Content marketing is an essential aspect of organic lead generation and attracting sales. In the end, businesses have two options, buying online ads on search engines and social networks or earn traffic by creating content. The advantage of content marketing is the self-sustaining relationship between content, SEO, and social media. A well-written article can feed its own popularity and boost your brand’s authority.
However, a statistic every business and marketer must understand is 60 to 70 percent of content goes unused. If an article does not generate search engine click-throughs, comments, social shares, likes, retweets, or linkbacks, then it is worthless. The job of content is to attract new visitors, build an audience, generate leads and sales, and nurture relationships with existing customers. This interaction sends signals to search engines who use this information to determine popularity and reliability.
Therefore, content marketing that actually works for you will identify you as a trusted company and authority. Search engines are working to satisfy their customers. Accordingly, their algorithms factor in engagement and social proof to determine a page’s placement on results pages. If your content marketing does not provide an authentic, obvious value beyond self-promotion, it will not produce results. Does this make sense to you?
Nonetheless, it is obvious why many businesses believe content marketing does not work, especially if they are part of the 70 percent failing at it. Within this article, we are sharing some of our tips to make content marketing work for you. If you follow these strategies, you can see an almost immediate improvement to your return on investment.
1. Write for Your Ideal Customer – Many companies have an idea who they want as a target audience, but do you know your vital few? Typically, a large percentage of total revenue will come from relatively few customers. These are the people in which your company consistently meets a need. Therefore, your ideal customers are these vital few, not the majority. Identify these individuals, and use what you know to develop well-formed buyer personas. Align your content creation with these semi-fictional characters in mind, and write articles they want to read.
2. Create Long Form Content – When content marketing experts say quality is more important that quantity, this is a major part of what they are talking about. One quality 2000-word article will have more value than seven weak 300-word articles, both with your audience and SEO value. Research has discovered that the first 10 results, from search engines, average 2000 words. While no one knows with 100 percent certainty how algorithms rank websites, this provides a good indication that word-count is a major factor. Additionally, the same reporting discovered long-form content had a 37 percent higher conversion rate.
3. Respect the Writing – It is just a simple fact, many businesses and marketers do not respect production writing. As a result, many seek to make content creation as cheaply as possible. However, this is one example of “you get what you pay for.” Internet users are hungry for quality content. It doesn’t matter how much money you are “saving” if the return on investment is zero. Content must be written to meet the needs of your visitors, audience, and customers. Therefore, articles must be informative, useful, or entertaining. The content must be something people want to read. Therefore, you must respect the writing as a creative work.
4. Improve Your Web Design – Quality content leads a visitor to perform an action, either sharing, commenting, subscribing, or requesting a rate quote. Your web design is a major factor in visitors taking the next step. Declutter your website so the user’s attention is focused on your content and your load speed improves. Ensure you provide easy navigation and users can find what they are looking for within 3 or 4 clicks. Additionally, make your site mobile-friendly. Studies show 60 percent of all internet access is mostly mobile-only, and 83 percent of users intend to make use of mobile commerce within the next 12 months.
What haven’t we covered yet that is important to you? If you would like to talk about how to make content marketing work for you, or need more information, please contact us.
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