Top 5 Ways You Can Rescue Your Businesses Content Marketing Strategy
Top 5 Ways You Can Rescue Your Businesses Content Marketing Strategy
If you’ve lost track of your content marketing strategy, or it’s hanging on by a thread – it’s not too late to take action. Save your businesses content marketing strategy by doing these 5 things!
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Identify Your Target Audience
Knowing your audience is essential to understanding how you can improve your content marketing strategy. By making a content marketing strategy without knowing who you’re making it for, can only lead to wasted time and money. For example, if you’re a residential HVAC contractor, then it might not make much sense for you to market your services to apartment buildings full of renters. It’s important to have a clear picture of who you are (and who you aren’t) writing for.
Top Reasons Why You Should identify Your Target Demographic:
- Ensure you’re creating the right content for the right people.
- Have a better understanding how to create content that benefits and fulfills your reader’s needs.
- Increase conversion rates and generate leads.
Not sure where to begin with defining your audience? Let’s start here. Begin asking yourself these simple questions:
- What problems can my products or services solve?
- Who are my current customers?
- Who’s my competition?
- How is my business unique and why would someone choose me over my competition?
- What are their purchasing behaviors?
- What are their purchasing behaviors?
- How do they prefer to communicate?
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Define Your Goals
By defining goals, you’re able to keep your efforts focused and effective. The last thing you want to do is create content just for the sake of creating content. It must have a purpose. So, what do you hope to gain from your content marketing strategy?
- Earn backlinks?
- Rank on search engines?
- Educate an audience?
- Connect with an audience?
- Entertain an audience?
- Drive social media engagement?
Whether you’re trying to build brand awareness, educate customers, engage customers, or something else, defining your goals will help you get there. Is your content strategy effectively working towards your goals? If your answer is no, then it’s time to think SMART.
SMART goals act as a useful template for businesses who don’t know where to start with defining their goals. SMART stands for: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timely.
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Specific:
Ask yourself why your business is producing content and make the goals specific. What do you hope to accomplish? Is it simply to engage with customers or educate them on a topic? Make sure your goal is specific, clear, and concise.
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Measurable:
Your goal should also be measurable if you want to tell just how effective your strategies are. Invest in specific content marketing tools that give you the data and information you need to track engagement, conversions and other metrics.
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Attainable:
Challenge yourself – but don’t make your goals impossible to reach. You don’t want to set yourself up to fail, you want to set yourself up for success. Ask yourself: Are my goals reachable?
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Relevant:
Your goals should not only be relevant to your business, but also relevant to your customers. Your content must resonate with your readers.
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Timely:
Deadlines, deadlines, deadlines! This is a good way to hold yourself accountable. It’s easy to put off achieving your goals if there is no deadline. So mark those calendars!
- Create Content That Is Appealing and Interesting
It’s been reported that the average human attention span is now shorter than that of a goldfish. A recent study has found that our attention span is now around 8 seconds – and a goldfish’s attention span is around 9 seconds. That being said, you have about 8 seconds to capture the attention of your audience – so you better make it count!
There are a few major ways you can begin creating content that will captivate the attention of your audience. Here’s how.
- Use Headers and Sub-Headers
- Be Concise And Clear
- Use Graphics and Other Visuals
- Use Lists and Bullet Points For An Easier Read
- Have A Call To Action
- Edit Your Work Before Publishing
- Write For Your Audience…Not AT Them
- Tell A Story Through Your Writing
- Use The Right Keywords
- Incorporate Relevant Internal Links
- Be Consistent With Your Writing Style And Type Of Content
- Show Your Passionate Side
- Have A Conversation With Your Readers
Your online efforts with creating content are essential for creating and effective strategy and attracting the right customers. Your content should make your readers want to read it – and not lose interest.
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Create A Good User Experience
While appealing content is important, it is not the be all end all of your content marketing strategy. If your content is well-crafted and optimized for search engines, then congratulations – you have successfully created a good user experience! However, if you’re reading a blog about how to rescue your businesses content marketing strategy, then chances are you don’t quite have this one nailed down yet. But that’s okay! You are not alone. Most businesses understand the importance of publishing content that is engaging and customer-focused, but they don’t understand how to go about doing so.
As it pertains to content specifically, try:
- Creating a clear customer experience vision within your company
- Producing relevant and engaging content
- Keeping in contact with past customers
- Understanding your customers
- Creating an emotional connection with your customers
- Listening to feedback, both good and bad
- Measuring your ROI
According to a study done by American Express, about 86% of customers are willing to pay more for a better experience. The question a lot of business owners ask often is “how will I know if I’ve provided a good customer experience?” Well, the answer is simple: reviews!
Both good and bad reviews help you understand what your company is excelling at and what your company could use some work on. While bad reviews are never something businesses like to receive, they don’t have to be bad. Try looking at negative reviews as a way to l earn how to create a better experience. Ask for feedback often so you know what you’re doing well and what you might need to improve on. Let’s face it – we all have things we can improve on!
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Measure, Review and Adjust
Creating content is only half of it – what are you doing to track its success? If you’re bit measuring the success of your content marketing strategy, then you won’t know what you’re gaining – or losing – from it. Once you measure your content marketing strategy, you can review it and adjust it based on the data and analytics you’ve received.
According to the Content Marketing Institute’s 2020 research, about 80% of people responded that they do use metrics to measure performance. However, that number dropped to 65% when asked if they have KPI’s to measure performance, and 43% when asked if they measure content marketing ROI (return-on-investment).
Some things you should be tracking as it pertains to your content marketing strategy are as follows:
- Website Traffic and Source
- User Behavior (Time Spent on Page, Bounce Rate, New/Returning Visitors, Etc.)
- Impressions and Click-Through-Rates
- Total Content Shares and Backlinks
- Keyword Rankings
- Lead Generation