The feeling is euphoric. You’ve created some unique content for your client, outreached to hundreds of prospects and attracted an influencer whose sleight of hand has sent your Social Media shares into the stratosphere. It’s the perfect end to your content marketing cycle.
Last month the Site Reach Content Marketing team hit the jackpot when their content went viral. Within 12 hours our infographic was shared by the biggest Facebook profiles in the UK education sector, seen and liked by thousands, and shared by 1900+ teachers among others.
As any content marketer will testify, it’s an incredible feeling when your very own curated content sends word of your client far and wide, grows your social media followers and attracts valuable inbound links.
So how did we create a viral Social Media campaign?
Well….in truth, we followed our 5-step Content Marketing Strategy, a process we developed years ago and still follow! Here’s how we put the theory into practice.
1. Setting Objectives
Our client, Education Umbrella, is an Ecommerce business that sells education textbooks and digital learning resources. Our overall digital marketing objectives were to drive web sales through Organic channels and grow the database of contacts, introducing more educators to the brand.
Our content marketing objectives were specifically to create interesting, unique content that would position our client as an authority in the sector and help to attract large volumes of traffic, primarily through Social Media.
2. Customer Profiling
Having completed a review of customer profiles to help us understand the target audience and their motivations, we began researching the types of sites that they visit and the topics being discussed. We then analysed the types of content being shared by these influential websites and used social analytics to identify popular trends.
What we learned was that educators favoured informational, easily readable graphics and were much more likely to be shared than articles- therefore we predicted that infographics would work well in this particular market.
3. Content Creation
Over the next 3 months, we set to work designing a number of infographics. We then sent them to focus groups (including teachers) to gauge interest and learn from their feedback; it was an invaluable exercise and gave us so much more insight than we could gain through research. Once we’d updated our infographics, we then moved onto our 4th stage of our content marketing process – distribution.
4. Distribution
As part of the outreach process we reached out to hundreds of teaching blogs and influencers in the education industry to see who wanted to share our infographic. Of course, not everyone was willing to share our infographic (in the first attempts we were happy with just a few shares!), but we found ourselves making great connections who wanted to keep in touch.
5. Review and Repeat
It took three months of testing the water with content until we hit the big time. Having gained a rapport with an influencer during the distribution process, he emailed us one day complimenting our previous infographic and requested that we create one for him.
So we did…and Facebook went berserk!
Results
Our infographic was shared over 1,900 times on Facebook by powerful education bodies, including the Teaching English – British Council (3.8m followers), English primary teacher (2,900 followers) & TEFL.
Our branded infographic introduced Education Umbrella to thousands of potential customers and attracted dozens of valuable inbound links. Within 12 hours, our social media stats read as follows;
Why did we succeed?
Our reach would always have been limited were it not for our connections and the quality of our content. By having clear marketing objectives, listening to audience feedback and producing great, relevant content we were able to make strong connections and gain a rapport with influencers.
Our next step is to continue with the Content Marketing campaign and hopefully be posting about more social media campaign success very soon. Watch this space!