Content marketing is not just blogging and content marketing is not just links. Content marketing is the act of distributing a valuable piece of content (video, text, audio, etc.) to hopefully a large volume of prospects with the goal of converting to a lead, and then a customer.

To understand the purpose, you must first understand what each are:

• Prospects are people who have shown some interest in your product(s) or service(s). For example, Twitter follower, Facebook fan, etc. Prospects can also be nurtured through blogging and email marketing for conversion to a lead.
• Leads are people who have completed a task that you have specified in your conversion funnel. For example, downloading a document.
• Customers are people have traveled through your sales and marketing funnel to the point of purchase.

At Photocrati, we sell a WordPress gallery theme that has been purchased by around 15,000 happy customers (at the time I write this). The interesting thing is that we have never done a true content marketing campaign.

Photocrati uses a variety of marketing tools and tactic to sell the theme:

• Weekly blogging (not too much, not too little)
• Monthly emails to customers for customers to learn from and promote blog articles
• Affiliate program with a monthly email of affiliate marketing tips
• Social buttons on every article (floating and after post technique)
• Photocrati Fund is an annual project where we provide a photographer with a $5,000 grant to pursue a humanitarian and environmental project
• Pay per click using Google Adwords
• Search engine optimization using photography SEO advice that we provide to customers.

Since we provide a lot of sales, marketing, business and SEO advice to customers, we eat our own dog food. The one piece of advice we never had used ourselves is a strategic content marketing campaign. So this is what we decided to do.

We had the idea to provide an eBook to the entire photography community, and make it free. Who doesn't enjoy free eBooks, right? So we had internal discussions as to what topic to discuss in the eBook. Then we came to the realization that we can keep it specific and broad at the same time. Thus came the idea for an eBook on photography website advice. To take the eBook to a higher level, we decided to utilize the results from some of our relationship marketing tactics and also build some new relationships. We asked a group of photographers to contribute their advice for the eBook. In the end, we received tips from ten photographers. We didn't want the eBook to be limited to ten tips, so we added a few pages of our own advice. Even with our own advice, we wanted the contributors to be the focus of the title, so we decided on using the number ten.

In another internal discussion, we debated on a few title options:

• 10 Website Tips For Photographers
• 10 Photography Website Tips
• 10 Tips To Supercharge Your Photography Website

and a few others...

In the end, the unanimous decision was for the eBook title, 10 Tips To Supercharge Your Photography Website. When the eBook was complete we created a landing page specific for the eBook, and included:

• Description of the eBook
• Mailchimp opt-in form asking for an email address only
• Social proof using our WordPress gallery plugin, NextGEN Gallery as a slideshow.
• Portraits, quote and bio of each contributor

The layout of the landing page is clean and focus is brought to the opt-in form, funneling towards submission. With that said, here is the conversion funnel for the eBook:

1. A prospect types their email address and clicks the "Download the eBook" button.
2. They are brought to a Mailchimp "Almost Finished" page asking for the prospect to check their email for a confirmation.
3. The prospect reads the email confirmation stating that when confirmed they will receive an email with the eBook.
4. When confirmed, they are brought to a "Thank You" page on the Photocrati website stating that the eBook was just sent to their email address.
5. A Mailchimp email is received that includes the link to download the eBook.

The reason we used this method is to build a list of new leads that we can remarket to. Here are the marketing and remarketing tactics that we are using for the eBook leads:

1. Two days after downloading the eBook, another email is sent reminding the lead about the download just in case they forgot to download it or misplaced the PDF file.
2. One month after downloading the eBook, the lead will begin to receive a monthly email with the latest articles from our blog.

What this will do is keep our name in their mind, and continue to educate them on supercharging their photography website. Some might think that waiting one month for further contact is too far away. It might be for certain industries, but we have found that photographers are not fans of too many marketing emails. Knowing that, we have decided to keep it small, but consistent. Also, having a slower conversion process is not a bad thing. We believe in education, building trust with our blog and keeping our brand in the mind of prospects. Lastly, by spreading the emails out, it will filter the leads that are not likely to convert to customers.

The result of this content marketing campaign has been amazing, with growth of over 500 new downloads a week. We have also included the free eBook into our affiliate marketing system so affiliates can promote the eBook with the chance to make sales.

Here are some of the great things that the eBook has done for the business.

• The eBook served as link bait, and articles have begun to appear linking back to the landing page
• Every day there are new social media comments about the eBook
• Customers continue returning to the website
• The email click-through rate has increased by a significant percentage
• Sales conversion is seeing a positive impact from the campaign

With the success of the eBook, we decided to use the same campaign format in the Photographers SEO Community. We have released a free Photography SEO Audit Checklist so prospects can see where their website stands and where they need to be for SEO basics. There is one part of the audit campaign that is not in the eBook campaign. That is, three times a year we send an email to non-community members with a big promotion code that saves 50% on the membership fee. Another difference is we are trying the inclusion of the opt-in form inside of the blog article announcement instead of a page. I look forward to seeing those results.

At the end of the day, every company and every industry would have a different content marketing campaign. The trick is discovering what would convert prospects to leads and leads to customers, and how to go about it. Simon talks about this well in The Ultimate Guide to Content Planning.

Thanks for reading,

Scott