Content marketing is the process of creating and sharing written and visual content with the aim of gaining new customers.
The ultimate goal of your content marketing strategy should be to increase sales. How your business goes about this is a personal decision, but there are a few methods you can follow to enhance your chances of creating successful content.
Create content that leads to sales
Content remains king – especially when it comes to getting potential customers to your website and interested in something you sell. It’s important to always have an end goal for what each piece of content you create is trying to achieve. For most pieces, you’ll want them to ultimately evoke sales.
To generate content that aligns with your business’s objectives and what your customers want, you need to determine what content types appeal to your target market. For example, if you own a top-of-the-line hotel, professional images and flawless video will most likely appeal to your target market.
Each item of content you develop should lead to a product or service. For instance, you could produce content that:
- Tells your business story, so your prospects can relate to your business.
- Solves customer pain points by targeting consumers who are at certain life stages, or if you’re selling B2B, at various stages of the business cycle.
- Demonstrates the benefits and features of your goods or services.
Engaging content can draw direct purchase decisions and generate high conversion rates. It can even outdo your best salesperson. The challenge is to create interesting and entertaining content that’s valuable to consumers.
Consider the following steps to achieve your content goals:
Outline a specific topic
Determine what topic (or theme) your content will have. The important part is to first settle on a subject. For example, if you have an art and graphic supplies store, you might think about developing a blog that features great works of art made of products you sell in your store.
After your business begins growing, you could even consider creating some case studies of well-known artists who utilize your goods.
If you plan on writing an e-newsletter to your customers and future prospects, it’s a wise idea to design a monthly schedule outlining the general topic for each month.
Make your content a lead magnet
How people buy has changed – consumers have become wiser about filtering out advertising and using tools to block web adverts. They search the web for items of interest and when they find what they want, they look for a way of making contact that could lead to a purchase.
Sales leads will now have a tendency to come through your business’s website, social media platform or blog. Aim to maximize the number of targeted leads your business can get via your content marketing in these channels.
You can try synchronizing your content messages by using automation tools to enhance your digital presence.
An effective content marketing automation package will give your small business an avenue to motivate, capture and nurture leads online. You can set up a schedule of when and where certain content will be posted to your website, blog and social media platforms.
Decide which medium to utilize
The variety of online content continues to grow, giving your business a number of mediums to try and connect with your target consumers. They include:
- Infographics, which are visual representations of data and information.
- Videos and images.
- Guides and articles.
- Case studies of some of your highly appreciative customers.
- White papers and eBooks, which are informative documents that highlight the usefulness of your products or services.
- Interactive content like training videos, quizzes, or participation videos.
Make your content easy to find
There’s no point creating great content if no one sees it. After all, there’s no return on investment in content that your target market isn’t reading.
By making your content as accessible as possible and building a reputation for worthwhile content, you’ll start to develop a standing of being a thought leader in your field.
Decide on the strategy you’ll adopt for putting your newly released content in the hands of your target customers. For example, place it on your home or landing page, your main social media platform and offer links to it through your e-newsletter.
Amplify your content
Advertising your content will help make it easier to find for prospective customers. Your options include advertising through:
- Search engines. Most people don’t go beyond the first page of a search result, so paying for a Google ad could significantly increase the number of people viewing your content.
- E-newsletters. As mentioned above, this can be used as bait to hook in your catch of new sales leads.
- Social media. Whenever you release new content it should also be featured on your social media platforms.
- Print media. Don’t forget print media still has its place, particularly for target markets with older people.
- Other websites, such as strategic partners so you’re linking to each other’s sites.
Create awareness
Reach potential customers at the very top of your sales funnel before they’ve even made a decision on what they need.
The key is to use the right content with the right voice to reach out to your target market and begin growing your online traffic. Educate your prospective customers so you build trust and long-term relationships. Then, reinforce your brand and retain customers by using content marketing post-sale.
