As content marketers, we want to know that what we create matters and makes a difference to the company as a whole. One of the most important metrics to measure large scale impact is through the number of customer conversions that result from individual marketing campaigns. While it’s very difficult to attribute a customer conversion to a piece of content, touches to a particular piece of content in relation to others can serve as an indicator.
Buffer did just this, and achieved extraordinary results from a recent campaign. In the midst of our Marketing Crush Monday campaign, we caught up with Kevan Lee, Content Crafter at Buffer, to get the details on one of their most interesting recent content marketing campaigns.
Let’s take a look inside the wildly successful blog post that generated over 97,000 unique visitors for Buffer.
The idea for the campaign stemmed from the desire to create a piece of evergreen content that could serve as a destination for a particular social media question people often have. There were many questions that fit this criteria, but they settled around the Facebook algorithm for this campaign.
“We chose this topic because it seemed really interesting to research what factors have been made public about how Facebook decides what you see in your News Feed.” Kevan Lee, Content Crafter at Buffer
This a question many social media users grapple with. Because Buffer’s audience consists of these inquiring social media users, they knew this topic could drive consistent traffic for them.
In the last year, “Facebook News Feed” received 8,000 – 33,000 average monthly searches (Google AdWords).
Buffer’s Kevan Lee put an original post together that detailed the Facebook News Feed algorithm:
He also noted there would be consistent updates with new information as it became available:
These updates are brief in the article as well, and are logically added to the top. They include the main points of the updates with bullet points and relevant statistics, ensuring the changes do not take a significant amount of time.
The article is aptly titled, Decoding the Facebook News Feed: An Up-to-Date List of the Algorithm Factors and Changes.
The post quickly gained traction, and within its first couple of weeks ranked at the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs) for “Facebook News Feed algorithm,” and similar terms. This holds true today, as the article still appears at the very top of the Google results for that search phrase.
Reaching the very top of the SERPs is not easy, and it requires sound SEO practices. Buffer’s target audience for this campaign were people who search for information on the Facebook News Feed. They optimized for the best keywords around this topic, and used Google Trends to choose between similar phrases like “Facebook News Feed” and “News Feed Algorithm.” For increased SEO, Buffer included all of these keywords in the title and kept it consistent. They also kept the original content present, and simply added new updates from Facebook as they became available. Both of these tactics lend themselves to better optimization because rising in the SERP ranks takes time.
Quick SEO Tips
- Perform keyword research and use the primary keywords in the title and body content
- Use a descriptive URL that’s relevant to the content
- Employ descriptive, keyword-rich alt attributes for all images
The Buffer content team was interested to see what type of response the evergreen post received, and have always enjoyed experimenting and trying new things. They knew they wanted a piece that would consistently drive traffic, but they didn’t know exactly what that would look like. However, they were certain that they wanted a topic with high traffic that was relevant to their audience and consistent with their brand.
Buffer deemed this campaign a success based on a number of factors that built a strong intuition for them. These factors included comments, social shares, SERP position, and conversions to the Application from the post. The Facebook Algorithm post has also been among Buffer’s Top 20 articles for the past several months, which is impressive considering their full library of consistent quality content.
Most importantly, Decoding the Facebook News Feed: An Up-to-Date List of the Algorithm Factors and Changes was the leading post to convert Buffer signups for all of 2014, even though it was published at the end of the year. It also still continues to drive Buffer signups into 2015 given its evergreen content. This is one of the best outcomes for which a content marketer can strive. In the past 4 months since the article’s publish date, it has generated 97,427 unique visitors for Buffer. To date, it has also prompted 4,417 tweets, 4,879 Facebook shares, and 123 comments.a
This campaign is a gold star in the world of content marketing because it has a measurable link to company-wide results. It’s impact on visibility and traffic is clear from the numbers, but the campaign attribution is what’s truly impressive.
The ability to point to tangible results from a marketing initiative, especially one as successful as Buffer’s campaign, can grant credibility and buyin to your content efforts. Numbers like Buffer received would certainly not go unnoticed.
