I had a great conversation today with Dr. Sandra Bauman from Bauman Research about start-up companies. She shared with me the idea about “sleeps, creeps and leaps.” In the first year of a business launch, the brand sleeps. In year two, you start to see the company creep toward success. But it’s in the third year that the business leaps and really begins to grow.
Fascinating concept.
The same principle can be applied toward corporate content marketing.
As the corporate content program starts (let’s say with a blog, white paper, enewsletter strategy), success is difficult to find. Not much of the right traffic, not many tangible results. This is a good reason why most corporate blogs die within three months.
It’s only after months and months, possibly a year of time before you start to see real engagement. Because you have kept your content promise, you now start to see people sharing your content, signing up for your RSS feed, and linking to your great content. Google starts to pick up on this and your organic search engine results start to pick up.
Then, after well more than a year, the real magic happens. You become the thought leader. A trusted advisor for your industry. People start to look to you for guidance in the industry. It’s in this time period, that you start to see quantifiable business returns as a result of your content.
Yes, it could happen sooner, and it could also take longer, but the key issue here is this – content consistency.
The most important part of the content strategy (even, dare I say, more important that the absolute best content for your niche) is consistently delivering on your content promise day after day, month after month, year after year.
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Create Content that Sleeps, Creeps and Leaps
I had a great conversation today with Dr. Sandra Bauman from Bauman Research about start-up companies. She shared with me the idea about “sleeps, creeps and leaps.” In the first year of a business launch, the brand sleeps. In year two, you start to see the company creep toward success. But it’s in the third year that the business leaps and really begins to grow.
Fascinating concept.
The same principle can be applied toward corporate content marketing.
As the corporate content program starts (let’s say with a blog, white paper, enewsletter strategy), success is difficult to find. Not much of the right traffic, not many tangible results. This is a good reason why most corporate blogs die within three months.
It’s only after months and months, possibly a year of time before you start to see real engagement. Because you have kept your content promise, you now start to see people sharing your content, signing up for your RSS feed, and linking to your great content. Google starts to pick up on this and your organic search engine results start to pick up.
Then, after well more than a year, the real magic happens. You become the thought leader. A trusted advisor for your industry. People start to look to you for guidance in the industry. It’s in this time period, that you start to see quantifiable business returns as a result of your content.
Yes, it could happen sooner, and it could also take longer, but the key issue here is this – content consistency.
The most important part of the content strategy (even, dare I say, more important that the absolute best content for your niche) is consistently delivering on your content promise day after day, month after month, year after year.