Content marketing was driving 67 percent of all organic traffic going to a website, making the strategy indispensable to the company.

Industry: Financial services consulting
Content: Daily premium blogs
Highlights: Blog content drawing 67 percent of site’s traffic

Content marketing has become a buzzword in the past couple years. The Content Marketing Institute found that 86 percent of B2B companies and 77 percent of B2Cs use this approach to build their brands online and generate more sales. However, only 38 percent say they’re effective.

What’s the hold up – and why is there so much hype if companies aren’t seeing results?

There’s reason to believe that companies engaged in content marketing are:

  • Not measuring the results properly
  • Not attributing wins to their content correctly

One of our financial services clients wanted to do a deep dive into its content analytics to see how blogs from our content writers were contributing to the site’s success overall. We found that the content from our editorial team was the driving force behind the brands’ web visibility.

Over the past 3 months, 67 percent of the organic traffic that entered the company’s website through a search result entered on a Brafton article.

Content draws in 2 of 3 organic visits

Over the past 3 months, 67 percent of the organic traffic that entered the company’s website through a search result entered on a Brafton article. At first glance, this might seem like a lot, but it’s exactly how content marketing is supposed to work.

You build an archive of relevant content that answers users’ questions, and when they conduct related searches, your articles will show up. Prospects click the answers to learn more, and they land on your site.

In the case of this client, we saw that content wasn’t just contributing the lion’s share of organic visits – it was bringing in 22 percent of all traffic to the site, including direct visits and referral traffic.

Consumers want answers in the form of web content

When marketers are under pressure to deliver numbers, there’s a risk to overlook the impact content is having on the bottom line because it takes time to gain momentum and reach its full results potential. However, pulling the plug on a strategy that’s working could reverse any success a website has seen. This client would lose most of its organic search traffic if it wasn’t producing web content on a regular basis to draw in readers.

Empowered consumers do research online and they read content to learn. If brands aren’t producing assets that educate their prospects, they’re missing ripe opportunities to generate leads and convert visitors.

Lauren Kaye is a Marketing Editor at Brafton Inc. She studied creative and technical writing at Virginia Tech before pursuing the digital frontier and finding content marketing was the best place to put her passions to work. Lauren also writes creative short fiction, hikes in New England and appreciates a good book recommendation.