Content marketing has been popular for a few years now, and marketers keep finding new ways to improve how to do it. The billions of searches done daily on Google prove that people are hungry for more information.
How can you get your content in front of them so you can build brand authority and drive sales? Focus on these fundamental ways to improve any content strategy.
Know What Your Audience Wants
A frequent content marketing failure is to write content that isn’t relevant to your audience. It can be hard to see things from your audience’s perspective. A representative from Alcolock, an ignition interlock services company, explains:
“When you’re deep in your niche, you can lose sight of what your audience really wants to know. We might be interested in the technology, but our audience wants to know its applications more than the details.”
Improve Your Promotion Tactics
Long gone are the days when businesses can post content up on their site and expect people to find it. There are over one 1.6 billion web sites, each with multiple pages. Search engines do a great job of sorting through all that data, but it’s not enough if you want to drive people to your content.
Too many businesses think that content alone is enough. You also have to market that content. Social media marketing, email marketing, and other digital promotional tactics can spread your content to a broad audience and the right audience.
Measure Your Performance Better
Measuring the ROI of a content marketing campaign is hard. A visitor may bounce through many pieces before they finally convert. Fortunately, there are a lot of tools to measure how effective a content marketing campaign is going and how your leads are interacting with that content.
If you’re still playing a guessing game about your content or only using the number of visits as a metric for how well a piece of content is performing, it’s time to upgrade your metrics. Every content piece needs to pull its weight toward your business goals. Accurate metrics help you confirm that you’re writing pieces that resonate and that you’re promoting them well enough that your audience finds them.
Drive the Conversation
Finally, stop seeing your content as “bait” to get people to interact with your website. All too often, your readers will eat the bait and won’t go further into your funnel. That may be fine if you want brand awareness, but it won’t drive sales.
Give your readers ways to further interact with your brand. Start a conversation through things like replying to their comments and pointing them to other pieces of content on your site that relate to the topic. Encourage feedback. That’s how you start to know what your audience likes.
Content marketing takes work because you have to forge connections with your audience. These take time, but if you do it right, you can raise the lifetime value of each visitor.
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