Are you a business owner looking to improve their online presence? How can you get more traffic and sales into the new year? Try these content marketing tips!
Content Marketing should be at the center of your 2019 business marketing plan. It is the one marketing strategy that builds brand awareness; generate new customers, and increase sales and bottom line revenue.
Best of all, content marketing is 62% cheaper than outbound marketing. It can also generate up to three times more leads and results. Conversion rates are six times higher as well according to the Content Marketing Institute.
But these results aren’t always guaranteed. Here are five content marketing tips that will help you ensure every piece of content you create in the coming year works hard for you.
1. Establish Business and Content Marketing Goals
Your first step should be to establish clear content marketing goals based on your business goals. Do you want your content to increase brand awareness for your new business, generate 15 new customers each month, or to increase monthly sales by 20%?
One piece of content cannot help you achieve all of these goals, but one piece of content clearly focused on one goal can help you achieve all of them.
2. Understand the Content Marketing Funnel
When the line between content and business is clear from the outset, it becomes much easier to write, promote and track the performance of each piece of content. Each piece of content you produce should be focused on filling only one step in the marketing funnel, not all of them.
- Build brand awareness
- Create interest in your product or services
- Educate prospects so they can make a decision
- Call prospects to take action and buy your product or service
Remember, people buy from companies they know, like and trust and they get to know you online through your content.
3. Answer Questions with Your Content
Sites like Quora and Answer the Public will help you determine what questions your prospects have at each stage of the sales funnel. Armed with this, you can focus your content to answer their questions which positions you as an authority on the subject.
These sites will not only show you what questions your audience is asking. They also show you how they are asking the questions. You should use these “keywords” when you create your content to make the promotion of it easier.
4. Plan Your Content Types
Written words in the form of blog articles are not the only way to go. Some types of information lend themselves to other displays quite naturally. The statistics quoted at the beginning of the article, for example, would make a great infographic.
YouTube videos, digital coupons, tweets, and Pinterest images can all be effective pieces in your content marketing plan. In fact, you can amplify the effectiveness of any given piece of content by “repurposing” it to fit a new audience or a new step in the funnel.
5. Track and Analyze Your Content
Don’t wait until the end of the year to assess your results. Also, don’t be satisfied with the surface numbers. If you check often and see a lot of people responded to content on one particular topic, for example, you’ll be in a position to offer more content on that topic or another view of the topic through another content type.
6. Bonus Content Marketing Tips!
Perhaps the most important of these content marketing tips that we can share is that there will never be a better time to get started than right now. If you’re not sure exactly what you need or know that you don’t have the resources you need to put this sort of comprehensive plan into action, check out our services page for all the ways we can help you tell your story the right way.
