Anybody who has tried content marketing knows it takes work to develop the magic balance that drives readership, leads, and sales. One of the more interesting -- and I'd argue more effective -- high-growth areas for content marketing is the growth of corporate media sites.
As I am defining it in this article, a corporate media site is a corporate-sponsored website written and curated with content on a specific topic that goes beyond typical corporate white papers, blogs, or product information. The goals of a corporate media site are different for different organizations, but at a high level, they are a way to share useful, viral content for a strategic target audience.
There is a growing number of examples of corporate media sites. Intel launched the Intel Free Press, and Cisco launched "The Network." Overseas, the Chinese e-commerce site Alibaba Group hired an award-winning Time magazine reporter to build out a corporate news site called Alizila.
These types of sites can be attractive to corporations because of the opportunity to speak to your target market. However, it is also easy for companies to make the critical mistake of viewing them as simply another way to get out their marketing messages. For these sites to be successful, they need to move well beyond corporate product messaging in order to offer true value to the target audience. This counter-intuitive approach can create concerns that they will not generate a return on investment (ROI). The reality is that these types of sites can lead directly to measurable results, including leads and sales.
At my company, OpenLogic, we spent the past few years investing in and growing our own media site, Wazi, targeted at developers and enterprises using open source software. After extensive experimentation, we were able to determine a formula for success to drive leads and sales. Wazi has more than tripled traffic over the past six months and is now a predictable source of leads for our company. If you are looking to create or improve your own corporate media site, here are our key lessons learned:
Know your audience
Know your audience members and what topics interest them. Conduct keyword research using tools like Google Analytics and Google Insights for Search, and if possible ask your audience for feedback and input on content via Twitter, Facebook, surveys, in-person conversations, or any other means available. Don't be afraid to move beyond your company's traditional marketing messages. Publish content that goes beyond what your company has to offer, but remains relevant to who you are and what you do.
Hire a professional
Hire or assign a professional editor or reporter to help guide, edit, and curate the content. Ideally, you want someone who has already been writing or editing content in this area. Provide guidelines about the type of content you want, but don't micro-manage every article. You don't want this site to turn into just another version of your corporate website. Conduct regular meetings with your editor or reporter to ensure you've got visibility into the editorial calendar and can provide feedback and assistance when necessary. Develop a collaborative relationship, but ensure that your editor or reporter also has enough autonomy to make decisions and do the job.
Content from everywhere
Move beyond just corporate-generated content in order to foster an unbiased third-party voice to your site. You may choose to pay professional journalists or others to provide content. For Wazi, after originally using technical experts who were not professional writers, we switched to freelance writers who are already writing technical articles about open source. These professional writers are much better at meeting deadlines, since this is usually their primary source of earnings.
In some cases, you may want to have your employees contribute content as well, but these articles need to be of interest to your target market instead of just spouting company messages. If your readers -- or outside writers -- feel that the site is just another corporate mouthpiece, they're unlikely to be repeat visitors or contributors.
Syndicate and share content
Share your content to get the word out about your site and build traffic. Find syndication partners that will publish excerpts of your articles and link back to your site for the full article, or allow your partners to publish complete articles -- just ensure there's always a link and attribution. Expand your site's content by syndicating content from your partners' sites.
You should also consider publishing your content under a Creative Commons license to encourage and allow for sharing and free viral distribution. For Wazi, we use the Creative Commons Attribution License, which allows others to publish our content as long as they include an attribution and link.
Convert for ROI
Although some companies are satisfied with using a corporate media site to drive traffic or awareness, many companies will want to ensure that the site generates a measurable ROI. Our most important goal was to drive leads and sales. Consider starting with a "softer" approach to providing offers in order to avoid annoying readers or changing the feel of your site. You can always scale up the number of offers or banners later, once you have the metrics to support the decision. Consider presenting free educational offerings with a registration form. Popular items include white papers, webinars, videos, and how-to kits that are relevant to your visitors and logical extensions of your articles.
Test, refine, rinse, and repeat
Continually and closely monitor what content performs the best and drives the most traffic and, if appropriate, leads. Make sure that you understand the source of the traffic -- whether from Google and other search engines, or links from other sites. Make sure your articles incorporate relevant keywords that will attract your target audience. Track the ratio of site visitors to leads, and then try to drive that ratio down while increasing site visitors. Utilize A/B testing on banner copy, images, and placement to optimize lead capture.
Kim Weins is senior vice president of marketing for OpenLogic.
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