Demand generation specialists certainly appreciate the importance of content marketing for their activities, being the most important link that connects customer retention and brand awareness. Executed in a smart way, content management helps the brand becomes recognizable and trustworthy in the eyes of prospective customers, and that’s all because they think the content provided to them is relevant, carefully planned, and intended to answer their questions.
Still, content management is not just about what you’ve written, but how you’ve written it. That’s why developing an SEO strategy is a complex process that requires you to stay in control of guidelines, promotions, audience interests, and many other SEO elements. When applied on fresh and interesting content, and directed towards the right audiences, these elements can do miracles for your retention strategy.
Which is the goal you’re trying to achieve? You need to be quite specific about it so that you can measure the effect of different parameters. It won’t be enough to say you need ‘more leads’ landing on your pages, but to define exactly the marketing efforts needed to support the bottom line of your business.
Once you have all your marketing priorities listed, the next step is to determine actions that will enable you to achieve them.
How to develop an approach that can genuinely attract customers? You must research key conversion drivers, and adjust them to the most prominent expectations of your customers.
Meet and engage your audience
Providing content for audiences you know nothing about will almost certainly lead your strategy to fail. Think of it as a man standing on the corner of a busy street and yelling absolute nonsense: few people may stop and ask what is wrong, but most of them will rush by and they won’t care.
Plus, we live in a digital era where reaching audiences is extremely easy. The challenge, nevertheless, is to attract those audiences with content that is more engaging than one of your competitors. All you need to do to present your brand in a better way is to compare it to related brands and learn from your best-performing social posts.
Another thing you need to be aware of is users’ browsing patterns: which are the channels and platforms they use to consume content? Do they enjoy watching videos, reading blogs, or following social media?
The common practice of experienced marketers is creating personas, used to categorize audiences into groups and obtain quality insight on their psychographics and demographics.
Collate your goals in a mission statement
Take some time to think about the goals of your content, and the SEO benefits you need to achieve. This way, you will be able to draft a detailed list of tasks and assignments.
Do some research
Use a content curator such as Google Alerts, in particular when providing factual and commission content that has to be backed up by a great deal of research. Furthermore, keep in line with the latest news and popular trends, the same as viral industry items that may be interesting to republish.
Brainstorm ideas
With a completed mission statement, it will be easy to break content down and glean valuable information about targeted visitors. Once you’ve done that, ideas will start appearing on their own.
The most important thing to remember is to make content less self-promotional: Visitors don’t like being overwhelmed with product ads and posts and prefer being given relevant content packed with useful information. Instead, try to research content related to the interests and needs of your target audiences, ideally such that will inspire them to act the way you expect them to.
Add some more efficiency to the process by repurposing the content you’ve created, as for instance transforming a post into infographics, or using them for eBooks and social media posts.
Publish, Promote and follow the progress of your posts
The key priority when publishing content is to take care of quality, which means that you have to make posts useful and informative, and write them in an audience-friendly tone that readers would easily understand. Needless to say, you must pay attention to spelling and grammar, ideally by hiring a specialist who would proofread them prior to publishing.
Instead of looking to optimize your entire site, try including SEO elements in every post, and make it rank better on Google and other search engines. Promoting posts in this way will allow you to track their performance, and depict content that is demonstrably better-accepted and create similar posts.
In case you’re recording higher bounce rates (number of visitors who open your posts but leave the site without reading it), that means that the post needs more interesting details that would retain users. Compare the referral traffic to other blogs or websites, and try to link your content to them in order to learn some of their practices.
Your duty, nevertheless, doesn’t end with content creation. The next important task is to distribute the content to the attention of as many people as possible and make sure they won’t miss any important updates. Meanwhile, make sure they know you’re providing easy-to-consume content, unlike millions of useless posts they’re being bombed with all the time.
In the perfect scenario, you should pay specialized organic promotion services to spread your content on social networks, or feature sponsored ads in places where people are most likely to see them.
Give your performance an unbiased grade
Give your mission statement another look, and compare the metrics you’ve mentioned there with their current values. This way, you will understand how your marketing strategy is working, and whether your goals have been achieved. A positive result of this evaluation would mean that you are driving audience in the right direction, providing them exactly with information they need.
Plus, detailed performance monitoring helps you make adjustments to your content marketing strategy at any point in time, or improve it to maximize its impact on your ROI rates, sales, and brand recognition.
Ending thoughts
Use your content marketing strategy to outline the key goals of your business, and to align them with the needs and expectations of your customers. Once ready, develop an organized strategy of how to address those needs, and make users love your content.
Our recommendation is to give all users in the company/organization access to your content strategy so that they would contribute with fresh ideas. The larger your organization is, the more important it becomes to keep everybody in line with the content goals. The same applies to small companies which are just beginning to explore content marketing because they need to rely on both internal and external experts to plan their strategy.
Obviously, every company has to consider its structure and corporate culture and decide whether it is better to share all documentation or target specific stakeholders with particular summaries depending on their roles and objectives.
As we already mentioned, businesses must follow trends and adjust their strategies to them, but there are parts of those strategies that should remain intact even when marketing priorities are changing. Those are the mission and the goals of the company, namely the two things that should stay on top of the company’s schedule regardless of what it is doing.
For everything else, though, updating and reviewing are extremely beneficial. For instance, you should occasionally revise your channel strategy, monitor your team’s activities, and reconsider your core topics.
Finally, the reaction of your audience when presented with content depends on a number of different factors including the mission, products, brand awareness, and structure. What you should do in order to impress them is to provide consistent, high-quality posts that will not only attract them, but preserve their focus for as long as possible, and compel them to read more. The more you invest in promoting your content, the more people you will attract towards it.
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