Serving existing customers and generating leads can be done through content marketing. Here are a few stats that show why content marketing is worth the hype!
Approaching content marketing strategically is very much necessary to generate leads and increase ROI. If you think content marketing is all about blogging, it is time for you to rethink! This blog is all about understanding what perfect content marketing is! I have divided this blog into three headings: Content creation, content distribution, and measurement.
Marketing is all about conversion. The art of converting a cold prospect into a customer is the essence of marketing. The prospect passes through various stages to finally become your customer and your content needs to be created accordingly. This is exactly why I said Content Marketing is much more than blogging. There are three stages that you should take your prospects through with your outstanding content marketing strategy:
The first step of content marketing is getting your content ready. Lead generation through content marketing is dependent on one important thing called “target audience.” The content you develop should focus on the target audience and the medium of sharing such content should also be audience specific. For example, if you have a food blog and you share videos of your recipes, you should make sure to share it in such a way that it reaches your targeted audience. In such a context, social media is one of the best places to share. This is effective even when you want to attract sponsors for your blog, say an olive oil producing company. They sponsor for your video episode and you can get your job done. It is a win-win!
Content marketing at every stage is vital and getting your content ready can be done with the help of “The Lifecycle of Contents.”
Stages | Content Marketing Techniques |
Awareness |
|
Evaluation |
|
Conversion |
|
The effectiveness of the above content marketing techniques can be well understood with the graph below:
Creating a piece of content that gets shared on Facebook, retweeted on Twitter, and generates backlinks are the topics on which any content marketing team will likely focus on. Creating one content master piece that just pierces through all marketing platforms can be a boon but it is just not as easy as it sounds. Generating one such content that goes viral is not what businesses can do easily. So, how to create a content for marketing? Developing a strategy is what perfect content marketing is all about. Here are a few things about amplifying your content.
The goals of a content marketing strategy are generating traffic, improving rankings, and generating leads. All these goals cannot be achieved at a single go and the idea pretty much unrealistic. In an attempt to achieve all the goals, you may end up publishing something, thereby ditching all your goals. Go with a “one thing at a time approach.” Here are four main types of content that can help you achieve your goals.
Each and every content you create on the basis of the above four categories should help you achieve at least one of your goals and trust me, you can be happy if that is done!
Throughout the blog, I kept saying content, content, and content. You might be wondering what sort of content you should create to convert your leads into customers. How does content marketing generate leads and what sort of content you should deliver? I have got an answer for that too!
Type of contents that lead to conversion | Example |
Contents that influence the prospects buying decision | Content on “Investing in digital marketing, Good or bad?” by a Digital marketing agency |
Content that explains latest industry trends | Content on “Are floral prints in trend?” by an online fashion boutique. |
Tutorials on “How-to” | Content on “How to make your beard soft?”by a company producing grooming items for men |
Case studies and real time examples to influence the prospects and convince them to become your customers. | Inserting “We have successfully implemented our Risk analytics software in XYZ Inc.” in one of the blogs |
Distributing your thoughtfully crafted content is as important as creating it. Here are the various channels through which your content can be distributed. It goes without saying, be mindful of the target audience while choosing the channel of distribution.
Three major metrics for measuring content marketing effectiveness are:
The above are the various pointers that can be used while creating a Content Marketing strategy. At the end of the day nothing can go wrong with useful, engaging, and informative contents.