Guest blogging, using posts on other people's blogs as part of your marketing strategy, is an invaluable marketing tool. In spite of Google penalising spammy guest posts, as the Guardian points out, responsible guest blogging is still strongly recommended by builtvisible as part of an overall marketing strategy.
At Flow Ink, a digital marketing agency in Bishop's Stortford Hertfordshire UK, we use targeted guest blogging as part of the marketing strategy offered to clients. One of the most successful campaigns so far has been on behalf of overseas property developer Kristall Spaces.
Kristall Spaces
Kristall Spaces is a property developer that specialises in building luxury apartments in Austrian ski resorts. Its portfolio includes purpose-built buy-to-let holiday properties in top resorts, including St Anton, Kühtai and Galtür.
We built their website at propertysaleaustria.co.uk as the first stage of the marketing campaign. The site needed to be attractively designed, simple for customers to navigate, responsive for mobile and of course optimised to ensure it's easy to find through search engines. This has been successful — for example, the site is the second result on Google for "ski property for sale in Austria" along with other top search terms.
Guest Blogging
As part of a measured digital marketing strategy to increase lead generation from home buyers and investors, we created a series of guest blogs about Kristall Spaces' various developments. Following a procedure similar to that recommended by the Content Marketing Institute, we targeted a range of host blogs, mainly in the property and lifestyle sectors.
Measurement of Footfall
As always, the marketing strategy for Kristall Spaces included analysis of footfall from the various channels in the wake of our guest blogging campaign. This was measured by tracking contact forms and downloads of the brochures for St Anton, Kühtai and Galtür during January.
Reliable information wasn't available for either passing visitors or calls to the phone number on the website, although we've been informed the company received 3-5 calls per day from the website.
The channels measured were organic search, paid search, social media, direct visits and referrals. Of these, the great majority of positive results came from paid and organic search. This reflects the costs for channels, with paid search accounting for around two-thirds of the budget.
Overall in January there were 5,340 new visitors, and 76.59% of the sessions were new. The contact form had a 0.47% conversion rate, whereas the St Anton brochure, the one most downloaded, had a conversion rate of 13.27%, creating a cost of £135 per contact form submission and £2.58 per brochure download.
This is in the context of unit prices of apartments between €237,390 and €1,996,500, and the figures suggest a positive result from the digital marketing activites and in particular guest blogging campaign.
The article was brought to you by founder of Flow Ink Digital - David Newman.
