Email marketing and content marketing are two of the most valuable ways of promoting your brand. They’re a great investment of time and resources and ultimately have the same goal: to contribute to the growth of your brand in terms of awareness AND revenue.
Though these are two very different approaches, the success of either your email marketing or content marketing strategy is often dependent on the other. Their overlap is important to understand if you want to harness the potential of both.
In this post, we explain the difference between the two marketing approaches and walk you through how to measure your success in each.
Let’s break it down. What is content marketing?
What does the term “content marketing” really even mean? Let’s get past the jargon.
Content marketing is what industry professionals refer to as an “inbound” marketing method – meaning that the aim is to attract customers and viewers who aren’t already a part of your following to engage with your brand.
What makes users engage with any brand? Value. When a brand offers VALUE, they naturally attract an audience who wants to know more. So, any content that you create should give away really great, usable info to your intended audience. You want them to feel educated, empowered, or in the loop after consuming your content.
What does this look like, specifically? The most common types of content we see successful brands creating are:
- Blog posts
- Videos
- Podcasts
- Whitepapers
We should mention that content marketing is definitely a “long game” approach. This growth is organic and is most successful with companies who have put in the work to their content efforts to the point that they’re deeply trusted by their followers. By using content marketing, your goal should be to become a trusted and needed voice in your niche. This does not happen overnight.
Content, of course, needs to be shared strategically. This is where the overlap happens with email marketing. Once you’ve created your content, you’ll want to use all available channels you have to promote it, including email and social media platforms.
How do I measure success?
There are a few key metrics you can use to measure the “success” of your content. You can’t always directly tie content marketing to dollar signs, but there are a few statistics that help you gauge whether your time or dollar investment is paying off.
- Traffic – How many viewers are actually viewing your content? This is a great number to start with since it shows you your most basic measurement – how many eyes (or ears!) are on your work.
- Comments – This stat reveals engagement. The higher the engagement, the more likely it is that your audience will want to continue to engage with your content and, eventually, your brand.
- Shares – another great engagement metric. This one is especially important because a share means you just got even more eyes on your content!
- Clicks/Time spent on page – Once a visitor is on your content, how long do they spend there? And do they click through to other places on your site? Time spent on-page is a really telling number. The more valuable/entertaining the content, the longer a viewer spends on your page.
And, what is email marketing?
Email marketing is what industry professionals refer to as an “outbound” marketing effort. You’re pushing a sale, an ask, or content out to an already-existing audience. No matter how much time you spend writing that super-witty email, the number of people who actually read it is limited by the size of your email list. This is why so much effort is put into list-building, especially by digital businesses.
Here’s the good news: once your list is built and engaged, email marketing is the single most lucrative type of marketing out there. The names on your email list have already shown that they value your content/brand/persona enough that they want to grant you the privilege to their personal inbox.
Since your leads are already so warm and interested in your work, your emails can have a much more forward selling tone to them than a blog post or a podcast. You can urge your followers to take action when you know that they are already a captive audience to what you have to say.
So, with that in mind, it’s important that you tread carefully with what you send and how often you send it. Showing up consistently with valuable offerings is important, but going overboard can quickly feel like spam to your subscribers.
How do I measure success?
What you’re looking for with email is engagement, and there are a few different ways to measure that.
- Open rate – just what it sounds like. How many people opened your email? If you’re struggling with an open rate, you may need to rework the way you write your subject lines. Running A/B tests with different subject lines for the same email is a good way to start to learn the habits of your audience.
- Bounce rate – How many emails were undeliverable? This number should be under 5%.
- Click-through rate – Ah, the start of that ROI working. Your click-through rate is how many people followed your call to action and went to the content, page, or offer you asked them to visit.
- Subscribes/Unsubscribes – again, what it sounds like. If your emails are consistently getting high unsubscribe numbers, you may need to rework your approach. Perhaps your emails feel spammy, underwhelming, or irrelevant.
Without content, your email marketing can quickly feel irrelevant or unhelpful and can lead to unsubscribes more quickly than you would like. Conversely, without a solid email marketing plan, you lose out on your very best leads for every piece of content that you create.
The two approaches really go hand-in-hand. For help with developing either marketing approach, get in touch with our experts at Deal Digital.