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Inject your business with a dose of content marketing and see what happens. Stay ahead of the competition and improve your profitability.
Considering all other pieces of the marketing pie, content marketing is a big slice. The right content published at the right moment will help build customer loyalty and bring plenty of other benefits to your business. Get a leg up on the competition by having a viable content marketing strategy that meets your customer’s needs at each phase of the buyer’s journey. Without a proper plan, you can only hope to achieve random results.
For more than six years, our marketing consultancy had been implementing successful marketing strategies. As we expanded and the team’s goals grew, our company started to deploy more advanced content-focused inbound marketing campaigns and eventually earned its place among the Top Content Marketing Agencies.
We learned that behind every interaction, there is a person with an individual request. Thus, you need content that caters to the needs and interests of target individuals and a content strategy that will help the company establish trusting relationships with its target audience. We do this by asking ourselves 8 key questions, answers to which would guide our content marketing efforts – this is a powerful technique we want to share with you in this article.
Take your time to step back, and ask yourself the following questions that help build stronger relationships with people that are behind your data.
What objectives should your content achieve?
Define what problems are you trying to solve – driving traffic to your website or increasing sales? This step is often skipped by marketers. Don’t make the mistake of acting without having a clearly defined goal.
Who is your target audience?
Investigate a buyer’s persona and write for a niche target audience to get your message across to the right people. Discover how your customer behaves, looks and dresses. If you want to take your bottom line to new heights you should get the answers to the following questions:
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- What type of content resonates with your customers?
- How much time do they spend consuming content?
- Which devices do they prefer?
- How long are the articles they usually read?
- Which social media do they use to share content?
Is your content visual enough?
We are visual creatures. Make your content more powerful and memorable using visual elements such as video, images, gifs, or content infographics. This helps to attract your audience and convey valuable information in the engaging visual format.
How to scale content creation?
Google, as well as your visitors, love quality content. Crafting high-quality content is key to having your brand meet customers’ demands. That’s why hiring inexpensive writers and producing good-not-great content is a disservice for both you and your client. The quickest path to improve your content is to establish an efficient workflow that includes:
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- Content creation. Use automation and reminder tools. The more you can automate the content creation, the better.
- Prioritization. Rank all content requests by priority.
- SEO analysis. Discover the keywords which are the most marketable.
- Publication and promotion. Make people know about your content using a distribution strategy.
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Where should you distribute content?
Planning content distribution is critical to your marketing strategy. Keep in mind the following practices for choosing your distribution plan:
Figure out your audience.
If you want more eyes on your content, take a hard look at who is going to see and share it. Understanding of your target readers is key to shaping your message.
Choose the distribution channels.
They include your blog, social media, email marketing, PPC (pay-per-click), SEO, and content distribution tools (like IFTTT, Triberr, dlvr.it, or GaggleAMP). Influencer outreach will also help increase your chances of being seen even more.
Target content for customers at each stage of the buyer’s journey.
Every piece of content should serve a purpose and be addressed to the right people. Create relevant content and don’t push people to buy your products when they haven’t even heard about your brand before. Instead, use it as the change to grasp data on interested users and use retargeting advertising to attract their attention with a meaningful offer.
How to measure the effectiveness of your content?
At the onset of measuring the content marketing success, look at the people you’ve reached out. What channels do they use? How often do they visit? Consider the following Google Analytics metrics to determine user demographics and behavior.
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- Page views. It is a basic KPI that shows which page and how many times has been viewed on a site.
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- Demographics. Find out your audiences’ ages, genders, and interests to make sure you are getting a message to the right people.
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- Geography. Define where they are coming from and allocate resources to this geographic area.
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- Average time on page. Investigate how much time your readers spend on the website page to understand if they are interested, skim, or not really read at all.
- Bounce rate. It shows the percentage of your website visitors who viewed one page and left.
Keep an eye on metrics of social media distribution:
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- Shares. The higher count is always better. It indicates that your content is relevant and valuable for your audience.
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- Follower growth. Remember, it is more indicative of your success than a static number of followers, no matter how large it is.
- Comments. Welcome any positive and negative feedback to see if your content resonates with your audience.
Rioks team is using multiple tools for measuring content marketing KPIs and campaign results, such as DataBox – analytics tool for marketers that can interconnect your reports from various sources of cloud-based data such as Google Analytics, Instagram, Facebook Ads, SemRush, and HubSpot in a single interface. This kind of business analytics platform makes it easier to keep track of various key performance indicators (KPIs) in the user-friendly form of daily scorecards, weekly summaries and alerts.
Do you spy on your competitors?
Marketing is a game of competing for the attention of the target audience. Be one step ahead of others and monitor your competitors’ marketing to understand what your audience is responding to. It helps to make insight into the needs of your readers.
What are your personas’ pain points?
Discover the problems bothering people you are reaching out to. It helps create content with the sole goal of solving the actual problems of consumers. After all, that is the main goal of content marketing and the reason behind its success.
Pain points can be classified into 4 categories:
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- Financial pain points. Usually, your audiences want to reduce their spending on the products or services they use.
- Productivity pain points. They want to spend less time using this product or service but boost productivity.
- Process pain points. Your persona wants to make internal processes more efficient.
- Support pain points. Your prospective consumers aren’t getting the needed support at critical stages of the buyer’s journey.
Take a step forward and stay committed to creating high-quality content. Don’t expect noticeable results overnight, but keep in mind that you are working on a long-term strategy. If each page or video that you publish serves a purpose and has an impact on your target audience, it won’t take long for the undeniable rewards to become apparent.
Rioks is recognized as a top Inbound Marketing Company on DesignRush. Feel free to get in touch for any content marketing advisory you may require.
