A lot of companies send nurture tracks to new users or new leads (or both). These email campaigns are sent automatically by machines on a pre-defined timeline, and often include tips on how to use a product, what content resources are available, why you’d want to talk to a sales rep, and so on.

It’s like living in the future!

Except that, in our experience, most nurture tracks are lovingly crafted and then ignored for months or years on end.

Which is a shame because, depending on your company, this might be thousands (or even millions!) of users who you could be seeing all your brand new content. And it doesn’t take all that long to take a red pen to those email tracks and make sure you’ve got the latest stuff in there.

🏄 What you can do

Talk to your demand gen team. Graciously. Ask them about the nurture tracks. You might say:

When was the last time we looked at the nurture track? If it was a while ago, I’d love to take a look at it.

Let them know what you have to offer:

• Update content links in the emails
• Add additional emails with more resources
• Refine the email copy
• Remove the lowest-performing emails and replace them with better ones

You might even add “nurture track” as one of your distribution channels. Every time something new gets published, see if you can include it in an onboarding or nurture flow.

(Too many nurture track emails? Start segmenting them, by persona, by company size, by buyer stage, and so on.)

We recently read a LinkedIn post that inspired a lot of great conversations on our team.

Last week, Sarah Colley wrote about one overlooked benefit of adding expert quotes to her content: When you quote someone for a piece, they’ll probably share that piece with the world.

How does this benefit your content distribution?

It’s social proof, which every content distribution channel (and its almighty algorithms) depends on.

• Google loves backlinks
• LinkedIn loves content that’s shared by more people
• Good old fashioned word-of-mouth increases when interesting people join in

More importantly, great marketing is about creating shared value.

Sarah’s tactic is a great example. Expert quotes benefit everyone involved with the content:

• Customers get more thorough content
• Experts expand their reach and esteem
• Marketers have an easier time writing

🧨 So here’s a challenge for you

Ask yourself: how can you make current content projects more valuable by including others? Extra credit question: How can you do this with your product?

Thanks, Sarah, for inspiring us with your post.

Have you ever gone to a website, and suddenly everything on your computer slows down? And the fan on your computer gets really loud? And your Zoom interlocutors ask, “Should you really be talking to us while flying a vintage prop plane?”

That’s JavaScript, baby!

Websites use JavaScript to do pretty much anything that involves any kind of processing – animations, various widgets, some types of form submissions, and, best of all, tracking your every move.

Some JavaScript can be useful. But too much JavaScript will slow down your site, frustrate your visitors, and hurt your rankings and conversions.

🏄 What you can do

If your company uses Google Tag Manager, it should be fairly easy to take a look through and pause tags that aren’t needed. (Without GTM, you might enlist the help of your web dev.)

Remove outdated or unnecessary trackers from third-party services:

• That analytics service you tried out 3 years ago
• A/B testing tools that only need to run on the pages you’re conducting A/B tests on
• Advertising pixels for channels you’re not using anymore

Or ask your analytics manager to add “triggers” for just the correct set of pages where appropriate.

This question has come up in a few client meetings. Maybe you’ve been asking it too.

What is Google Tag Manager? Should I care, as a content marketer?

Google Tag Manager is a way of putting JavaScript tags on your site – and managing them – more easily.

It’s not weird for a site to have dozens of these tags for various purposes, with wide-ranging effects on analytics and site performance – both things that you probably care deeply about as a content marketer!

Tag Manager simplifies crucial web dev work:

• Add analytics tags when and where you need them
• Remove analytics tags when you don’t need them anymore – or only fire them if they’re needed – which makes your site faster
• Manage and troubleshoot analytics tags that are causing problems with the site.

That means more time for adding new functionality, implementing new features, and other things that are more obviously helpful to users.

What should you do?

Ask some questions of your web dev: Is your team using GTM? Who is managing it? If you’re not using Google Tag Manager – or if nobody’s looked at it in a while – there can be some quick wins there for site performance and tracking.

Your brand and product marketing teams might be really excited about this metric we’re running into called “Share of Search”.

It’s simple to understand: who do people search for the most in our category?

And it’s easy to calculate, too – get the monthly search volume for your brand, and see what percentage that is of all brands in your category. For example:

• If you have 10,000 searches a month, that’s 10,000 searches for you, and…
• Your 5 competitors all have 5,000 each, that’s 25,000 searches for them, then…
• Share of search is about 30% – your searches (10,000) over total searches (35,000)!
  

(A quick and very rough way to get a similar analysis is Google Trends, so start there if you don’t feel like doing a lot of math right now.)

Share of search is cool for a few reasons.

1. It’s meaningful. The more present you are in search, the more you can expect to sell.
2. To put it another way, share of search predicts share of market.
3. It’s easy to calculate, understand, and validate. You can track it easily over time.

But most importantly, it helps you make the case for visibility in organic search – and therefore, in investment in content – in a way that should get your colleagues excited. (Or depressed? But then maybe resolute.)

How to get started:

• Go in and explore Google Trends. Type in your name, and your competitors’ names. Adjust the time range.

• Compare your competitors. If that didn’t work, tools like SEMRush or Ahrefs will usually have the data even if Trends doesn’t deign to include it.

You can take this one step further by seeing what your share of search is for certain topics.

You’ll need a tool for this, but look for a tab called “Competitor Analysis” or something similar, and enter the topics that are most important for your brand.

Share this data with your comms and product marketing teams.