TL; DR: Creating and marketing big content takes a lot of work but for SuperOffice, it led to record organic visits, social traffic, website leads and conversion rates. This 2,800-word case study explains the entire process in full.

Introduction

You have heard it before - Big content works, right?

And you may have even read this post by Dr. Pete on why it’s worth the risk or Mackenzie Fogelson's strategic steps to big content but how do you get from the initial idea of big content, finding time to write it and then launching big content?

The answer: Hard work.

We have all seen this chart before (which isn’t slowing down!):

But what else do we know about content marketing?

Well, we know longer content ranks better. We know longer content gets more social shares, and thanks to reports from the Content Marketing Institute, we know your competition is spending more each year on content marketing.

Content marketing is coming into its stride this year. Companies that experimented with content marketing last year are now seeing the positive results and are spending more money on it.

On January 6, 2014, SuperOffice launched the CRM Buyer's Guide, a guide designed to help decision makers choose the right CRM solution for their business. At 31 pages and 7,000 words, this was our attempt at big content. It took nine months from idea to launch and this post details the entire process from start to finish and the lessons I’ve learned along the way.

i: The starting point

About SuperOffice. Founded in Oslo, Norway in 1991, SuperOffice is Europe’s leading CRM software provider with more than 11,000 customers and has offices in Germany, Netherlands, UK, Norway, Denmark, Switzerland and Sweden – All with local language websites. Along with www.superoffice.com, we have eight websites in total.

The Team. For online marketing, we have Jennifer Lund (Marketing Director), Charlotte Blicher, Marketing Manager Denmark (who recently left SuperOffice to join SimCorp as Head of Lead & Client Engagement) and me. Here we are (Charlotte left, Jennifer middle, me on the right):

Direction. In January 2013, we created a shortlist of big content we wanted to produce. We don’t have the big budgets that competitors have in our space, and we needed to be smarter in how we spend our marketing dollars and how we invest our time. We came up with two types of big content:

• The beginner's guide to CRM
• The state of CRM: 2013 report

That was it. We had two big ideas, that were basically plucked out from the air and for one reason or another we chose the beginners guide to CRM. As Jack Welch famously said, “Pick a general direction and implement like hell!” That's what we did.

Research. Before we started, we looked at successful guides and white papers that we have all enjoyed reading, including Moz’s beginner's guide to SEO and Marketo’s definitive guide to lead generation. By performing keyword research, we found that there was nothing else on the market that packaged all this type of content into one guide.

Audience. “Who is the guide for? We need to understand our audience” - Jennifer

At first, I wanted this guide to target anyone and everyone. In hindsight, this was a mistake but luckily, we decided we would write for decision makers who were looking to purchase a CRM. This was the complete guide for them. So we changed the name from Beginner's Guide to CRM to Buyer's Guide to CRM.

Purpose. And finally, we had to answer the question; why are we writing this guide? Our goal is to drive more leads, and creating this guide fit within the overall goal. We had our purpose.

ii. The content

Creating big content is no easy task, and it took almost a year to launch. We started really talking about the idea in March 2013. Here’s the process laid out on how we went from initial idea to getting ready to launch.

The content. To create the outline of the guide, we created a list of questions that we wanted to guide to answer. If we could list 10 questions, we could then write 10 answers that would cover at least 10 chapters. The questions ranged from 'what is CRM?', 'Why is it so popular?' to more advanced questions like 'how do I measure CRM success?'.

Start small. It’s easy to get overwhelmed when approaching a huge 7,000+ word guide but we chose to start off small and once we decided on the chapters to write about, we split them up between the three of us and wrote one chapter at a time – and in blog post format. For our own psychology, we found writing blog post content between 500-800 words was much easier to digest than trying to write a full on guide from start to finish.

First draft. By breaking the guide up into smaller chunks, we managed to get through the first draft rather quickly and in less than six weeks. At this point, we had 6,000 words and a wide range of topics ready to be organized to fit the flow of the guide.

Collaboration. We used WorkZone's project management software to stay on top of things throughout the process. This helped us stay on track and meet deadlines. Without it, we would have had several different copies of the guide lying around, which would have led to more delays.

Tone of voice. Once the final draft was ready and we were happy with the content – we rewrote it. Well, Jennifer did. We had three writers; a Brit, an American and a Dane, so the tone of voice wasn’t consistent. Jennifer spent a week rewriting the entire guide to have one tone of voice.

Design. SuperOffice design is a little playful with the matchstick man. We’ve worked with an agency in Denmark for years and they understand us well. The design for the guide was spot-on the first time around. Working with an agency that just gets you and the brand is priceless and this case was no exception.

Feedback. We fully immersed ourselves into the guide. We lived and breathed the guide. And we had become protective of it. We thought it was great, but we needed to collect feedback on it before we were ready to continue. We reached out to colleagues and friends to read through the guide and provide feedback. This became a truly important part of the process (we also used the feedback later on in our email marketing efforts).

Translations. The guide was never going to be English only. We needed the content translated into six languages, which took several weeks from initial translation of the copy to adding it into the design of the guide, and sending back for a final review before sign off.

Postponing the launch. We were ready to launch. We held a meeting at the end of November and all we had to was say let’s launch it – but we pushed it back until 2014. Having worked on the guide for more than nine months we didn’t want to launch it over the Christmas period and set it up for failure– that would have been wasteful. We decided to wait.

iii: The marketing

We were finally ready to launch the guide. Ten months after we first discussed it, it was now time to launch.

Soft launch. The day we launched the guide wasn’t a planned and coordinated effort. In fact, a lot of this process has been ad-hoc and learn-by-doing and the launch of the guide was no different. One day it wasn’t there, and then the next day it was live on one of the home pages.

But, two days after the soft launch, we were ready to start marketing the guide. We agreed on a multi-channel communication plan for the guide. Here is the list of marketing channels we used:

Website. The website is the first place to promote the guide. We created a huge banner on the home page with one call to action. We have a 'white papers' tab in the main navigation menu that lists all our white papers and guides, so we included it there too. Another way to promote the guide was to use Hellobar. It's been hugely popular and we have seen a lot of success by using it.

While we started by promoting the guide on the home page with both the Hellobar plugin and the main banner, we decided to implement the Hellobar plugin site-wide, as we found a lot of visitors were arriving on landing pages from search engines and might not realize we have just launched a guide.

Social media. SuperOffice has several business profiles on LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+ and Twitter and with more than 200 employees, has a lot of personal profiles as well. We used this to our advantage and shared the guide across all platforms and profiles, and several times during a two-week period, which led to our highest social visits and conversions month ever!

We also tested Twitter ads with a $100 budget targeting the UK. We had never used it before, and it was a positive first time experience. We launched a very basic ad targeting tweets that included ‘CRM’ and received 45 clicks and two conversions, with the cost per conversion actually better than some of our paid search CRM campaigns!

Email marketing. With 50,000 email subscribers, we've seen a lot of success through email marketing and we usually try to send two emails per month. We changed that approach for the buyer's guide though, and instead sent three emails to our database. Hoewever, the second email was only sent to readers who didn't open the first email, and the third email was only sent to those who didn't read the first and second.

Here are the subject lines we used:

• Email 1: Hot off the press – The CRM Buyer’s Guide
• Email 2: Free Download and Excerpt to The CRM Buyer’s Guide
• Email 3: Learn How Your Business Can Benefit from CRM

Remarketing. We also remarketed to visitors who browsed the site but didn’t download the guide, with the exception that the landing page they would arrive on from the remarketing banner being different to the initial buyer’s guide landing page (a more focused page).

Blog. The SuperOffice blog received a lot of press in Norway for being one of the first brands to use content marketing in this region. The blog received close to 25,000 unique visitors in 2013 so we used the blog to launch the guide.

Using the blog post acts as a great platform to launch a white paper. Most visitors didn't share the landing page for the white paper, but we found they were much more likely to share a blog post. In fact, the blog post itself was shared more than 90 times.

Qualaroo. We use Qualaroo on the site to ask visitors what their biggest challenge is when it comes to choosing CRM software. Instead of having a simple “Thank you”, we included a link to the buyer's guide.

A/B testing. We were seeing some good results. We were sending a lot of visitors to the landing page so we decided to use A/B testing software to perform a test on the landing page where visitors download the guide. We made a simple change from the “Free download” call to action button to the “Free Download: CRM Buyer's Guide”.

We’re still testing this and it’s only been changed on the English website, but so far the variation has increased conversions by 35%!

What we didn’t have time for

From our initial marketing plan, we had several ideas that we didn’t have time to implement. Looking back, I wish we had made time. Here’s the list of things we didn’t find time to do (but you might find useful for when promoting your big content):

• Infographic - Summarize the guides charts for those that wanted a quick overview
• LinkedIn Ads - Test promoted posts on LinkedIn to business professionals (our audience)
• SlideShare – Use the charts and graphs and compile into a visual presentation
• Webinar - Host a webinar for Q&As on how to select the right CRM software for your business
• Influencers – Use Followerwonk to find and follow influencers that work with CRM

Some of these were pretty close to being implemented. For example, we had a list of the top 50 influencers from Followerwonk, but we just didn't have time to follow them all on Twitter. Or how we have the presentation ready for SlideShare, but we just haven't had the chance to upload it with the right notes.

iv: The results

The guide took almost a year to complete and a full month to promote it, but was it worth it?

Here’s a look at the results so far (three weeks later):

• A record organic traffic month with more than 10,000 visits
• A record conversion rate month with 10% conversion rate across all websites
• More than 1,500 people have downloaded the guide
• A record leads month with more than 3,600 leads

Organic traffic by month (Jan 2012-Jan 2014)

We received 32,000 organic visits in 2012. and 72,000 in 2013.

Buyer's guide downloads January 2014

Our white papers usually receive 600-700 downloads each.

Conversion rate and leads for January 2014

In 2012, our conversion rate was 1.1%. We doubled it to 2.2% in 2013.

Lessons learned

It’s been a long nine months. Would I do it all over again? Absolutely!

We learned a lot about the writing process, and marketing of big content. Here are some of the lessons I've learned that I will take into my next attempt at big content.

1. Big content works

Creating big content is time consuming. And when you add seven languages into the mix, it becomes even more complex. But every content marketing case study you read tells you how powerful content marketing can be. The results speak for themselves. You need to invest in it.

2. You don’t need an army

We had only three people and we are not even full-time writers. Jennifer is the marketing director and spends as much time in meetings as humanly possible, and Charlotte was our web analyst who helped make sure that other marketing activities were performing well and we were not getting side tracked by only focusing on the guide.

3. Set goals for the content

Let’s not kid anyone here – we’re not doing this for the greater good. We’re doing this because we want to grow our business. Setting goals before we start creating big content helped us become laser focused. Our overall goals were to generated leads, build brand awareness, increase organic traffic and increase on-site engagement.

But we were also very specific about these goals. For example, how do we generate leads?

• Landing page with web form (visitors have to enter contact information to get the guide)
• Remarketing to visitors that downloaded the guide (hey, you may also be interested in this…)
• Remarketing to those that didn’t submit the form (hey, remember this?)
• Web form thank you page (thanks for downloading. You might like this also…)
• Use Hellobar as the main CTA on the blog and home page

4. It’s OK to get cold feet

Yes, just like when it comes to your wedding day, it’s OK to get cold feet. I’m sure everyone who has ever created big content got cold feet. It’s only natural. As soon as we were ready, we started asking ourselves questions like “Are we sure we don’t want to cut it down?” and “What if no one wants to read it?” It’s OK to worry about things like these but don’t let it stop you from launching it (or stop you from getting married either!).

5. Content doesn’t promote itself

We implemented a lot of marketing activities to promote the guide and the above charts who how important it is to market your content marketing efforts. But some countries were not able to implement all activities. In fact, even though leads have skyrocketed across most of the SuperOffice websites, here’s a screenshot from Google analytics of one website that didn’t fully promote the paper.

Four leads. That’s all. It’s almost nothing compared to the thousands we can report and just goes to show that had we not implemented the all the above marketing efforts, this whole content campaign might have been a huge failure.

Content marketing is just as much marketing as it is about content. If you have great content but no one reads it, then you won’t reap the content marketing rewards.

Conclusion

Although our guide was 30+ pages, big content isn’t big due to size - it’s big because of the impact it has on your organization. This was our first attempt at big content and we’ve had a record month. Did we get lucky? Maybe. But it won’t stop us from trying again.

Try creating one piece of big content in 2014 and then share your story with us here. Creating big content is good for the web, it’s good for your customers and it’s good for your brand. There is no loser in big content.

How have you used big content to grow your business? Let me know in the comments section below.