Content marketing is an important component of every digital marketing strategy. It serves several purposes, such as:
Building brand awareness
Assisting in lead generation
Giving the audience the information needed to make a purchase decision
Pushing uncertain prospects to convert
Attracting inbound links for SEO purposes
Expanding your reach via social sharing
While most companies know they should do content marketing, many don’t gain much traction. Therefore, here are some tips that will greatly improve your results.
1. Create a detailed marketing plan. Including goals.
You need a detailed plan if you want to experience success with your content marketing. Many companies just publish blog posts without a plan. There is no research behind them and there are no benchmarks or goals established. The purpose of content marketing is to generate revenue. Yes, there are short-term goals in between, but when it comes down to it your content needs to produce a return.
Brainstorm topics based on campaign goals: are you looking to generate leads, push prospects directly to a purchase offer or guide them towards another conversion goal such as a phone call or location visit. You then need to optimize your content properly, set conversion goals and plan a promotion push. Map out your content marketing plan, including goals, so you can easily answer this question: “Is this working?”
2. Determine what content is currently producing the best results.
If you have been posting fresh content to your blog for some time, use Google Analytics to see what content your visitors have been engaging with the most. What posts received the most visits? What blog posts kept your visitors on your website the longest? What content did your audience engage with before they converted? You should also look at the social shares and comments each post has received.
This gives you a good idea of the content styles and topics that your audience responds to the best. Use this information to plan future topics and continue to monitor your results. Don’t be afraid to test different styles and topics – just analyze your data and you will take your content marketing in the right direction.
3. Focus on quality, not quantity.
Content that truly deliver results isn’t cheap to produce. Not every company can afford a full-time in-house content writer or a freelancer. This isn’t an excuse to sacrifice quality. If you can only afford to publish one high-quality blog post per month, in the beginning, do that.
Some of the most popular forms of content include ebooks, blog posts, videos, webinars, case studies, and infographics – these all cost money to produce. Don’t opt for several lower quality pieces. If your content assets are limited, focus your energy on promotion and increase your publishing schedule as your revenue increases.
4. Use paid outlets to expand your content reach.
You might create the most amazing piece of content, but it’s not going to be effective unless your target audience engages with it. If your website doesn’t receive a lot of organic traffic, you need to seek additional traffic sources to get eyes on your content. Sending your new blog posts to your email list and sharing them on your social media profiles are great ways to attract some traffic for free, but if you really want to get the most out of your content, you need to utilize some paid options.
- Paid social media promotion: As organic social reach is limited, especially on Facebook, if you want to attract traffic you can boost your Facebook posts, run sponsored updates on LinkedIn and promote your tweets on Twitter. Start small, maybe just $10 a day, and scale up your social promotion as your revenue increases.
- Content distribution networks: There are two main players, Outbrain and Taboola, that help place your content on major websites in front of an audience that their algorithms determine might be interested in your content. You only pay when someone clicks and they are brought to your website. Both companies operate on a cost-per-click bidding model.
Written by Jonathan Long.
Originally posted on entrepreneur.com