This is a story about how following our own advice that we preach week in and week out led to some awesome successes for us. It’s a reminder that when we do the things that we tell others to do, we benefit from it as much as they do!
We should know this advice by heart by now. We’ve seen it improve our own results at NorthIQ, and we’ve watched it in action as we started content marketing on Manage Comics and saw our market share grow.
Last week the comic book retailers group ComicsPRO got together and did three days of meetings about comics retailing. During those meetings, Diamond Comics, the main distributor for about 90% of the comics market who has exclusive distribution rights with Marvel, DC Comics, Image Comics, and many others, made an announcement that they would be releasing their own version of a comics pull list application called Pull Box.
Where do we go from here?
When I read this news on Friday at 5pm, it devastated me. I’ve built Manage Comics into something I’m very proud of, and we’re beginning to get some traction. To think that would all go away was pretty heartbreaking.
On Saturday morning I woke up and decided that Manage Comics is, and always WILL BE a better product than anything Diamond can come up with, so I wrote a blog post about it. Why Manage Comics will ALWAYS be better than Diamond’s Pull Box. I applied some good old fashioned Gary Vaynerchuk hustle to the problem and promoted it on my usual social media feeds. It got shared and retweeted by a bunch of my friends.
Then I sent it to Rich Johnson at Bleeding Cool – one of the more popular, and controversial web sites that writes about comics news. He responded almost immediately with “I can run that.”, and so I waited.
Wednesday morning I got an email from a new prospect who said that they read about us on Bleeding Cool. I immediately went over and found the post on Bleeding Cool – Why Manage Comics will ALWAYS be better than Diamond’s Pull Box
We’ve already seen a boost in traffic since that day, and our pages are climbing up the rankings as well.
Benefits from one piece of well timed content:
- We added four new stores in one day.
- 14 people watched our 30 minute webinar in one day.
- We answered 18 emails with questions about our service.
- We grew our lead database by 16% in a day.
Adding four new stores is amazing, but growing our lead database is just as important for us. We now have 100 people who have asked us to prove to them why Manage Comics is amazing.
That’s something I can work with, and for a business that has some very reasonable targets (30 customers by the end of March, 50 customers by the end of June), this is something I can build on.
The moral of the story is this, by following the very advice that we give our clients, we saw spectacular results. This isn’t a magic trick, it’s a recipe which you can repeat on your own.
The NorthIQ Content Marketing Recipe for Success
- Monitor your industry’s news.
- React quickly to it with a well written piece of content.
- Reach out to people who can amplify the signal.
- Be prepared to respond to requests for more information.
That’s it, four little items, all in I spent less than an hour writing my blog post, creating an image for it, posting it to social media, and reaching out to Rich Johnson at Bleeding Cool.
If an hour of effort can make this much of a difference to our business, think about what it could do for yours!
