Leads By The Bucket: Our 2016 Content Marketing Breakthrough (And How To Replicate It)

By Jean Tang

​It’s December, and that means saying goodbye to 2016—but not without a bit of reflection first. From artists taken before their time to unexpected election results, the year has been a wild ride for everyone. On the bright side, my copywriting solutions agency has had its busiest year yet, and there’s one clear reason why: inbound marketing.
MarketSmiths is a content agency, but they say the carpenter’s house always needs work and the shoemaker’s kids always go barefoot. 2016 was the year we put an end to that. Thanks to some analytical insights gleaned the year before, we passed over flashier tactics like search engine marketing (SEM) and digital advertising in favor of doubling down on our content.
It was a remarkable success. Today, more than 80% of our business comes to us via organic Google search. Here’s how we decided to take the dive, how it worked and how you can replicate our success.
Investing in Inbound Marketing
Throughout the year, we continued to harvest business with a little self-care: we invested about $3,000 a month of our own resources (in-house and contractual) to publish high-quality blog posts at a faster clip, to update our fastidiously written website copy and to debut our first eBook. Now MarketSmiths gets one to five leads a day from people that are qualified and eager to engage. Our search revenue far eclipses that gained by networking or word-of-mouth referrals—and without a penny of ad spend or SEO.
It doesn’t get more meta than this. We publish high-quality content. It’s found and read by qualified leads. Once we close these prospects, we get to help our new clients do the same: gain revenue by publishing high-quality content. And around and around it goes.

Source:http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeantang/2016/12/18/bringing-in-leads-by-the-bucketload-in-2016-and-how-you-can-replicate-this-success/#7ecd3c0a65c5