Marketing in the Cloud Blog

Search engines like content.  Marketing directors like traffic.  CFO’s like free traffic.  CEO’s *really* like gaining market share, while simultaneously decreasing the PPC budget.  Recently, we were tasked with building a workflow system to create and manage enterprise content.  Simple goal: increase traffic while decreasing PPC spend.

Background:
In every industry we’ve worked there are always ways to increase web traffic with a systematic content creation strategy.  And there are folks who really figured out the content creation process.  But rallying resources to create great content on a consistent basis is massive hurdle.  Part of the solution is technical and (of course) most of the issue is human — e.g. how do we prioritize content creation on the long list of company projects?

High ROI Content Creation:
Solution?  We recommend you take a two-pronged approach to content.  First:  Focus your team’s efforts on high-ROI content.  Identify keywords that offer the the best visitor for your company, then rank content opportunities based on a keyword valuation. We do this by leveraging a bit of internal special sauce, where we give every keyword opportunity a corresponding valuation — an amalgam of demand (searches), sales cycle intent (buying vs. info gathering intent), and the PPC cost to buy a given keyword.

Second:  Systemize your content creation.  Set a content goal.  Create your content calendar. Identify content creators (you, your team members, internal subject experts, outsourced writers, ghost-writers) and integrate these folks into your content plan.

Just a couple years ago, this two-pronged attack would mean a big IT undertaking.  Today, leveraging a bit of open-source technology, solving the content-creation problem is within reach.  Here’s how we’re approaching this problem:

Project Scope: Content Creation Engine ‘must-haves’
Our proposed solution had a few ‘must-haves’ to be a good fit for the organization and meet ROI goals:

• Content ‘valuation’ based on ppc/keyword cost (done)
• Content idea repository and article to-do queue
• Workflow engine to leverage internal and external authors
  • Internal folks, subject matter experts.
  • Contract writers, paid by the article.
  • Industry partners, guest-post authors.
• Business process for creating and queueing completed content
  • To include business rules, routing, and approval
• Content staging
• ROI Reporting based on traffic and keyword valuation.

Solution Identification:
We were surprised we couldn’t find an off-the-shelf solution within our (admittedly modest) budget parameters.  There were a few almost options, but test-driving a couple open source BPM solutions convinced us we could build a high-ROI solution, fast.

Final Architecture:
To get the project in client hands turned out to be a quick and inexpensive. In Part II, we’ll walk through the entire application structure, including integration, our customer-facing app, but here’s an overview:

• Keyword Ident: Using our existing keyword & valuation engine via API.
• Workflow: Activiti BPM engine.
• Outsourced Writing: API integration with Amazon Turk and Writer’s Market
• Article queue: RedisDB
• ROI Reporting: Google Analytics API plugin.

Bottom Line:
A systematic and scalable content creation engine that drives traffic is within reach.  Look for Part II for a real-world look at what’s possible and how to implement within your organization.

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About ROI Studios

We help marketers connect and integrate cloud-based marketing services like Salesforce, Eloqua, Marketo, Twitter and 100s more. Result? Our customers get a more agile marketing department with real-time, 360 degree control of campaigns, customers, content and KPIs.