Four ways to generate great content marketing results on a budget

Here at Evolved, we love creative content marketing. Thinking big has allowed us to win many awards for our unique ideas and full-scale hero campaigns created over the years for our automotive, retail, and finance clients.

There’s always going to be room for creative content marketing, like interactive campaigns or detailed data-led indexes.

But not every business has the budget, resources, or capabilities to have these kinds of campaigns. That doesn’t mean that these businesses should be left behind when we have a number of other great content marketing tactics available.

Large campaigns aren’t always the answer – stay strategic with SEO plans

Even if a business does have the higher budget or resources to focus on unique content marketing, it’s not necessarily the right thing to jump into an out-of-the-box campaign. We may achieve better results by concentrating our efforts on Technical SEO or On-site Content, depending on the Strategy we build for our clients.

We’ll show you how we generate relevant links, drive brand awareness and increase organic traffic for our clients with content marketing that didn’t require a huge budget, allowing us to focus on other parts of our Strategy and still achieve excellent results.

1) Using internal data to grow relevant links for our gardening client

Key results: 160 backlinks acquired, including topically relevant links from Hortweek, Country Living, House Beautiful and Gardening etc.

Internal data is an under-utilised component of content marketing, mostly because not everyone knows how to find it. But Google Analytics is a gold mine of interesting data, if you know how to use it. We did exactly that for our online garden centre client, Primrose, with an annual trends report.

Firstly, we used internal sales data to find the best-selling products for the most recent year. Houseplants, trees, furniture – you name it, we included it in our report, with additional expertise to explain the story. This gave journalists to have a reason to cover our report, as we had unique data and a gardening expert to back up our findings. Internal linking also allowed us to pass the value of backlinks to Primrose’s key category pages.

2) Cutting through the noise of current trends with unique data

Key results: 9 pieces of Digital PR coverage, including topically relevant backlinks from Hortweek, House Beautiful Gardening etc., Homes & Gardens and coverage in The Telegraph.

Other way we used internal data for our gardening client, Primrose, was to join an existing trend with our own unique contribution. At the time of Bridgerton season two, our team remembered the ‘wisteria hysteria’ back from season one, where news outlets everywhere were reporting on the popular plant seen in the television series.

While we didn’t work with Primrose at the time of Bridgerton season one, we knew the trend would return. We were going to be ready for the season two news but could cut through the noise by providing our own unique data.

We studied the historic internal searches from the Primrose site and found that interest in wisteria had grown by 400% after Bridgerton initially aired. Our royalcore gardens piece was picked up by several gardening publications by using this one hook, including The Telegraph.

3) Positioning clients as experts while giving readers useful advice

Key results: 681 backlinks acquired from 5 advice-led Digital PR pieces, including links from Yahoo Finance, The Daily Record, The Money Pages, and regional news outlets.

A few years ago, we may have never used advice-led content to catch attention. Much of this content is created using keyword research or customer inquiry data, which isn’t typically seen in some larger creative campaigns.

But with the pandemic and cost of living crisis, among many other challenges the world is facing, more journalists appear to want plain and simple advice to genuinely help their readers – and users want that too.

That’s why we now focus more on combining On-site Content (typically found in blog posts) and Digital PR to create high-quality advice-led content. Traffic is generated through both link building and from those finding the content through Search, allowing us to fulfill the needs of all users.

An obvious topic to cover is to give guidance on money topics. We positioned our finance client, Ocean Finance, as a money-saving expert throughout the pandemic and continue using this tactic to gain relevant links.

4) Putting a spin on no-spend secondary sources

Key results: 8 pieces of Digital PR coverage, including links from Tyla, Heart, and Her.ie.

Original data like surveys are valuable in content marketing, but if the spend is better placed elsewhere, secondary sources are still useful, if you can make your own story.

We use data from secondary sources like the DVLA, HM Land Registry, and the ONS, but present the findings in a unique way that’s relevant to our clients. We’ve reported on everything from financial fraud to cycling theft to baby names – the latter for our gardening client previously mentioned, Primrose.

Baby name stories are often used in content marketing, but we noticed a gap and produced a study on the UK’s favourite garden-inspired baby names. With 10 years of government data and over 6.9 million names to investigate, we knew there would be a story to tell – we just needed to put our own spin on it. We noticed a new trend within the data that made it our key hook to stand out against other baby name stories.

If you’d like to get your brand involved with some unique content marketing that builds relevant links and is aligned with a complete SEO strategy, get in touch today.