Since the advent of inbound marketing, Marketers have devised different ways to market their business, company or services. One of the most effective ways to market your business online (inbound marketing) is content marketing. Users have found that content marketing costs 62% less than outbound marketing techniques and get 6 times higher conversion than outbound marketing. 86% of marketers think content marketing is a key element of their overall marketing strategy.
But just using content marketing is not going to give to conversions. You have to do effective content marketing. That means knowing the key tips and tricks to use and how to use them. There is a checklist which you have to understand and implement for effective content marketing.
Content Marketing provides 4x the ROI of our traditional marketing spend.
– Julie Fleischer, VP Marketing, Neustar
Effective content marketing means that you should have
- Understanding how the content works in your sales funnel : Content clarity is a key element in content marketing. The content may be applicable for different parts of your buyer’s journey, but you have to decide what’s the best way to put it to use. Some content may be used to attract customer (informative content with research and lots of neat data and graphs). Some content can be used for helping them make a decision (how to blog explanation, FAQ’s) and other content may be used for selling (copy on the website, sales letters).
Make sure that whatever you write, you are giving value to your customers/readers. Even if they don’t make the decision to purchase, they should have a good feeling when they close that tab. That will make sure that next time they need some info, yours is the first website they’ll open and in long term customer loyalty is an important metric for regular sales. - Understanding the data associated with content marketing is one of the most important aspects of modern marketing. If you are just putting out content, you won’t know how each piece of content is working. You have to track, analyze, report and strategize.
The more data you understand the more targeted your marketing would be. You will be able to divert your efforts towards that 1% of the population instead of casting a wide web and hoping to catch some attention.
Some data is more important than other.s It is good that you have eyeballs on your website, but you have to track how much you are converting.
- Have Consistent content output: Even if your content is the best, if you are not putting it out on quickly , or at least in a schedule, you will lose customers. You have to show that you are an authority on your niche. You do so by regularly putting out good, clean and informative content.
Tools can be used for this. Content calendars can be organised and tasks can be divided so that you have the exact information about the content.
Benefits of content calendar :This will make sure that each person who is a part of your content teams knows
- Writing deadline
- What keywords to incorporate
- How long each piece of content should be
- Publishing deadline
- When it’s your turn to publish (for multiple people in the team)
- Proofreading person
- Where to publish the content and where to market it (social media handles)
This may also help you to repurpose old content as each week it can be difficult to come up with new ideas. As you know, you need to 10X your content
- Influencer marketing : Influencer marketing is one of the most important marketing techniques that you need to get on now. These last few years companies have been spending a huge amount of their marketing budget on influencer marketing techniques.Quotes from influencers are a top hit in blogging these days.
Another thing you can do is you can pay an influencer to promote your blog on their social media handles. Who can you approach for content promotion?
- Social media stars
- Youtubers
- Bloggers
- Authority influencers etc
- Have a Brand’s voice : Make sure that the content you are putting out (or hiring a specialist to put out) displays your brand voice. It is synonymous with your website copy and what you say is what you mean.
This means more than just content. Your each website page should match the colors. Any sales letters should have the same theme as your website. Also it should be in such a way that people begin to correspond that logo and color theme with authority in that niche. This will take time, but it will be worth it.
Content marketing is such an amazing tool to grow your business with the least amount of resources. It is the least expensive form of marketing, and most importantly, it works. Make sure that you are putting the right amount of effort,skill and money in content marketing. It will give you great leads and amazing conversions if applied correctly.