I came across a great blog post on how Fractl, a digital marketing agency, used content marketing to increase its referral traffic by over 6,000 percent. In the blog post, Fractl discusses several lessons that they learned, which helped them achieve this success. These lessons apply to almost any business and can help game and tech companies grow.

Don’t limit large scale campaigns with narrow-scope ideas

A mistake commonly made is creating a narrow focus for your campaign, implicitly limiting the reach. Content marketing, however, can be used in every stage of the customer journey. You also need to realize that one campaign will not impact every metric that you track but you need a diverse strategy to reach customers in different stages of their journey and thus impact more metrics.

In the blog post, there are four stages of the customer buying cycle. The best content marketing strategies focus on developing a long-term strategy that target all fours stage of the customer journey:

• Viral campaigns. A campaign tangentially related to the brand that achieves a deep emotional reaction and thus encourages hockey stick levels of sharing and traffic.
• Conversion-driven campaigns. These are targeted to a specific audience that is ready or almost ready to monetize.
• Awareness campaigns. These are designed to increase exposure to the brand and attract and engage consumers who are at the top of the sales funnel.
• On-site content. he multipurpose content is designed to build the brand and engage with the target market.

The key takeaway is that you should build your content roadmap so it touches potential users and existing customers at all parts of the customer journey. If you create a campaign focused on one niche goal, you are missing the broader opportunity.

Heavy research earns more press than knowledge curation

Fractl initially built campaigns that cast a wide net but they learned that sites that would republish their materials were primarily looking for exclusive research. They found data curation had moderate engagement while heavy research based campaigns have the highest engagement and syndication because they bring something new. This is relevant for even consumer facing games, if for example you bring new research into how people compete in casino games, it is more likely to be spread widely.

Quantitative research is stronger than qualitative

In Fractl’s research, sites and other potential influencers wanted to see more data-driven articles, infographics, and mixed-media pieces, followed closely by data visualizations, images, videos, and interactive maps. They were less enthusiastic about Press releases, interactive projects, quizzes, flipbooks, widgets, and badges. While articles might do well with qualitative results, most of the other top-ranked content formats require a type of data visualization that is most valuable when it features quantifiable results.

Gated assets create a value-add and incentivize people to give you their information

Fractl learned that there was limited value to being mentioned on other websites. Creating a white paper, eBook, list, or any other gated asset that adds value to your original research creates an incentive for people to go back to your website and continue engaging with your brand. By gating the asset, you enable your team to capture the contact’s information and further nurture them in your sales funnel.

A related suggestion is for you to save at least a quarter of your findings and then feature it in your gated asset. Make it explicit in your content marketing that there is more information for people to learn about if they click through or go to your homepage.

Learning which publishers drive the most qualified lead flow is critical to your success

It is important not focus your promotion around sites you like or you find prestigious, but to identify objectively the sites that will generate the most leads or reactivations. Fractl suggests creating audience personas to understand the optimal channels. “Audience personas are a characterization of your businesses ideal customer. Creating these personas forces you to consider what your customers value, what they hope to achieve, what they fear, and much more. By putting yourself in the shoes of your prospects, you can begin to get a sense for where they get their news and which blogs they might read—allowing you to improve your pitch targeting for brand awareness and conversions.”

Key takeaways

1. Content marketing can be a strong user acquisition and reactivation channel but it takes good planning.
2. The key is to build your content marketing strategy around the full customer experience, not just narrowly targeting acquisition or conversion.
3. If you create gated content, it can help capture leads and drive customers to your site.