Content marketing is the most cost-efficient way to get targeted visitors regularly hitting your website. This blog lays down actionable content marketing strategies to help you gain traffic from your website’s content. So sit back to imbibe the tips, techniques, and strategies for better business responses.
1. Have a strategy
Without drawing a clear strategy to guide your content, you risk wasting time and effort on pieces of content that will not connect with your target audience. So, before you go about framing content, be clear about the following:
- Who is your target audience?
- What type of content strikes well with your target audience?
- How does your target audience get at your content and consume it?
Build every piece of content on this foundation, and you won’t be spinning your wheels with revisions, do-overs, or content that does not connect.
2. Plan Ahead
Ask most marketers, and they will tell you that their biggest struggle is not creating new content but rather dealing with new content subjects. Most of the time, your time and mental energy are exhausted brainstorming these new subjects rather than creating new content.
So, try mapping out a list of topics in advance and schedule their publishing dates.
Content marketing needs to be prioritized over other business growth strategies, irrespective of the extra effort and patience it demands.
Why? Because Content marketing yields tremendous results with minimal investments. The most efficient and effective way to make content marketing work for you is to be laser focussed on what produces results.
3. Begin with the end in mind
The best way to develop your plan is by working backward. Before creating any content, get crystal clear on your marketing goals and what you are trying to accomplish. This is what will shape and streamline your message, giving every piece of content a strategic purpose. For example, if you are looking to generate leads, you will want to brainstorm content that will provide a quick win and entice visitors to submit their email address. If your motive is to increase sales and work further down the funnel, you may want to consider a webinar that showcases your products and services, creating brand awareness.
Every piece of content you publish should bring prospects one step closer to becoming loyal customers.
4. Know thy customer
Here’s the bottom line. It is useless to create content your target market does not care about. The purpose of content marketing is defeated. Every piece of content should hinge on knowing and understanding your audience. Creating the ideal customer Avatar is one way to ensure that you are creating the right person’s right content. Your avatar should include interests, age, profession, and geographic location to get a sense of what topics significantly impact their lives. You can then leverage this knowledge and content to deepen your connection with your prospects with content that resonates with them.
5. Salt in the wound
Nothing else than pain, whether emotional, physical, or financial, encourages someone to act. You will want to avoid dramatic tactics here, but the key is to be aware of such sensitive issues, and follow them by offering a solution. Check out your customer avatar. Can you identify their pain points? Use contrast to paint a specific picture of what life could be on the other side of their troubles. Offer your products and services as the means to get them there. Use your content to solve their problems.
6. Publish” X vs Y “posts
“X vs. Y” posts are posts such as: “Convertkit vs. Mailchimp,” “Keto vs. Paleo.” “X vs. Y” posts help drive more traffic to your site. Why? First of all, the “X vs. Y” keyword does not have a lot of SEO competition.
Secondly, people that search for such keywords tend to be well informed. Consider, for example, Somebody searching for “Convertkit vs. Mailchimp” already knows about SEO. They are just looking for the best tool. This is why CPC’s on these “X vs. Y “keywords tend to be super high.
Linking to social profiles in outreach emails is an easy way to get more responses. This is often overlooked, but very simple content marketing strategy that can help drive traffic to your website, blog, and social media pages. It will help you sell more of your products or services. It is a great and simple tactic that you can set up once, and you never have to worry about it again. As it is automated,it is automatically applied to every email that you send.
8. Take inspiration for relevant content.
Content should look relevant to the audience that you are catering to and not be out of place. Take inspiration and ideas from other successful content creators on their platform. Try to adapt, customize and unleash your very own version of the content. Don’t hesitate to look outside your industry for inspiration.
9. Choose a relevant platform to reach out to your audience.
The channel or medium you choose to distribute your content plays a vital role because it sucks many valuable resources. So when it does not yield the desired response, it feels like time, energy, and money wasted. It also discourages you from moving forward.
Ensure that your content does not fall on deaf ears. Choose the platforms and content channels your market uses. It is very easy to get drawn towards a million different social media channels because they seem like a popular choice today. Do the research and discover where the market hangs out online by delivering your content on platforms your target market uses and prefers. You will significantly improve your chances of reaching out to them and avoid hitting dead ends with your content marketing efforts.
Once you are equipped with the content, republish it and share it across other channels and platforms. For example, a video can be turned into a podcast episode, transcribed into a blog post. It can be carved up even further into Facebook posts, tweets, or condensed articles for Linkedin. When you are syndicating your content across multiple channels, you extend your reach to a set of potential customers who wouldn’t have otherwise known you. For instance, someone who follows podcasts may spend less time reading blogs, or a daily Facebook user may never have a reason to go on LinkedIn.
11. Call to action
You just dozed your audience with a dangerous amount of high-quality content. Now it is time to use the opportunity to help guide your ideal prospect in the right direction. Conclude every piece of content with a friendly call to action. Call to actions are very useful in driving more sales, subscriptions and moving readers through your content. An effective digital marketing strategy is one that tells people what to do next. Have a clear picture of the outcome you want to achieve when creating a CTA appended to your content.
Conclusion: 70% of marketers actively invest in content marketing today because an effective content strategy is a critical component affecting the stages in a buyer’s journey. I hope this blog helps you create a sound content marketing plan for your business.
If you have any trouble planning a sound content marketing strategy, Simple Intelligent will be glad to lend some fresh ideas to your plan and help fortify your business goals.
