Content marketing is the most efficient and the most effective way for any business – small or big – to enhance their online presence. Simply having a static business website is no longer enough. With the advent of customers going online first to research you need multiple social media pages promoting your brand through a steady stream of high quality messages. Infographics, surveys, video, images, blog posts and articles connect with your customers in an entirely new way. Keep in mind, content marketing is not just about convincing your customers to purchase a product or service. Content marketing is also about influencing a prospect’s mind or educating and informing existing customer’s behavior and views.
Getting More from Your Content Marketing Efforts
In the modern, consumer-centric market, connecting with your customers will take much more than just creating a billboard ad or radio spot. Relevant and timely content will help to develop your business’ story and drive home the unique type of value that you have to offer. It is also what informs potential customers how your services differ from your competitors.
The first step of any content marketing strategy is to the business goals. You should never create content without one. Instead, you need to understand what type of outcome you want to achieve. For example:
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Do you want to increase the awareness of your brand?
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Are you trying to build your email list?
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Are you trying to nurture your prospects along the buyer’s journey?
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Are you trying to convert your current prospects into paying customers?
The goal will be unique to your business, but determining the goal is essential for developing a successful content marketing strategy.
Content Creation Efforts
If you have determined that your content marketing goal is to sell a product, this does not mean that you need to create content that attempts sell a product over and over again. Instead, you need to create content that will tell your customers why they should purchase your product or service. What type of problem will you solve and why this is important? The key to great content is offering your readers value.
Your content needs to benefit your visitors. They should feel as though you have offered a solution to a problem they have after reading the content you created. If you are selling a computer, then you need to think of the different reasons that your customers may be searching for one or a concern they may have when making the purchase. One way to approach consumers worried about features would be to explain how the features can benefit their lives (eg store 5 years’ worth of pictures!) You can provide statistics that will prove the effectiveness of the computer in achieving tasks (eg battery life increased to 10 hours). Finally you can illustrate how a computer can meet a customer’s specific needs to perform business tasks (great for presentations), gaming (runs the latest games) and Internet browsing (super fast networking speed).
When you take the time to think about your target customer’s needs, you can create content that they will read, share and use. This can help increase your brand awareness and encourage loyalty.
Keeping Your Content Fresh
For most websites, creating content that is considered “evergreen” will be important. This means that the content will be relevant today, tomorrow and two years down the road. However, if you have a product that is featured in the news or wins some type of award, creating content around this can also be beneficial. You have to try different things and see what works best. Traffic analytics obviously can help with that. If you don’t have traffic analytics available you must get them installed right away.
Additionally, once you have created the content, you cannot simply publish it on your website and forget about it. Bring the content to where your customers are – social media. Share links or snippets of the story in various social media channels, where the customer click or tap to the full article. Content promotion is as important, sometimes more important, than the content itself.
The Bottom Line
The overall objective for content marketing is helping prospects and customers find you, building trust and keeping them coming back for more to read or share. While content is king, there is no shortcut to great content. You have to get to know your audience, determine what you want the content to do and then create content that is valuable and beneficial to your customers. If you do this consistently you will see an increase in traffic from the content that you create and that will eventually turn into increased sales and customer satisfaction.
