Posted by KristinTynski Recently, new internal analysis of our work here at Fractl has yielded a fascinating finding: Content marketing that generates mainstream press is likely 2X as effective as originally thought. Additionally, the long-term ROI is potentially many times higher than previously reported.I'll caveat that by saying this applies only to content that can generate mainstream press attention. At Fractl, this is our primary focus as a content marketing agency. Our team, our process, and our research are all structured around figuring out ways to maximize the newsworthiness and promotional success of the content we create on behalf of our clients. Though data-driven content marketing paired with digital PR is on the rise, there is still a general lack of understanding around the long-term value of any individual content execution. In this exploration, we sought to answer the question: What link value does a successful campaign drive over the long term? What we found was surprising and strongly reiterated our conviction that this style of data-driven content and digital PR yields some of the highest possible ROI for link building and SEO. To better understand this full value, we wanted to look at the long-term accumulation of the two types of links on which we report:
While direct links are most important, secondary links often provide significant additional pass-through authority and can often be reclaimed through additional outreach and converted into direct do-follow links (something we have a team dedicated to doing at Fractl). Below is a visualization of the way our content promotion process works: So how exactly do direct links and secondary links accumulate over time?To understand this, we did a full audit of four successful campaigns from 2015 and 2016 through today. Having a few years of aggregation gave us an initial benchmark for how links accumulate over time for general interest content that is relatively evergreen. We profiled four campaigns:
The first view we looked at was direct links, or links pointing directly to the client blog posts hosting the content we've created on their behalf. There is a good deal of variability between campaigns, but we see a few interesting general trends that show up in all of the examples in the rest of this article:
We'll now take a look at some specific results. Let's start by looking at direct links (pickups that link directly back to our client's site or landing page). The typical result: A large initial spike with consistent accumulation over timeThis campaign, featuring artistic imaginings of what bodies in video games might look like with normal BMI/body sizes, shows the most typical pattern we witnessed, with a very large initial spike and a relatively smooth decline in link acquisition over the first month.
After the first month, long-term new direct link acquisition continued for more than two years (and is still going today!).
The less common result: Slow draw up to a major spikeIn this example, you can see that sometimes it takes a few days or even weeks to see the initial pickup spike and subsequent primary syndication. In the case of this campaign, we saw a slow buildup to the pinnacle at about a week from the first pickup (exclusive), with a gradual decline over the following two weeks.
“These initial stories were then used as fodder or inspiration for stories written months later by other publications.”Zooming out to a month-over-month view, we can see resurgences in pickups happening at unpredictable intervals every few months or so. These spikes continued up until today with relative consistency. This happened as some of the stories written during the initial spike began to rank well in Google. These initial stories were then used as fodder or inspiration for stories written months later by other publications. For evergreen topics such as body image (as was the case in this campaign), you will also see writers and editors cycle in and out of writing about these topics as they trend in the public zeitgeist, leading to these unpredictable yet very welcomed resurgences in new links.
Least common result: Multiple spikes in the first few weeksThe third pattern we observed was seen on a campaign we executed examining hate speech on Twitter. In this case, we saw multiple spikes during this early period, corresponding to syndications on other mainstream publications that then sparked their own downstream syndications and individual virality.
Zooming out, we saw a similar result as the other examples, with multiple smaller spikes more within the first year and less frequently in the following two years. Each of these bumps is associated with the story resurfacing organically on new publications (usually a writer stumbling on coverage of the content during the initial phase of popularity).
Long-term resurgencesFinally, in our fourth example that looked at germs on water bottles, we saw a fascinating phenomenon happen beyond the first month where there was a very significant secondary spike. This spike represents syndication across (all or most) of the iHeartRadio network. As this example demonstrates, it isn't wholly unusual to see large-scale networks pick up content even a year or later that rival or even exceed the initial month's result.
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January 2019
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