In a rapidly evolving digital age, people all over the world are exposed to more content in a day than they could ever possibly process. Content marketing continues to take over, compelling brands to be creative and more efficient about how they get information out to their target audiences. What makes a brand stand out among the rest? The production of content that adds value to their customers, which includes valuable information that is helpful to them now.
Content marketing is revolutionizing digital campaigns because of its huge potential to increase your business’ brand awareness and growth. The numbers show that content marketing is one of the most effective ways to influence consumers’ decisions and behavior.
In the U.S., 61% of online consumers decided to buy a product or service after reading recommendations from blogs, according to data from the Content Marketing Institute. 74% of companies surveyed by Curata, meanwhile, attributed their increased leads, both in quality and quantity, to content marketing.
The effectiveness of your content marketing strategy has a huge impact that can make or break your business. High-quality content is a powerful tool that your business can use to earn the trust of your audience, build your brand, generate site traffic and qualified leads, and more. But for content marketing to work, it has to be purposive.
It’s not so much about the sheer volume of content you’re producing. When you write content just for the sake of creating content, there’s a good chance you may not even be reaching your target audience. Random content, short blog posts, and irrelevant news will not secure audience engagement. You’ll need to customize your content strategies, so you can work towards achieving specific business development priorities and goals.
Why Is Goal-Oriented Content Important?
A good strategy is an essential part of the game. Without a solid plan in place, your business is unlikely to achieve the desired marketing results. Early on, your company must assess and identify primary goals and design a successful content strategy to meet those objectives.
Goal-oriented content marketing is what makes you connect with people who have problems that your brand can help solve. You’ll need to have the target audience in mind when you think of a custom content plan. This entails creating detailed buyer personas that identify your target clients, their needs and issues, and how they consume content. With goal-oriented marketing, you get a considerable level of certainty that you’ll find leads who genuinely want to use your products or services.
Tracking your progress and measuring marketing results are also simpler and easier when you know exactly how you want your content marketing to work for you. To win over clients, you’ll need to optimize your content and increase your site rankings so that consumers get the sense that you’re a thought leader in your industry. Secure your conversions by having a clear and concise call to action that encourages your audience to take the next step.
The techniques you will use to build your content, and the channels by which you will distribute them, will all depend on the goals of your content marketing strategy. Content marketing essentially helps you achieve three different goals: engage audiences, drive traffic to your site, and increase conversions.
Content for Links
In developing your content marketing strategy, you have to consider the kind of content that generates the most links for your business. Link-worthy content matters because it strengthens your SEO, captures the attention of your readers, raises awareness for your brand, and makes influencers want to participate and get involved.
Google and other search engines heavily weigh links and use them to boost your site’s organic search ranking. To stay ahead of the competition, you’ll need to do more than just get the most links to your content. What you need to focus on is earning top-notch links that improve your search engine rank.
Generally, content that most people would want to link to are those that they find very useful. It’s interesting information that can either teach them something new, entertain them and trigger different kinds of emotions, or move them to act.
Moz and BuzzSumo analyzed more than a million pieces of content to find out the relationship between shares and links and learn more about the types of content that are most likely to get earned links. The study reveals that much more must be done to amplify content, as 75% of their randomly sampled articles got zero links.
The study also suggests that long-form content, with about 2,250 to 2,500 words, get higher chances of receiving more links than shorter pieces of content. However, 85% of published content that was analyzed is less than 1,000 words, representing a huge missed opportunity for companies.
How can you best earn links and drive traffic to your content? Stand out as a thought leader with unique, engaging content. Original, authoritative content that’s longer than 1,000 words catches the attention of your target market because it offers accurate and useful content. You’ll be able to establish your company as an authority figure in your industry.
Focus on list posts, why posts, and how-to posts since they get more links than other content formats. Keep in mind that 91% of smartphone users look for information and guidance on how to complete specific tasks, according to Google. Meanwhile, on YouTube, “how to” searches are growing as much as 70% every year.
Research-backed content is a cost-effective way to earn some great links. Data-driven content marketing campaigns challenge you to create stories by giving a fresh take on data collected from other sources. Including infographics, charts and graphs, and other engaging imagery and videos to back the data-driven content also helps to create a linkable asset.
You’ll need to spend as much time promoting your content as you did creating it. Use a variety of platforms to distribute your content and reach out to influencers who can help you reach your target demographics.
Content for Engagement
When done right, content marketing can effectively engage your audiences and elevate your brand above thousands of marketing messages. Creating engaging content on a regular basis can be tough, but it’s all worth it. Even if you create a gazillion content, if it’s not the high-quality type that your target audience will be willing to read, or pay for, then all your efforts would be for naught.
One of the best ways to create content that will effectively push your target markets to act is by appealing to their emotions. Something that has personality, value, and substance will definitely resonate with your audience. More often than not, people get hooked on great stories. Emotional triggers can help you build a strong connection with your target demographic because it enables you to address their needs and pain points and provide reliable solutions.
Authenticity is also an essential element that makes content engaging. Maintaining brand voice is important, but ultimately, engaging content is first and foremost about the reader. Content marketing does provide value to you and your bottom line, but only when you create that transformation that converts your readers into leads or sales.
Delivering on your target audience’s needs and wants—not your own—can make your content more engaging. Your content should embody your unique voice, one that shows how you and your audiences would talk. Research about the latest trends that your audiences are following and churn out content based on those. Be sure to take advantage of opportunities before the trends fade so you can stay ahead of the competition.
Unique and attention-grabbing titles, headlines, and subheadings do the trick and draw your target markets to your content. Be diligent with your research and use terms and keywords in your titles with descriptions that people will actually seek. Diversify your content portfolio and spice it up with infographics, videos, photos, and online quizzes and games. This way, you can find out which types will drive the most engagement from your target markets.
Ensure that when your audiences read a piece of your content, they would not leave with an impression that you’re just trying to sell. Engaging content should delight your audience by offering them something that can satisfy their curiosity and needs. The insights and lessons they gain from reading your engaging content will leave them wanting more. Take it to the next level by giving them freebies that allow them to learn more about your products and services.
Content for Conversions
Generating more leads and conversions from content marketing requires a long-term strategy. While content marketing cannot drive immediate results, it can be optimized so that it has the highest potential to drive user action. Content marketing must be built and nurtured over time. It also must be designed with conversion potential in mind.
Taking a brand-first approach to content marketing can have a significant impact on your sales. With a clear brand strategy in place, you can attract targeted leads who are engaged and entertained. Use your content to establish your company as an industry authority and shine a spotlight on your brand’s expertise.
You can gain the trust of your consumers by consistently creating high-quality content that provides them with real value. Including relevant, clear, and catchy calls-to-action in all your content will strengthen its ability to convert its audience. Take advantage of opportunities to effectively tell the user what they can do next.
Take the time to truly understand your target audience and ask the right questions so you can get insights on what they want and need. Market research will also give you access to your consumers’ hidden wants—those emotional motivators and specific values that influence their decisions and behavior.
Placing an emphasis on storytelling and optimizing your copy can generate the kind of brand recall that drives your conversions. Words on your website copy, product copy, messaging, button texts, headlines, and more have the power to convince audiences to browse deeper, or it can disappoint and cause them to look elsewhere.
Your content can be high performing if it helps audiences clearly understand the features and benefits that they can get from your product or service. Using stunning visual elements to emphasize some points instead of focusing purely on text can help grab your audience’s attention and compel them to dig deeper and get more details.
What better way to do persuasive content than to drum up testimonials from customers who have benefitted from your brand. When executed correctly, testimonials can do wonders for your content marketing campaigns by generating buzz that can lead to conversions.
Testimonials can help your brand build personal connections with its target audience if it drives your message home with a compelling and inspiring story. Focus more on quality rather than quantity One compelling video of a real consumer telling the story of how the brand has made his or her life better is far more effective than many short snippets that don’t say much of anything.
Your Content Marketing Goals Matter
By having clear intentions about why you are creating content and who it’s for, you can ensure that the resulting pieces are highly useful and creative. Build your content around your business objectives and use them to create a customized and efficient pathway for your target audience.
Goal-oriented content marketing primarily leads to driving traffic to your brand, getting your audiences engaged, and converting them into leads, sales, and brand advocates. You can achieve these goals by identifying the challenges your customers are facing and providing content that can help them resolve the challenges. Your content can effectively show your brand as a champion that understands their wants and needs, while providing solutions to address them.
Always keep in mind that each piece of content must have a specific goal and a specific audience that makes sense of that goal. Identifying your objectives and audience will help you determine the content types that will move that audience to the desired outcome. A solid goal-oriented content strategy will enable you to deliver the right message at the right time with greater frequency.
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