When building an inbound marketing strategy – fantastic, target audience-specific content is going to be the driver of your marketing communications, the reason your audience comes to your website and hold the call to actions that guide your audience towards purchasing. Your content marketing strategy directs any and all media that your company creates or owns, creates a voice that shapes your consumer’s perception of your brand and determines in part how successfully your company will engage and retain loyal customers. Content marketing is also is a way for a company to create reliable and effective sources for lead generation and website traffic.
Let’s say, for example, that your company only sells their stock online and delivers to its customers directly. Your company then begins to post blog articles about the newest trends in men’s fashion that result in consumer interest and therefore increased traffic to your website. Call to actions would then be placed in the article to capture audience contact information to nurture them towards purchase once they have left the website. A proper content marketing strategy creates different content for different target audience interests, then links your products in relevant ways into the writing or offers a lead magnet. Content strategy is the thing that generates qualified leads, incites customer conversation and turns those leads into customers for life.
Setting goals and objectives for why you’re creating your content marketing strategy is vital to understanding if your strategy was successful. What’s your aim for developing a content marketing plan? Why do you want to produce content and create a content marketing plan? Know your goals before you begin planning, and you’ll have an easier time determining what’s best for your strategy.
Content helps with SEO and Google rankings
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) used be having the right keywords and then making sure those keywords appeared in your content. This has changed to the point where google only pushes content up in the rankings when that content focuses on a niche topic.
For example, let’s take the clothing company we mentioned earlier. They can’t just write a blog broadly on the topic of men’s fashion. They would need to get specific, like what fabrics are the best, where can you find those fabrics, how do you keep those fabrics maintained for a longer time, possibly even adding video and links to other blogs that also touch on this specific subject. To get high ranking content, you need to be as thorough as possible with your content.
Great content has an optimised title tag and meta description. Inbound marketing strategy, therefore your content marketing strategy, is about generating highly qualified leads that lead to more purchases and re-purchases. So optimising your content so that it has a title tag and meta description that is easy to read, flows in a sentence and is appeals to the person searching for the content.
The success of your inbound marketing strategy is dependent on how your content plugs the gaps in anyone’s knowledge reading through your content. This builds trust with your potential customer and then they will keep coming back to your content to gain further knowledge.
Increasing web traffic and conversions
One of the core goals of content marketing is to attract and retain an audience. And while we may put some of our content out on the web and social media, smart marketers know you ultimately want to be driving people back to your site.
So content marketing is, in part, an exercise in getting people to come back to your site.
That’s why we want to get people’s’ email addresses, to nurture them towards a purchase and once they have purchased, we want to send them customised content that leads to repurchase. Because we don’t want them to come across our content once, then never come back again. One of the core jobs of our content is to lure them back.
Your content should lead customers through a cycle of purchasing your content – but should also have the goal of enriching, educating and entertaining your audience. Your aim is to be a qualified thought leader that has a large following just for the information you publish. First win their adventurous, curious hearts with content that revolves around their interests and passions, then win their wallets and loyalty.
SEO optimised content will help your website show up when people search for the keyword you have used in your writing increasing the number of customers being driven to your pages and the amount of customers who are being helped by your brand.
More to the point, customers very infrequently purchase from a business when they first visit a website. This is why content marketing is great for increasing conversions, it drives customers back to your website regularly, and once a website visitor has been converted into a lead they are nurtured into purchasing.
Great content marketing also gives your brand a voice to converse with already existing customers and getting an existing customer to repurchase is statistically four times easier and more economical than getting a new customer to purchase.
Limitless content
A good content marketing strategy is in fact limited by very little – you can communicate a number of subjects and connect with your audience in whichever they require most – as long as that way also leads to customers converting.
You should create content that educates the audience about your product and the issues surround your product. Nivea once created an advertising campaign in a magazine for their sunblock. Their target audience was mother’s in South America that frequent beaches often and have children that they take with. Now, Nivea’s brand essence is to protect your body and keep it healthy, but their extended brand essence is to protect the customers family and keep them healthy and safe.
So, what did they do? Create and magazine spread that has a free sachet of sunblock? No, well yes and no. They included a plastic watch that Mothers could put on their children’s arms, that was water proof, and that had a chip on it so the Mothers could download the Nivea app and track exactly where their kids were on the beach so they would never get lost. That shows you how far Nivea goes to promote a brand perception of protecting the family. It’s an experience.
The point of this story is to show you that content and the communication tools you have at hand are incredibly powerful not only for communicating and selling products, but also for creating a brand experience that elevates your consumers perception of your brand.
Do you sell bread at a shop?
Maybe you have a article series that teaches customers how to make different pesto’s and spreads in under 10 minutes.
What does that have to do with the bread you sell? Nothing, but it can be used on your bread and apart of a consumer lifestyle that integrates perfectly with the lifestyle your brand essence promotes.
Strategic SEO content is a predicate, but so is content that is amazing, fun and entertaining. This content makes customers fall in love with your brand and increases true loyalty and repurchase.
