Case Study: How MarketMuse Helped Cortex 3x Traffic

Creating comprehensive content that ranks well is always a challenge. It’s even harder when your resources are extremely limited. That was the situation faced by the content team at Cortex.

They had ambitious plans to gain topical authority in specific areas important to their business. But their method was cumbersome and not always effective. They needed a process so simple that an intern could do it.

Cortex

Cortex is an AI social media and creative strategy platform that helps companies optimize their visual branding and messaging. Companies and agencies produce more design content than ever before. Cortex enables creatives to better understand their business impact and the performance of their work, so they know what works and what doesn’t.

Content Marketing Challenges

Prior to its association with MarketMuse, Cortex faced three significant content-related problems.

• The company lacked a comprehensive content strategy.
• Their workflow was time-consuming and inefficient.
• The process was not scalable.

“MarketMuse was something of a game changer for me, where I was able to build a process and give my team the tools they need to execute it,” says John Lahr, Director of Marketing & Growth, Cortex

The organization relied on a completely manual technique, wasting extensive time conducting ineffective keyword research and trying to build content briefs. It took too much time to produce very little in the way of results.

The small marketing team worked hard to create content. However, they needed more than the two blog posts per week they were producing. Unfortunately, with their process, scaling content production was out of the question.

What they needed was a content planning process to help them increase authority for their core business, topics at scale. Plus, the plan had to be foolproof so it could be handed off to interns to run with.

How MarketMuse Helped

The content team at Cortex turned to MarketMuse Suite’s Compete and Optimize applications to determine the competitive environment and what content would add value. Content gaps were identified and existing content optimized where appropriate to build authority.

Having a tool that provides a coverage map, identifies gaps, shows how and why other are ranking, makes carving out a niche infinitely easier. A logical plan backed by data offers greater assurance of success than going by gut feeling.

Results

Using the same resources, the content team at Cortex was able to increase the publication frequency from two blog posts to five or six per week. That content has doubled the number of keywords ranking in the top three and increased the number of first-page results by the same amount.

“The impact on our keyword rankings is just undeniable. It’s not only the number of keywords. The velocity at which they climb in the rankings is super impressive,” explains John.

Traffic to the site has increased by a factor of three with eighty percent of traffic now coming from organic search. More importantly, this traffic is high quality. The type of leads generated via search has improved and so has the number of leads – by 30% over the last six months.

For the foreseeable future, Cortex plans on doubling down and doing more of the same. After all, it works!