Marketing

Content Marketing Strategy: Everything You Need to Know to Build a Growth Machine

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Content marketing strategy is something few companies do well. This is something I’ve focused on for years, mostly because all the companies I’ve worked for, from super early stage startups to HubSpot where I work now, have been largely supported by content marketing (in one way or another). However, each company’s content marketing strategy was … Read more

What is A/B Testing? An Advanced Guide + 29 Guidelines

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A/B testing (aka split testing or online controlled experiments) is hard. It’s sometimes billed as a magic tool that spits out a decisive answer. It’s not. It’s a randomized controlled trial, albeit online and with website visitors or users, and it’s reliant upon proper statistical practices. At the same time, I don’t think we should … Read more

Growth Models

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How do you model and predict growth (and growth opportunities)? There’s all this talk about “growth models” and “growth modeling” but not much talk about how to build them and get value from them. As with many things, it’s easy to see why they’re important, but hard to put them into action. This post covers … Read more

There Ain’t No Such Thing as Free Lunch in Content Marketing

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“There ain’t no such thing as free lunch.” – Milton Friedman (among others throughout recent history) This will be piece inspired by a recent BuzzFeed article that outed contributors at “trustworthy” publications like Forbes, HuffPo, and Inc. To recap the piece: Forbes and others operate using a free contributor model. In addition, their editorial stringency … Read more

How to Capture Email Leads (using Journalism’s 5 W’s technique)

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Capturing email leads is one of the primary goals of most content marketing programs. The money’s in the list, you get a million dollars back for every dollar you invest in email marketing, yada yada yada all the cherry picked statistics. Anyway, you know it’s important or you wouldn’t have found your way here. The … Read more

Content Marketing Analytics: 11 Ways Data Can Inform Your Content Strategy

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We all want to be data-driven marketers, but sometimes content marketers are left out of the loop and expected to run solely on creativity.

Content marketing is a creative endeavor – just as other types or marketing are – but data and analytics can inform content marketing just like they can paid, social, or affiliate.

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What I learned about content marketing at CXL

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I always wish that more people would document their learnings as they go through a process. We often get post-hoc analyses that are cleaner in retrospect and spoken about from a 10,000 foot view.

A big part of my job at CXL was to do content marketing – create great shit, promote it, grow traffic, leads, etc.

Luckily, I did document a lot of what I learned while going through it.

This post covers a lot of what I’ve learned about content marketing and doing it well (in the context of CXL’s business, at least. May or may not apply to yours).

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