If digital marketing is the fire that drives a business, then the content is the fuel that drives digital marketing. From brand awareness, brand authority, brand loyalty, online presence, backlinks to the generation of traffic – everything revolves around content. It creates the interaction point between your online business and your audience. As such, content is an important part of your digital marketing strategy.
In the recent past, online businesses have realized the importance of content to their success. Melbourne SEO SEORUS states that according to a study conducted in 2018, 91% of B2B marketers use content marketing to interact with their customers.The same study also revealed that 86% of B2C marketers think content marketing is a key strategy.
Just one major problem – many marketers do not know how to market through content. Statistics show that 63% of businesses do not have a documented content strategy. Out of 63%, – 38 % had a content marketing strategy only that it was not documented. 19% did not have a strategy but were planning on having one in a year. And only 6% did not have a strategy and had no plan to document one in the 12 months that followed.
Going by these stats, there is a lot of content marketing going on but the outcome is not satisfying. The content supplied is more than what people can consume and businesses are losing a lot of money as a result. As such, there is a need for businesses to come up with new ways to make the best out of their content.
In this article, you will learn how to maximize content and increase the Return On Investment (ROI) on your online business.
- Match Your Content Marketing to Your Goals
The fact is, if you are spending your money, time, and effort into content marketing, you want results. Whether you want to get more leads, traffic, or more subscribers you are not using content because you want it. Content is only a means to an end.
Your content marketing should be able to deliver the outcome you desire. For that to happen, you must first match your content marketing to your overall business marketing goals. After that, you should work your way back to see how your content marketing can influence the customer journey.
- Create a Content Marketing Strategy
Many people think that content strategy is just about the number of blogs you publish weekly, optimizing them, and sharing on different social media platforms. Maybe this would have worked a few years back.
Today, we are at a whole new level of content marketing. You will need to conduct thorough research for you to create a bigger and better strategy. Some of the things you need to know include:- the what and the why you are producing. You also need to know the expected ROI from your content as a whole and the individual marketing channels.
Above everything, you need to look at all your marketing channels as a whole. Understand what their targets are and ensure that they are all aligned with each other. Also, determine what their individual content needs are for you to create a solid strategy.
- Learn from Past Experiences
While you can anticipate what performed well, you need to get a detailed report from your sales team. You need to understand what the individual team members feel about what worked and what did not work in the past. You can use these insights for your decision making in the future. The most important thing here is to have the information you can trust.
- Learn from Your Competitors
There is a notion in businesses that we are all different from each other. That we are unique in our own way and that we are better than our competitors. While there is some truth to this, there is always something that you can learn from your competitors. Something as small as a review or formats combined with information from research tools can provide great insights about the competitors.
The idea is to avoid repeating mistakes that have already been made in the past by your competitors. Additionally, you can take what is working to use it to your advantage.
- Take advantage of internal Expertise
Creating content can be costly especially if you have to outsource your resources. However, if you have internal experts you can reduce the costs involved significantly. These experts place a great wealth of information at your disposal. The challenge is how to get this knowledge and transform it into valuable content.
These experts do not necessarily have to be marketers and do not need to have a clue about content marketing. But they can be of great value to your content building process. Some of the ways you can use to extract information from them are:
- Interviewing them
- Getting points from them
- Allowing them to contribute to your initial draft
- Letting them create an initial draft
Using proper guidance and process you can leverage your internal experts and save the business both internal and external costs.
- Leverage the Experts
If you are spending your hard-earned money, it is only fair if you spend it wisely. In the long-run, it is more efficient to hire an expert such as SEO Adelaide who knows exactly what they are doing. Relying on a newbie or trying to do it by yourself can be costly if you are not an expert.
One of the advantages of using experts is that they are more efficient due to their huge access to resources. Also, you can hold these experts accountable for the outcome they get in your content marketing campaigns. If you can find a worthy expert, it is in your best interest to retain them.
- Create a Resource Hub on Your Website
Creating loads of quality content is good for your online business. It will build your brand’s online presence, awareness, authority, generate more traffic to your website, create value to your users, and more. But it needs to be findable to your users for it to achieve all that. A resource hub can help make your content findable.
A resource hub also “a resource center” is the part on your website through which one can access all of your content. It is organized in such a way that one can easily find and navigate through all the content on your website. By creating a resource hub, you encourage users to discover your content naturally. This will ensure you get the best possible outcome you can get from your content.
- Repurpose Your Content
When you invest in content, you should get the best possible outcome you can get from it. Using the same content in different ways is the best way to do so. For instance, you can use parts of an existing blog to create short and captivating Facebook posts.
If you have to create new content every time you want to market, you will use a lot of time, effort, and money. Re-using content on the other hand is cost-effective and saves both time and effort used to create new content. You can repurpose your content by:
- Creating individual topics from different sections of a single article by adding more information to these sections.
- Packaging existing content into several different formats. For example, you can come up with creative images, videos, or create slides from an existing blog.
- Using your resource hub to write a book.
- Track Your Content’s Performance
Although you can put a perfect strategy in place and do everything right – not everything will happen exactly as expected.
And Even though it is easy to tell how things performed together as a whole, it’s important to determine the performance of each content individually. It is the only way to be sure of what worked and what didn’t. This will help you improve your overall strategy by improving the individual parts that are lagging and ditching what is not working at all.
There are different metrics that you can use to measure your content’s performance. These are site traffic, on-site time, conversions, returning visitors among others.
Use the different analytic tools available for both free and premium packages to measure performance on your content.
Wrapping Up
As we focus on content to market our online businesses, we need to realize that a lot has changed. As a result, we need to change our ways of doing things to get the desired results.
Whatever the measures you take, you should be able to integrate the individual content parts to work as a whole. The three things you should focus on when creating your content strategy are:
- Creating content that can grab your user’s attention and give them a memorable experience.
- Distributing your content in such a way that it can reach your target audience.
- Getting the true outcome from content that you publish.
If we can be proactive in all these, then we can be sure to save money, improve our efficiency, and even perform better as a plus.
