Content marketing is a key technique to generate qualified leads and improve conversion rates with a limited budget. The procedure of content marketing varies from outbound strategies to paid campaigns and is directed towards the target audience. It increases the website traffic so a business should have a well-organized content marketing approach. This article covers the top content marketing procedures to increase sales and hence boost your business.
1. Combined resources to run content marketing
One of the major challenges faced by marketers is the lack of resources, but content marketing yields positive outcomes even with minimum resources. The two essential parts of content marketing are:
Team – You need to have a dedicated team and a clear strategy to achieve your goals.
Marketing Tools – Besides a team, you must have data-driven marketing tools to track and enhance the progress of your marketing efforts because it is very difficult for a team to handle all the things manually. There are a lot of free and paid tools available online to regulate your content marketing efforts. These are categorized into:
- Keyword research tools – Like Google Keyword Suggest, SEMRush, and Google Trends.
- Writing tools – e.g. MS Word, and Dropbox Paper.
- Content contemplation and research tools – Such as Buzzsumo, and HubSpot’s Blog Topic Generator.
- Content distribution tools – Such as Buffer, and Feedly.
- User engagement tracking tools – Both for organic and social media traffic e.g. Google Analytics, Kissmetrics, and Mention, etc.
You all need to choose the most appropriate set of tools for your purpose and you can easily obtain them with a little expenditure.
2. Determine the KPIs for your content policy
Key performance indicators (KPIs) help you to keep track of your target achievement progress. So it is important to choose those KPIs which point toward the progress toward your goal. You should always document these fundamental KPIs:
- Time spent on creating content like blog posts and other content.
- Averages views on your blog and its bounce rate.
- Subscribers attained for your newsletter/email list.
- Social media sharing.
- Conversion rate.
- Inbound links attained.
- Number of comments posted on your blog.
For example, conversion rate would be one of your KPIs if you wish to boost conversions and sign up customers for an experiment.
3. Mapping content strategy to your marketing channel
The procedure for making a content marketing strategy should be associated with various stages of your marketing channel. For instance, if a marketing funnel is divided into 3 stages, it is crucial that the content strategy aligns with it. Such division of a marketing channel into stages is important to create a successful content strategy which can guide your clients in all stages of their voyage.
4. Streamline your content policy
Creating quality content is an important part of making the content strategy more efficient because it facilitates more engagement with your target audience. You have to follow these three procedures to streamline your content strategy:
- Make a content calendar for publishing articles. An article should be scheduled for publication on a specified date well in advance say after 15 days or a month etc. You can target multiple keywords in a month depending upon your team size and switch to a different set of keywords next month.
- Automate your social media distribution process because it is tiresome to manually publish more than 20 to 25 social updates on a regular basis. Hootsuite is an awesome tool to automate content distribution on social networks like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. You can choose the free analytical dashboard of the social media site to examine social media activity or a tool like Mention.
- Make and follow an outreach plan which is vital for quality link building and promoting your brand. The top funnels for an outreach plan include social media and email. Automation of your outreach campaigns is possible with tools like Ninja Outreach.
5. Frame appropriate content length as required
Usually long content is considered better to rank a keyword rather than a brief one. Although it is true in most cases like for bog posts, yet a short content is also perfectly suitable in some situations. The content posted on a website should have a good readability and for this, writing short paragraphs with sufficient whitespace and images on the web page is enough to engage more visitors.
It is important to post the content as per the target audience. In some cases, the content needs to be short and to the point so that the audience gets an idea about your pitch and then you can hyperlink for detailed information like “Read more…”.
6. Write some content other than about your brand
Generally, marketers focus on delivering content only to promote their own products or services. Sometimes this appears too promotional and the audience hardly trusts such brands. Since the main purpose of content marketing is to develop a trustworthy relationship with the audience that benefits both parties, so the marketers should also post some content according to the likes of their target audience. Then the readers are more likely to relate your product as a genuine brand that solves a customer’s problem.
7. Get faster results with CRM tools
Content marketing does not deliver immediate results but it is the best way to establish your brand across the globe. A Customer Relation Management systems (CRM) tool enables you to store and manage customer information, spot sales opportunities, and efficiently manage your marketing campaigns on a single platform. CRM is very important for the marketing process and generating qualified leads. Salesforce is a well-known CRM platform.
Pipedrive is a relatively newer CRM platform which facilitates content marketing to grab the audience attention and get enormous conversions. It’s free for a 14 day trial period and you have to pay after that. So you can also choose any such CRM tool to enhance your marketing efforts and get faster results.
8. Invest in content marketing to increase conversions
It is very important to promote the quality content to the correct channel at the right time. The promotion depends upon the type of target audience. For instance, you can utilize professional networks such as LinkedIn and GrowthHackers for targeting the B2B audience. Your minor investment per month will promote your content to several thousand people rather than a few hundred.
The formulation of a well-organized content marketing strategy requires good knowledge about your audience in advance. If you know well about your target audience, you are able to convert most of them into loyal customers. Providing high-quality relevant content all over the customer journey is the best way to obtain targeted traffic. Implement these above-mentioned content marketing procedures to improve your brand and grow your business.
About the Author
Paru Saxena is the Sales head at TechIngenious, a digital marketing company in India. He is passionate about writing and has been writing for the last 5 years. He has vast experience in digital marketing and web application development. You can find his LinkedIn profile here.