Is Medium a Valuable Platform for Content Marketing?

What is Medium?

Medium is a hybrid blog and publishing platform that works to curate the best articles from a variety of fields. Companies have increasingly broken onto Medium as a platform to either post unique content or to republish content from their own blog. We are looking to grow exposure for Growth Labs and Medium is one of the places where we want to try to make inroads.

The article cited above by Chloe Mason Gray on the Kissmetrics blog is a very thorough overview and outlines what appears to be a viable strategy. We have taken some time to carefully read the article and to really get a feel for Medium. (We signed up a while ago but as things usually go, we never got around to really exploring the site till now.)

In short, our goal is to produce great content fit for Medium which will result in traffic and conversions to our site.

You can go to the link above to see the full strategy but the main points we will try to test in this experiment are the following:

Re-publish content from your blog or website

Our content generation was put on hold for a bit as we were planning out our new website, getting ready for some changes, and generally taking it slow to get things right. Well, all the issues are about to be resolved and launched, so we are ramping up content creation. We will post some of our better performing articles on Medium and see how well they do there.

Link back to your website or blog

This one is rather obvious, as we want to not only generate interest, but also traffic and eventually leads from Medium. Every article on Medium that is imported has a “this article first appeared on…” tag. We will also reference other posts on our blog if relevant.

Use UTM parameters to measure traffic from your Medium posts

Medium has their own built-in analytics, but we need a way to track traffic to our site as well. Hubspot allows us to create custom UTMs for campaigns and will allow us to see the effectiveness of using Medium. I am not sure if we can get Medium to include UTM parameters in their “this article first appeared on…. “ tag, but any hyperlinks found within will have them.

Tell stories that are truly interesting

This is probably the biggest challenge. As Chloe says,

Brands using Medium should always remember: Medium is for telling stories. It is NOT a place to talk about how great your brand is, publish press releases about your company or blatantly promote yourself.”

Medium can look intimidating. How many interesting things can you say about Google Analytics? Or about designing a homepage for your business? This will be challenging because most of our articles so far have been SEO focused, tied to our site (all the great How-To articles) or are about Growth Labs. We haven’t told any real stories yet, so for this experiment, we will have to craft a truly interesting story that is relevant to our business, is interesting, provides value, and we will be extra careful to not make any mistakes.

Recommend posts related to your industry

This one is fairly straightforward. Following our industry’s thought leaders and sharing and recommending what they publish will help identify us as thought leaders, at least in theory. It might also drum up some interest and have people check for our submitted articles.

To test the viability of Medium according to the article on Kissmetrics.com, we will do the following to accomplish 50 views and 5 click-throughs of an article on Medium in 2 months:

  • Create a Growth Labs Medium Account
  • Start following/sharing/reading others’ submissions (and learn from them)
  • Republish two of the best performing articles we currently have (based on views and CTR)
  • Write one long, well written, story that is related to our company and/or our field
  • Use HubSpot to track traffic via a custom UTM
  • Make sure every article we publish on Medium links back to our website.

We will be posting updates as we go and will spend the time before our official start date to prepare for this experiment. We will share the posts we write and put up on Medium, as well as the results of the experiment. 

Feel free to give us any tips or advice as we go by leaving a comment below.