Client-led content strategy

Since it’s no longer sensible to base your agency’s content strategy on search volumes*, I thought I’d share a tactic that Branded3 used to plan content for its blog (which, at one point, received a million visitors per year).

Although sometimes we’d have an unexpected viral hit; and sometimes we’d accidentally become the de facto source of a quote or stat (the Branded3 blog was generally cited as the origin of the “50% of all searches will be voice searches by 2020” statistic…in reality, we’d embedded one of my live tweets from Yext’s Location World 2016 in New York, quoting someone from iProspect who said it on stage, which apparently made it a legitimate enough source for more than 200 publications to link to); most content was created by experts on staff who, basically, wanted to.

Knowledge sharing was part of the culture: I wrote a couple of weeks ago that agencies tend to take on the personalities of their founders and Branded3 did what co-owner Patrick Altoft did; speaking on stage; writing blog posts; and tweeting (a lot). It was a challenge to get content from some teams (and “write a blog post” made it into many a PDP) but, for the most part, content was easy to come by, particularly from our world-class Data Insights team, who I never once had to prompt for an article. I generally found it easier to write the SEO team’s content, since I self-identified as a writer long before (and after) I thought of myself as an SEO. I wasn’t particularly “on the tools” so, as I needed a way to get content ideas, I turned to the client services team.

The process

Each person in Branded3’s SEO Strategy team had time available for consulting, which included ad hoc questions: clients would read about some new technology; or have some kind of situation change thrust upon them; and would (perfectly reasonably) want to know what to do about it.

For a long time, a client would ask a question in an email or on a call, then the SEO Strategist would spend some time researching the solution and writing up a long email with the answer.

…but once that email was sent, it was gone - whereas a blog post would be available to reference again and again and, eventually, rank in Google for other clients who had the same problem. So I encouraged the Client Services team to tell me what clients were asking and I’d write the most comprehensive answer I could for the Branded3 blog. This would then be sent to the client (by me, or the Account Manager, depending on the circumstances) who would generally be pleased that the Strategy Director was taking an interest in their day-to-day problems and be grateful for a link they could easily send on to colleagues.

Once the blog was published and publicised, we’d also find that other potential clients would get in touch to tell us that they had the same problem e.g. we published a guide to using a subdomain, subfolder or ccTLD structure for international expansion after a CMO client mentioned it was on their mind in a pub; then on the day it was published, Holiday Autos messaged us asking us to consult on their upcoming migration.

I don’t know whether any of these blog posts used keywords with significant search volumes, but they continued to generate traffic and leads pretty consistently anyway.

There were wider benefits too: during a voice of the client session (where one of our clients would come into the office and do a Q&A with the team; we’d ask what they liked and didn’t like about working with us), one of our favourite clients, Jen Green (then of Provident, now of LMP Law), told us that one of the things she valued about working with Branded3 was our blog. Like most of her agencies, our documentation cited sources and linked to guides and further insight but, unlike most agencies, our links were to pieces we’d written on the subject. It consistently reinforced our expertise…and I would pit one piece of content per month that irrefutably proves my agency is an expert over five blog posts a week that don’t.

*I’m happy to debate at what point it became “no longer sensible” to base your agency’s content strategy on search volumes!