If your readers are signing on to hear more from you, you're probably doing something right. More than viewership, more than average time on page, your subscribers is what decides the success of your blog.
This metric is especially important as your subscribers are the ones who provide the initial traffic when you push the hit button. Which, then, turns to leads, and, in due time, conversions. But it all starts with building a subscriber community. Everyone wants more of it. And so did we.
So when we began strategising our content marketing strategy, we knew we had to make it extremely targeted and contextual. Here’s what I mean by it:
We identified our heroes and optimized them further
Over the years, we had over 300 blogs published on our site. So we began by identifying which blogs were performing the best for us: the blogs that were on the page 1. We started small, just a little over 10 content pieces, to test.
And while these blogs were ranking well, they still had scope of improvement. We started by deleting boring introductions that was leading to high bounce rates and added relevant, updated information within the first 100 words into the blog. We, further, identified topical keywords and worked those in, and we also ensured that each blog’s length was over 1200 words and all on-page aspects, such as alt tags, internal links, and anchor texts, etc., were updated as well.
This helped us better the rankings of the already-performing blogs, so much so that 3 of them are now appear as ‘featured snippets’ (or Rank 0) on SERP. And here’s how it worked for us (the percentage increase is in comparison with the previous quarter — Q420)
For each of the 10 initial blogs we picked, we saw a splurge in viewership from anywhere between 10% to 60% (we saw positive results for all).
Bonus result: this dropped our bounce rate by an average of 20% in all the reoptimized blogs.
2. We offered targeted assets on reoptimized blogs
We brought the traffic to the blogs, but we knew we had to do some ethical baiting to increase our community.
We identified a fallacy here: we were offering generic assets throughout our blog domain. Anyone who might have landed on, for instance, a diversity hiring blog, was being offered a remote hiring kit. This was leading to a disrupt in the reader’s journey and, thus, increased bounce rates. So we got rid of it.
We added related, contextual assets that targeted the reader’s mindset. In some cases, we simply offered to deliver the same information we are providing in the blogs to their inboxes. You can see an example of this here.
And the results were amazing:
Note: we were still working with the initial 10 test content pieces.
3. We added contextual CTAs
We observed that anything targeted works well for us, so we identified a way to double down on that.
Rather than slapping ‘subscribe to our blog’ CTAs at generic places, we worked further on the reader’s journey and tried to map their mindset while going through a blog. Through this process, we identified where CTAs seemed natural and welcome.
The copy on these CTAs were modified as well: if the blog was about a tech-based hiring (PHP, Java, Analysts, etc.), the copy, too, promised insights on tech recruitment world. And if the blog was about something as overarching as remote hiring, the copy promised recruitment-based updates.
We, then, added UTMs to track the traffic we’re receiving from these contextual placements and copies of CTAs. We observed that we’re getting thrice as much subscribers from these contextual placements as compared to scrolling subscribe-to-us CTAs on the blog.
4. We offered exclusive content
While targeted and contextual placements are working well for us, it is a long and arduous process. It takes time. And by the time we will be able to finish raking through all blogs that need to be reoptimized, we’ll miss out on the current opportunity we have with our viewership.
So, to keep that audience engaged, we offered exclusive ‘thanks-for-subscribing’ offerings on the rest of the pages. For example, a checklist recruiters need while hiring remotely, job description templates, hiring tips for 2021, etc.
This ensured two things:
We were engaging our audience at all possible places
We were offering value at all possible places
And as we continue working on the contextual placements, this acts as a great placeholder.
You can keep on trying what works the best for you. Perhaps a version of this, or perhaps nothing from this. But the worst thing that you can expect is a learning.
However, from what I have learned in my B2B content marketing strategy experience, offering value should be your main concern. Even if it is about mapping the reader journey, identifying what a reader might be feeling when they’re going through your content will go a long way. You can read about what iMocha is and what we do here. And we constantly share updates on recruitment on blog.imocha.io, if that’s your cup of tea, do give us a visit.
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