Content Marketing: Update on my News Release Experiment

Can News Releases Draw More Attention to your Content Marketing Strategy?

Just over two weeks ago, I announced I would begin testing the effect of news releases on amplifying a content marketing strategy. In Content Marketing: Start Sending News Releases NOW, I described how news releases are a great vehicle to draw additional attention and customer engagement to your content development efforts.

The Results of my Latest Content Marketing Experiment:
For the past two weeks or so, I have been sending one to two news releases utilizing PitchEngine. To date, my “pitches” received 510 views and counting. This number and statistic is great to know and understand, but there is another more important statistic that answers the question: How much web traffic did the pitches drive? This traffic information will show the conversion.

How much traffic did my pitches drive to OpenView’s sites?
By using Google Analytics I can see our pitches referred 22 unique people to one of our websites (our content site, our firm website, or our blog site); however, this is a 4.3% conversion! I did some searching to find a benchmark and so far I only dug up one blog from Brad Geddes, who conducted a similar experiment a few years ago. Geddes reported a conversion ranging from .89% to 1.85% over the course of two months.

Based on these initial results, I will continue to test news releases to draw attention to our content. I will use my statistic as a baseline and share an update in a few more weeks!

What is a good benchmark for traffic conversion from a news release?