FirstWord’s weekly content marketing roundup: 12 June – 15 June

This week’s content marketing roundup looks at new content marketing models, teams, missed opportunities with corporate reporting – and SEO – but with a content-led twist.

If that’s not too much content marketing for you, read on.

Content for backlinks

Everyone wants backlinks… well, backlinks from relevant quality sites. For the initiated, this guest post in Search Engine Journal from James Brockbank at Digitaloft provides a reminder of good practice.

And yes, I know it appeared in May. But I liked the post. Not least because I have never heard of 6-3-5 BrainWriting before.

Pull quote:

“When deciding upon the format, ask yourself how easy it would be for a publisher to go out and do for themselves what you’re sending them.”

Read more: 5 Content Marketing Mistakes You Should Avoid to Earn More Links

New content marketing model

Frameworks can revitalise your way of working, simply by showing you a new way of looking at a problem. Here it is about creating content for the purposes of SEO.

In this case, it’s TopRank blogger Joshua Nite’s post on the ‘Big Top Method’. Nite talks about how to re-engineer the qualities of evergreen content for current content.

The instructions are quite straightforward and, despite requiring a lot of work, will leave you with a formidable piece of content.

Pull quote:

“Identifying and promoting evergreen content can get more mileage out of a good post. But by nature and design, these posts aren’t built to be an enduring SEO resource. Think about it: when was the last time you clicked through on a blog post that was over a year old?”

Read more: The Big Top: A New Model for SEO-Driven Content

Content marketing team structure

So how do companies structure their content creation teams? Understandably, it is different for each one and depends on the structure.

However, there are always some surprises.

This Hubspot post looks at itself, Buffer, and other big platforms that have their own setup. What is interesting is the diversity of roles (see quote). While writing often plays a smaller role than you would assume.

Pull quote:

“We divide the creation and editing responsibilities among several people instead of retaining full-time writers, and that gives us two important benefits. For one thing, it affords us great flexibility (HubSpot).”

Read more: How HubSpot, Moz, Buffer, and TrackMaven Staff Their Content Teams

Personal and sincere

Personalisation is really important but difficult to do well. Get it wrong and you come over like a stalker. Or, worse, a spammer.

Business2Community has this post on the benefits of personalisation.

It makes the point that brands using personalisation in its online marketing saw a 19% uplift in sales and 20% increase in marketing ROI.

However, in content marketing terms it can elevate your work above the cluttered competition. See stats (below).

Pull quote:

“Brands that personalise web experiences see a 19 per cent uplift in sales and 20 per cent increase in marketing ROI.”

Read more: Why chief marketing officers should get to grips with personalisation.

Corporate reporting is a great opportunity

One missed opportunity for content marketing is the annual report. Often it is a dense paper brick of figures and tables.

Yes, you need those things but that doesn’t mean it can’t be interesting.

Good bit:

“But aren’t corporate communications departments missing a trick? How many superb stories are hiding in those giant, dense reports?”

Read more: Turn your corporate report into something exceptional

One more thing…

Thanks for reading. We plan to do this once a week, so if you have anything you’d like us to cover feel free to email us with a link.