7.8 times more site traffic than non-leaders
• 200 million people run ad-blockers. These people will only see your blog posts, videos, and social media posts
• Paid search accounts for just over 5 percent of all traffic, while organic hovers around the 95 percent mark

If you want to explore more research-based documentation on the ROI of content vs. AdWords, here are resources to check out:

9 Stats That Will Make You Want to Invest in Content Marketing
Content Marketing ROI e-Book
A Guide to Marketing Genius: Content Marketing
Blogging Statistics: 52 Reasons Your Company Blog Is Worth the Time and Effort

And if you’re interested in the packages we’re offering:

Here’s a summary of our 3 content-marketing packages. The client mentioned at the beginning of this article has been using our Gold Package for the last two years and, as mentioned above, saw an amazing 2,000 percent growth in his website traffic as well as a huge return on his investment in direct leads resulting in $6 million in sales.

What does all this have to do with nonprofit donations? Everything. We believe nonprofits would see similar results (in growth curve if not in numbers) by revamping their SEO strategy in a similar way.

Don’t buy your audience. Build it.

Check out our content marketing offerings.