If you search on Google “KISSmetrics”, you will get approximately 733 000 results. And if you search “KISSmetrics content marketing” you will get around 135 000 results. That’s amazing! There are a lot of websites out there that write about KISSmetrics, and what they do.
First of all, KISSmetrics is an analytics tool, which shows you exactly what your customers want. It provides data that will help you understand how you can grow your business. Also, their reports are very detailed, so you can see what brought a certain person to your website.
The founders, Hiten Shah and Neil Patel, noticed that companies paid for analytics, they didn’t know what to do with it, and then they hired consultants to help them understand the data. Hiten and Neil decided to make it easier for companies to understand all of that data, and provide them with actual facts about their customers. So, this is how KISSmetrics was born. They pitched their idea, and managed to raise $4 million in venture capital.
Aside from the service they provide, KISSmetrics is well-known in the content marketing world for their marketing blog. On their about me page, they tell you exactly what you’ll get if you subscribe to their blog. I mean, who wouldn’t like to learn how to increase their website conversions, get more traffic, have a user-friendly website design, and track the people that actually make an impact on your business? And all of this is for free.
Content marketing has been a big part of KISSmetrics’s strategy. As their goal is to help companies understand their customers, content and blogging was a must in this mix.
In an interview for Atomic Reach, Neil Patel, co-founder of KISSmetrics, says that the content they create for the blog is based on what the readers and customers want to read and learn. An amazing content team is behind all the awesome posts we see on their blog.
Neil Patel also writes for Quick Sprout, which is his own blog. One particular article drew my attention, in which he talked about how he naturally builds thousands of links through content marketing, which he states “is the new SEO”. Should we believe him? Let’s see.
For both Quick Sprout and KISSmetrics, he managed to get thousands of visitors only by creating high quality content. What is more believable than numbers? Neil demonstrates how KISSmetrics’s infographics got visitors and social media shares, without paying for any likes or tweets. At the same time, he disclosed the amount of money he invested in those infographics. The conclusion was that “if you were trying to game Google and get the same results as we did at KISSmetrics, you would have spent a total of $1,072,905.80”, instead of $28,200. How about that?
Though content marketing is cheaper, it is not the only reason why you should include it in your strategy. Search engines are smarter than you’d think, and they can tell you when your articles provide value or not. Paid SEO will only work for a short period of time, but if you want your articles to rank high overtime, you should consider investing in content marketing.
According to Hiten Shah, when you measure your content creating efforts, you need to break it down into two categories: the content you create for building traffic, and the content you use to get customers. When you create content that is meant to get traffic for your website, you also need to take a look at the shares on social media, and measure retention for your posts. If people come back for more, then you’ve reached your goal, and you need to keep on going. The content that converts readers into customers, is measured by how many people sign up for a service, or buy your product.
In the same article for Atomic Reach, Neil says that the return of investment (ROI) is also important when they measure their content marketing efforts. They look at each content creation and see how much money, and time they’ve spent on it, and how many new users it generated. It’s also important to track down whether these new users remain constant.
If your goal is to make money out of content marketing, then it should take you a while to figure out what will work for you. Traffic is not enough. As Hiten said, there is a difference between content that is created for the sole purpose of traffic, and the one you use to get conversions. The ideal plan would be to combine these two, but it’s often a hard thing to do.
KISSmetrics’s blog is first of all a tool for people that want to learn more about marketing, customers, conversions, driving traffic, and all sort of things that are related to content marketing. And it’s free too, which holds a great advantage from all the other competitors. The fact that they provide such high quality content is only in their benefit. Inbound links and referral traffic are the main benefits. Forbes and BusinessWeek are just some of the big websites from which they were able to get traffic.
To quote Jordan Kasteler, “if your free tools are extraordinary, your paid tools must be out of this world”.
Neil Patel didn’t come up overnight with the key to success in content marketing. Instead, it took him a few years to figure out what is the best strategy, and what type of content brings better results.
Detailed articles are better than short ones. At the same time, a longer article can go more in depth, and have a higher quality. Don’t try to copy all the other big websites that produce tons of content a day. Instead, give your readers an article from which they can learn something.
You probably already know that visual content can bring you more visitors, especially if it’s data compiled in an infographic that’s easy to understand for everyone. There are so many different possibilities for you to create infographics, and what’s great about them is that they can be easily shared or embedded on other websites.
Content has no value if you don’t promote it. Create social media profiles, that will help you engage your readers and customers. They will be the first ones to like, comment, or share your articles.
As I was saying in the beginning of this article, on KISSmetrics’s about me page they state 4 reasons why you should subscribe to their marketing blog. You could do the same too, or an easy way to collect mails would be to integrate pop-ups where people can leave their email to receive your latest articles.
ROI is really important when you’re doing content marketing. Make sure you publish content constantly. It doesn’t have to be on a daily basis. Nevertheless, don’t publish some crappy content if you run out of ideas, and focus on getting some inspiration by asking your readers what they want to read or learn.
Statistics say that “8 out of 10 people will read headline copy, but only 2 out of 10 will read the rest”. Headlines matter, so learn how to write them so that you make people actually click to read your article.
Here are some amazing statistics I found on Padicode.com, regarding the KISSmetrics blog. Their most shared articles can get up to 5 000 shares on social media. During a week, they publish 4.5 articles on average, and “every 10 minutes there are 5-10 tweets mentioning @KISSmetrics, one of their blogposts or one of their 50 infographics”.
Content marketing is definitely something you should look for in the future. You can even use KISSmetrics’s blog as an inspiration and as a valuable resource too.
Do you believe in the power of content?
