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On average, website visitors interact with your brand six to eight times before becoming customers. This is generally done through content of some kind, be it BLOG posts, podcasts and videos, social media, etc. Done properly, a good content marketing strategy will attract prospects and drive more sales for your business.
Content marketing generates over three times as many leads as outbound marketing, has six times the power of traditional marketing for converting people into leads and leads into customers, and costs 62% less.
Digital Marketing During the Pandemic
During the recent pandemic, many businesses learned the hard way that their digital marketing strategy was built upon shaky foundations. Businesses built upon traditional marketing, or ads, or social media all came to a standstill while people paused in fear of what was next.With the uncertainty around them, spending stopped but their online searching didn't. In fact, online traffic went up as everyone went to quarantine. As things started to get back to normal, people started spending on all the things they spent time searching for.
Those who had a solid foundation built on quality content, established strong relationships during that time, which led to sales. Those who didn't, are now scrambling to catch-up.
Tips for a Successful Content Marketing Strategy
Content Marketing is not just creating and distributing content. Your content needs to be "perfect." To execute perfect content marketing, you need a plan. With nearly 5 million blog posts published every day, your SEO Content Strategy must allow you to attract and engage a clearly defined audience and deliver valuable and relevant content to user so you can improve your online reputation, build a community and grow advocates of your brand.Most business owners still haven't documented a content marketing strategy. According to research by the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs, marketers with a documented content strategy are:
- Far more likely to consider themselves effective at content marketing
- Far less challenged with every aspect of content marketing
- Generally more likely to consider themselves more effective with every tactic and social media channel
- Able to justify a higher percentage of the marketing budget to be spent on content marketing
Here are a few tips to help you implement a Content Marketing Strategy for your business:
1) Set Clear Objectives
The first thing you need to do is be clear about what you hope to accomplish with your content strategy. What are your goals? Are you trying to address multiple challenges with a single campaign? Or are you planning to splinter your content into multiple campaigns?
Define your challenges and plan every piece of content with a purpose towards solving them.
2) Know Your Audience
Content Marketing is all about creating value for your users. You're creating content to help answer their questions. You want to help them overcome barriers and objections to purchasing your product or service.
To do this effectively you need to know who they are. You have to understand their concerns, their problems, and their needs. Create detailed profiles defining some of your users. We call these ‘Customer Avatars’. Others call them ‘User Personas’ or ‘User Profiles’. Whatever you call them, it's important to understand who you are trying to sell to if you expect to be successful!
3) Create SEO-Friendly Content
Once you know your audience and understand their goals and objections, you can research topics that you know your audience cares about. You want to be strategic about your content, so finding ideas through popular trends is a great start. Think more about general concepts than actual titles. That's how Google's search algorithm works. Through targeted keyword research using tools like SEMRush, you can get great content ideas that will serve their needs, answer questions your users ask, and help you move them through all three phases of the content marketing funnel. When combined with search engine optimization, you can also improve your link building.
Users can't evaluate your solution until they first become aware of your solution, so at the top of the funnel is often your typical BLOG content. Articles just like this one that offer them value through information or answers on something they are interested in.
Statistically speaking your users typically need to engage 6 or more times with you before becoming a customer, so you are going to want to offer them middle-of-the-funnel options like checklists or guides, or even free video trainings and webinars. We refer to these as 'Lead Magnets' and they deepen your relationship.
Lastly, you need to have content to help convert them into a customer. Case studies, testimonials, and product sheets often work well here.
4) Plan Your Content with an Editorial Calendar
An Editorial Calendar is a key component of any successful content marketing strategy. Writing perfect content for your content marketing plan is all about delivering the right information to users at exactly the right time during their customer journey.
A content calendar will enable you to strategically schedule, systematize, and even outsource content planning, creation, and publishing. Then you can see all of the upcoming content scheduled along with the important details like the author, the customer profile it's for, the funnel stage, the type of content, etc.
5) Plan Distribution Across Multiple Channels
If you know your users, you know where they spend their time. You don't just want to roll out your content on your website and hope for the best. You want to plan a multi-channel distribution across web and social media. Use the channels where your audience already spends most of their time to give your content the best chance of being seen.
6) Analyze Using the Right Metrics
To make your content marketing successful, you have to keep monitoring your campaign and analyze your content performance. This is how you understand what type of content is connecting with your audience so you can make adjustments and plan for more.
Content by itself won't improve your rankings in search results. It's a major piece of the puzzle, but that's primarily the responsibility of your seo strategy. When you create content, you want to improve user experience, improve brand awareness, and help generate more sales from your products or services.
- For user behavior you usually check for visitors, sessions, and pages per session.
- For user engagement you can look at the number of pages, time on page, and likes/shares/comments in social media
- For SEO you want to follow the growth of your organic traffic, the number of backlinks, and your keyword ranking (the right keywords)
- Conversions can generally be measured by leads, calls, and sales!
Putting it All Together
Take these tips and start planning your first campaign. Try and generate some new traffic with some top of funnel content that helps your users answer questions. Put a lead magnet together that your audience will be glad to trade their contact information for. Track down some good customer reviews and write a few case studies to give users confidence in what you can do for them.Start conservative, try and get a few pieces of content out in the next month, and see how it goes!
