“We were going through a rebranding effort and relaunching a new website, so we wanted to bolster our blog,” said USCCG’s senior marketing coordinator. “We have since added to our initial expectations. We started out just getting blog posts and case studies, and have since added eBooks, videos and other assets. So the relationship definitely grew over time as our needs grew.”
Brafton indeed helped USCCG bolster its blog, writing one post per week and increasing the site’s traffic by 15% year over year.
Supporting a small marketing team
USCCG boasts a lean but efficient marketing team. Brafton was initially able to alleviate some of USCCG’s content production strains but soon proved capable of becoming more of an integrated marketing partner.
Beyond content production, a major value proposition Brafton delivers clients is strategic consultancy. Every client is assigned a Content Marketing Strategist who provides content, SEO and calculated direction based on hard numbers.
By tracking, measuring and reporting web analytics for every client, Brafton takes the load off time-strapped stakeholders and provides insightful recommendations to make improvements. The key is to end each call with several actionable next steps in addition to following through on future executions once that week’s, month’s or quarter’s metrics are presented.
“We were able to present to our partners about how well we have been doing online; our traffic’s up and we’ve received more subscriptions,” said USCCG. “[Our strategist] provided this information in a quick way so all partners had visibility into our progress.”
eBooks generate great returns
As far as distribution strategy, USCCG’s marketing team sent out the eBook to their database of high level decision makers in the food and beverage industry, and the campaign was specifically focused on core issues these folks commonly see.
From that list, a prospect downloaded the eBook, meaning he was cycled into the USCCG system for leads. Following up over the phone, the prospect requested even more assets, specifically case studies based on past projects.
Impressed by USCCG’s track record of success, that lead turned into a working relationship.
And that’s exactly how the content marketing process is supposed to work: creation -> distribution -> lead generation -> sale.
USCCG generated interest from other companies asking about the eBook as well, and those leads have served as a solid starting point in 2018.
Brafton’s content has ushered top-of-funnel traffic into the consideration phase. We observed:
