If you’re looking to expand your reach, gain traffic, convert readers and be extremely search engine-relevant, focus on content marketing. If done properly, content marketing can become a winning portion of your online marketing strategy – read on to know how.
1. Go Over Your Content Marketing Strategy
Go over your content marketing strategy again and make sure you and your team are aware of its fundamental objectives. Knowing the answers to the following questions will give purpose to your content marketing campaign.
Your content marketing goal – SEO, leads, more conversions
Your target audience – demographics, shopping habits and history
What content format does your audience prefer – videos, podcasts, infographics, text
How does your audience locate content –search engine, social media, forums, authority sites
How will you monitor results – monthly conversions, revenue, traffic
2. Identify Audience Personas
Analyze your target market and identify the various personas within them. For example, if your target market is women from 20 to 35, analyze the subsets to which they belong. Some of these women could be homemakers, some could be career women. Design your content to address each of these personas; your content must interest and be relevant to a 30 year old woman with kids, while inspiring a single, career-minded woman to greater success.
3. Make It Easy To Capture Information
Make sure your web pages and navigation are easy to follow. You don’t want your audience to work too hard to find your content. Use only simple language in the pages leading to the content, so that any of your target personas can understand. Eliminate irrelevant info, and get rid of Ads and Banners, as these will only irritate your visitors. Most importantly, make your content scannable, so that even the busiest people in your audience are able to quickly grasp what you convey.
4. Engage Your Audience
Engage your audience personally through your blog and via social media. Read and respond to their comments; interact at a personal level and ask for their input. Make your audience know that they’re important to you, and that your blog is all for them. In return, they’ll want to know more about you. Provide links to products with your personal recommendation for specific personas. Use your personality and charisma to win your readers over as customers.
5. Provide Consistent Value
Provide consistent value to your audience via valuable information in the form of tips and tutorials. Share your expertise freely; you want them to trust you as a subject matter expert, and as someone who truly cares about their daily ups and downs. Most importantly, make sure that the content you put out is relevant and usable to all the personas you’ve identified in your target audience.
6. Post Consistently
Publish your posting schedule on your blog so that people know when to expect what post. This builds up anticipation and acts as a promotion for your blog as well. Determine post consistency based on your audience’s interest levels. If you find that your readers visit your blog every day, post something every day. A consistent posting schedule can do great wonders for your SEO as well.
7. Don’t Pressurize Your Reader
Put yourself in your reader’s shoes and evaluate how you would react to a pressure situation. Keep the engagement as natural as possible; don’t put several links to products and other offerings along with your post. That’ll overwhelm the reader and even scare them off. It’s perfectly all right to blog about a specific product and link naturally to that particular purchase page.
8. Leverage All Archived Content
Old content gets buried on your site, but search engines still bring them out if they’re relevant. You need to do the same – analyze your old content for relevancy and start using it to promote your campaign. Repost the archived content with a few new quotes and stats, and you’ll reap in traffic. Turn some of the old content into podcasts and infographics.
9. Get The Content Format Right
What kind of content does your audience prefer? If your audience has the time to read and appreciate text, stick to it. If large portions of your audience like quick-and-easy infographics, add those to your content mix. Be sure to ask your readers what exactly they want.
10. Monitor Constantly
Monitor your campaign constantly to ensure it’s working for you, according to a few actionable metrics that you need to define with your team. Aim for a certain increase in traffic, SEO, conversions, signups or whatever might be your goal. Evaluate your campaign and tweak it now and then to achieve your goals.
11. Promote Your Content
To make sure your content is seen and read, promote it across multiple media. Be sure to post it on FaceBook and LinkedIn. Tweet it to your Twitter following. Make sure you send out newsletters with containing your posting schedule so your readers know what to expect. Promote your content energetically and that’s your content campaign won.
Author Bio
Stephen Cambra is a freelance business writer and blogger from Invesp, who specializes in writing insightful articles on conversion rate optimization techniques.
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