In 2004, Barbara opened her own academic publishing house; Verlag Barbara Budrich. A specialist publisher for political science, sociology, educational science, social work and gender studies. Budrich is located in Opladen, near Cologne and Dusseldorf - two regions known for their bevvy of social-science publishers.
Budrich has since expanded as an international publishing house, where they work with more than 9,000 authors worldwide and publish over 240 new books every year!
What was the challenge?
Budrich, predominantly a German publisher, wanted to look at ways of engaging a broader international audience as well as ways of growing their subscriber base with this audience.
Budrich wanted to develop a content strategy that would help to expand their English repository of content. This content would go on to live on their U.K based website with the goal of:
- Increasing their English subscriber base by 100% within 12 months.
- Increasing their organic traffic by 100% within 12 months.
The Solution
To help Budrich achieve its goals, our team set out to create a content marketing strategy that utilised inbound marketing best practices.
It looked like this:
- We held a half-day buyer persona workshop with the Budrich team to help us understand what kind of questions, goals and challenges their clientele have at different stages of their buyer’s journey.
- We completed a comprehensive competitor analysis to understand the digital landscape Budrich finds itself in. This process helped us uncover content opportunities that we could potentially target.
- These elements then laid the foundation for us to conduct in-depth topic cluster research which helped us uncover relevant topics and subtopics that we would target according to each persona. Specifically, we took into consideration things like domain authority to target sub-topics that we believed stood a good chance of ranking for over a relatively short period of time.
This resulted in a 12-month content calendar that was re-visited every quarter to ensure we were covering topically relevant pieces. We used topical experts along with comprehensive briefs for each article and started creating content that we published weekly.
What were the results?
Budrich was able to increase its organic website traffic by 236% in 12 months, far exceeding the expected outcomes.
Content marketing is a compounding tactic, so we expect to see this continue growing with the addition of new content, and as the older content continues to embed and be distributed.
By adopting a content strategy that took into consideration their domain strength, we’ve been able to expand Budrich’s number of ranking keywords by 271%.
This expansion has meant that we’ve not only been able to start ranking for more relevant keywords and phrases but has also created a strong foundation to start targeting more competitive keywords.
“We are a highly specialized academic publisher, and it is of vital importance for us to communicate well what we have to offer. Uku have done an excellent job in helping us clarify our story, and, thus, to work on our positioning. Their content marketing approach fits perfectly with our attitude towards offering pertinent information to our customers. So this joint effort has helped our company to grow, step by step. ”- Barbara Budrich
Collaboration, communication and alignment with Budrich’s marketing team have been central to the success of this content strategy.