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content strategy

In today’s crowded and increasingly digital marketing landscape, you need a strong content strategy in order to reach your audience.

Here’s why:

Your content strategy is what makes your brand visible on search engines. It helps the right customers find you at the right time and provides the best possible user experience once they’re on your website.

In this guide, we’ll cover the specific steps you should take to develop your content strategy, plus real-world content strategy examples from brands who are doing it right.

Let’s get started!

Quick Takeaways

  • A content strategy is a holistic approach to delivering information to customers. It is different from content marketing, which is the execution of your strategy.
  • Clearly-defined goals and performance metrics are foundational components of your content strategy. They keep your strategy focused and help you measure its success.
  • Buyer personas are a valuable tool for defining your target audience prior to launching your content strategy.
  • Strong keyword research is essential to successful SEO for your content strategy.
  • Amplifying your content on your own platforms and making it shareable for users will increase your brand visibility and reach.

Shushing Face on Noto Color Emoji, Animated 14.0 PS – I put together these 10 tips for optimizing your content marketing. Watch Now!

What is a content strategy and why is it important?

A content strategy is a holistic approach to delivering the information your customers need across channels and at every stage of the buyer journey. It makes content a strategic asset for your company — one you can leverage to drive traffic, leads, engagement, sales, and other business objectives.

As you can see below, companies can choose from a wide range of content to deliver at each phase of the buyer journey. Potential customers at each stage have different needs and require different kinds of information, meaning companies must be intentional about what, how, and when they deliver the various content they create. Having a defined content strategy is critical to this effort and one of the surest ways to maximize content ROI.

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Content strategy vs. content marketing

It’s important to note that a content strategy is not the same as content marketing.

Think of it this way: your content strategy defines the overall mindset, culture, and style for communicating with your customers through content. Content marketing covers the execution of that strategy — your techniques, tools, channels, and of course actual content.

This distinction is crucial. Any company can publish content with fairly minimal effort. But to create consistent, high-value, relevant content that both helps your customers and drives your larger business goals is a much more complex undertaking. This is demonstrated in a startling statistic from SEMRush that found that while 91% of companies use content marketing, only 9% would rate the results of their performance as excellent.

So where’s the missing link? I’d venture to guess that almost all of those companies feeling dissatisfied with their content’s performance are missing a strong content strategy behind it. But you don’t have to be one of them. Let’s dive into how you can develop a content strategy that connects the actual content you create with the goals you want to accomplish for your business.

10 steps to a killer content strategy for your brand

Set your goals

The first critical step to a content strategy that will deliver is to set well-defined goals that can guide your strategy and help you measure its ultimate success. I recommend using the SMART goal framework, which helps you set goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. Setting clear goals and knowing what you want to achieve better positions you to outline the rest of your content strategy.

SMART analysis

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Define buyer personas

Buyer personas are representations of your customers that help you determine needs, pain points, motivations, and behavior. Ultimately, they should help you understand what your customers are trying to accomplish and how your offerings can help them do it. That’s why you should always keep your personas focused on actionability rather than arbitrary traits.

When you’re developing personas, aim to define:

  • Content your target customers use
  • Topics they are interested in
  • Types or formats of content they prefer
  • Channels they use
  • Stage of the buyer journey
  • Keywords they use to search and
  • Questions they ask

These insights can help inform the content pillars you should focus on (more on that next), what topics to cover, and what types of content will best engage your audience.

Determine content pillars and types

Content pillars are the main categories from which all your content ideas originate. Think of them as the “buckets” or “themes” under which all of your content can be organized. They’re central to your content strategy because they determine what matters to your audience and serve as a guide for your creators, keeping them focused on creating pieces that align with your larger goals.

To really use pillars to drive results, you should keep them somewhat broad, allowing you to come up with a range of topics and content ideas to fall under them. Tag every piece of content you create under the appropriate pillar(s) so that you have visibility into the volume and types of content being created for each. Finally, stick with your content pillars for an extended period of time to give your content a chance to drive SEO results.

Establish your brand voice

Your brand voice defines the overall personality you put forth when you communicate with customers. It’s an important component of how brands make connections with their audience and plays a central role in the customer experience. Your brand voice, like your pillars, also serves as a guide for content creators and ensures your content is an accurate reflection of your company.

To develop a strong brand voice, you’ll want to set parameters around language and tone. For example, should your blog posts be casual and conversational or formal and strictly informative? Which words or phrases should be used consistently to refer to specific products or buyers and which should always be avoided (like cliches or outdated terms)?

It’s a good idea to put together a documented guide with dos and don’ts around brand voice to help content creators stay consistent and on the mark.

Conduct keyword research and develop your SEO strategy

Did you know that 93% of all online experiences start with a search engine? If you don’t rank on search engine results pages (SERPs) for keywords and phrases that your customers are searching for, you’re essentially invisible to your audience.

One of the keys to ranking on SERPs is effective keyword research. You can conduct it using tools like the Keyword Magic Tool from Semrush. Once you have keyword ideas, you can develop your SEO strategy by aligning keywords with the buyer funnel and your content pillars. These steps ensure your content gets to the right customers at the right time.

For more on how to conduct keyword research with the SEMRush tool, watch a quick overview on each below:

Brainstorm content ideas

This is the fun part! Now that you’ve outlined buyer personas, content pillars, and brand voice and conducted keyword research, you have the information you need to begin coming up with your content ideas. This means outlining topics, titles, and types of content you’ll create to engage your audience.

Think creatively about how to communicate each of your topic ideas. For example, a how-to for using one of your products might be best published as a video, while a top ten list of resources on a particular topic might be better as a listicle blog post.

The Content Marketing Institute recently created this helpful content brainstorming guide with techniques to help you feel inspired and get more creative with your teams.

Create a content calendar

Your content calendar is a critical part of the execution plan for your content strategy. It determines how and when you’ll publish your content and keeps you on track and accountable. Check out our previous article on content calendars and templates for more on how to create one, or download our own template (linked here and shown below) to get started now!

Winking Face PS – Check out our weekly blog content service to grow your website traffic and leads!

Outline key metrics

How will you determine if your content strategy is a success? First and foremost, you’ll need to outline which key metrics you’ll measure. Many of these metrics will come from your original SMART goals, but now that the rest of your content strategy has been developed, you can get even more specific.

The five most important key metrics I recommend using to assess content performance are:

  • Traffic – Traffic is the one metric you must measure. If no one is landing on your website, no one is reading your content, and your strategy will not be successful.
  • Conversions – Conversions measure the rate at which your web visitors are taking action (such as subscribing to your newsletter or making an ecommerce purchase) after interacting with your content.
  • Engagement – You can track engagement by looking at data points such as time spent on your site and number of pages visited per session
  • SEO Performance – Track SERP rankings and how they are changing over time.
  • Authority – High authority drives better SEO and more traffic. Authority is not quite as cut-and-dry as the other metrics, but you can use this guide from Moz to help you determine yours.

Create awesome content

Content creation is no small undertaking, and publishing consistently is one of the most important drivers of content marketing success. Part of developing a strong content strategy is thinking thoroughly and realistically about who is going to create and publish your content.

Your two primary options are to create content internally or to outsource to an agency. Both have pros and cons, but I will say this: if you don’t have an internal team that is experienced with creating optimized content and has the bandwidth to do it, outsourcing is almost certainly your best option.

The biggest concerns companies typically have about outsourcing content are cost and loss of control over content, so let’s address those here.

There’s no denying that outsourcing comes with costs. But if you don’t already have an established content team, outsourcing is actually more cost-effective than building a team internally. When you outsource, you don’t have to worry about costs like salaries, benefits, or office space. You don’t have to worry about the time or additional human resources needed to manage a new team.

Outsourcing also allows your existing team to focus more on strategic work related to your core business initiatives.

As for control over your content, know this: a good content marketing agency will take time to get to know you, your goals, your brand voice, and much more. They will have ways to maintain ongoing communication with you built into their processes that allows you to see and provide feedback on all of your brand’s new content.

Explore outsourcing more in our article about the 11 Benefits of Outsourcing Content Creation.

Amplify your content

This one’s a no brainer! Don’t just publish content and hope it does well on it’s own. Amplify your content by making it as shareable as possible and sharing it yourself in other places. Share your content on social media, include it in newsletters and emails, and ask employees to share content, too! In short: the more your content is shared, the more it’s seen, and the higher your ROI on it will be.

Fire on Noto Color Emoji, Animated 14.0PS – Check out our latest case study that shows how we helped one company double their leads!

Content strategy examples to inspire you!

While we don’t have access to other brands’ internal documents and strategy development meetings, we can see great strategy when it’s reflected in content. To help you get inspired, check out these 7 real-world examples of high-quality content strategy execution.

Hubspot’s inbound marketing strategy

When Hubspot launched in the early 2000s, founders Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah were pioneers of inbound marketing with online content. Realizing that traditional sales methods were becoming less effective as people were inundated with more media and information, they quickly began building a blog covering topics relevant to their customer base.

Over time, they established strong brand authority and online presence for a wide range of marketing topics. Today marketing professionals know them as a go-to resource for inbound and content marketing information. Their success lies heavily in their ability to pinpoint customer needs and create high-volume, high-quality content — blogs, videos, infographics, original research and more — that addresses those needs.

Spend a few minutes scrolling through their blog and other content libraries and it’s clear how the customer is at the center of everything they create. You can see it, too, in Hubspot’s customer code — a guide by which the entire company operates. Dharmesh Shah’s deep dives into how you can grow your brand using their customer code are valuable reads.

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Blendtec’s “Will it Blend?” videos

Blendtec’s marketing team launched their “Will it Blend?” video series in 2007. It featured founder Tom Dickson blending extremely non-blendable items to show just how powerful their product was. The series was a hit — it increased their sales by 1000% and now has hundreds of millions of views.

The reason I like it as a content strategy example is for their clear brand voice in the videos. Blendtec decided that selling a practical household product didn’t need to be boring. They created a relatable, funny brand voice that connected with customers and made their brand recognizable to consumers.

John Deere’s The Furrow publication

Did content marketing exist in the 1800s? If you read original issues of John Deere’s ‘The Furrow’ magazine, the answer is a clear yes. John Deere has been publishing The Furrow for well over a century — since 1895 — to help farmers solve common problems they encounter. John Deere products are the secondary message, although they are woven into stories and articles to demonstrate how they can make farmers’ lives better and easier.

A lot has obviously changed since 1895. But the team at John Deere has smartly stuck to the content strategy roots established by The Furrow. It is still a premiere brand for farming equipment known for their long-standing focus on customer needs first, brand second.

As for The Furrow itself? More than 500,000 customers still receive it every year.

The lesson here: when potential customers recognize you as a thought leader in your industry, a brand they can turn to for important information, they’ll also turn to you when it comes time to make a purchase.

American Express’s OPEN Forum

American Express has always shared their commitment to supporting small business customers. Their OPEN forum has been one of the smartest ways they do it. OPEN forum aims to be a hub of thought leadership that small business owners can utilize to grow their businesses. It features content around finances, marketing, management and other topics important to small business owners. The catch? The content comes from other American Express customers, not the brand itself.

Hosting a place where small business owners can share ideas and learn from peers has proven valuable to their customers. Today, the OPEN forum is a core part of their content strategy. It has helped build community among customers and allowed American Express to create content on a larger scale.

Here’s a recent OPEN Forum feature from Inc. Magazine columnist Norm Brodsky and serial entrepreneur Brian Hecht on how to write business plans:

Moz’s Whiteboard Friday series

Moz’s Whiteboard Friday series is another example of a brand providing real value by covering topics that address customer needs and challenges. The Whiteboard Friday series, started by Moz founder Rand Fishkin, launched when Moz itself was a very young company. Rand used the videos to address common and complex industry topics in a visual, engaging way.

The series quickly gained momentum. The content was valuable and SaaS professionals responded, subscribing to their channel in droves. Rand is no longer with Moz today, but the series still publishes every Friday. It’s now one of the longest-running B2B video series.

Check out this Whiteboard Friday episode on optimizing competitors’ branded keywords:

Patagonia’s focus on shareability

Remember we said how important it is to amplify your content? Well, the team at outdoor apparel and gear brand Patagonia are pros. They create highly shareable content that’s lean on the hard sell and heavy on meaning. Their messages focus what their customers care about: sustainability, helping the environment, and knowing your impact as a consumer.

Ads like the one below — part of Patagonia’s now-famous “Don’t Buy this Jacket” ad in the New York Times  — was also published in blog articles and on social media platforms, making it easy to share and thus spreading awareness and increasing Patagonia’s reputation as an authority on sustainable products and purchases.

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Patagonia also operates several targeted blogs on platforms like Tumblr, like their Worn Wear blog, where customers share their own stories of wearing their Patagonia gear. Crowdsourcing this kind of content on platforms where sharing is the primary activity? It’s about as smart a content strategy as you can get. It has high shareability, brand presence on the platforms where their customers already are, and built-in social proof with every new post.

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Red Bull’s experiential content

The world knows Red Bull today as a content marketing guru brand, and for good reason. Their brand personality explodes with every piece of content they create, and they utilize many different content types across channels.

The key to Red Bull’s content marketing success is their focus on selling an experience. They showcase an entire Red Bull culture rather than just talking about their products themselves. People now associate the Red Bull brand directly with high-adrenaline, extreme sports. They have capitalized on this niche to build a loyal customer base with their content.

A quick look at their YouTube video channel homepage (which has more than 10 million subscribers!) shows exactly who their target audience is. That’s effective target marketing!

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Ready to build a content strategy that works?

Start with the resources you have. Create a strategy and commit to a high level of quality and a focused brand message. Keep growing your content strategy as you learn more about your customers. Then, engage with them and build the bridge between your brand and the people your business exists for.

Need help getting started? Check out our SEO Blog Writing Services or schedule a free consultation today!

The post How to Develop a Content Strategy (with Examples) appeared first on Marketing Insider Group.

man lifting weights to show boosting web traffic

Ask any marketer what they want for their website and they’ll likely tell you more traffic and more leads. Because you need more traffic in order to gain leads, we’re going to focus here on how you can use content marketing to boost your web traffic.

I know what you’re thinking: “everyone is creating more content. How do I compete? How do you actually grow your web traffic in this competitive world?

There are lots of strategies out there for bringing in visitors, including completely content marketing growth hacks we swear by. We suggest you test out as many of them as possible. Some strategies and channels work better than others depending on audience, brand niche, area of expertise, or competition in your space. It’s up to you to know your brand and what aligns best with your content strategy.

We’ve grown our own web traffic from nothing to more than 1 million visitors per year:

And we’ve done it without spending on paid traffic or full-time social media staff.

So here, I’m gonna share with you some of the ways we use to boost our traffic, as well as every single client website. These are proven strategies to increase web traffic. Let’s take a look!

21 Ways to Increase Your Website Traffic

Research Topics for Blog Articles

We use topic modeling to understand what keywords our audience is using and what topics are related to the topics we care most about. This forces us to think about our audience first. We then create a content calendar filled with a whole year’s worth of content ideas.

The trick here is to make sure you don’t think too much about whether the topic fits your product profile. If it’s important to your buyer, it’s a great way to boost traffic from people that are interested in the same things your buyers are.

Publish what they want so you can introduce them to your brand. Topic modeling allows you to identify buyer interest areas that your natural desire to want to promote your products will not allow you to conceive. Start publishing on these topics and you will attract more audience to your website.

topic modeling example

Focus on The Right Keywords for your Blog

We use a combination of high-volume, high purchase intent, long tail, and competitive gap keywords to focus our content creation activities on. When you create content that balances all stages of the buyer journey, you are more likely to capture  buyers at any stage of the buyer journey.

You are also more likely to touch more buyers within an account and with multiple “touches” during their buyer journey.

Bottom line is that the brand that serves effective content at every stage of the buyer journey will win more new buyers.

picking keywords example

Create Killer Blog Headlines

Did you know that 8 out of 10 visitors to your website read your headline only? That means only 20% of your web visitors are actually getting to the content you worked so hard to craft for them! Great headlines are the key to fighting back against this statistic.

This applies to every one of your content promotion strategies: social media ads, SEO rankings, sharing content in email newsletters — you name it. Regardless of the channel you’re using, irresistible headlines that grab attention and leave your audience wanting more are essential for getting them to read your actual content.

We use brainstorming to suggest 50-100 or more headlines to our clients and then ask the  to rank them quickly based on gut feel. We find this raises the cream of the best headlines to the top.

Publish Blog Posts 2-4 Times Per Week

In our blog frequency research, we found that 2-4 blog posts per week is the best way to increase traffic and leads.

blog post frequency chart

In fact, we have found that 2-4 times per week is the special moment where the highest rate of growth occurs. How much? If you want to boost your website traffic by 2-4x, then publish 2-3 times per week.

We also found that there is really no diminishing return. The more you publish, the more traffic and leads you will get! So if you haven’t started blogging, you really need to start today. There are about a million reasons why we think you should be publishing a blog on your website, so we’ll pick a few of the most important.

Today, 93% of online experiences start with search engines. Your blog is the main source of SEO content. Without one, you’re missing the biggest opportunity out there to increase web traffic. Your blog establishes your brand personality and expertise in your industry. It’s more affordable than any paid advertising tactic and much more effective.

Finally, your blog content is where many of your web visitors will find the most value. If you’re covering topics they care about, they’re more likely to stick around on your page. You then have opportunities to convert them to leads with tactics like lead magnets and strong CTAs.

If you aren’t creating customer-focused content (like a publisher) on your website, then we can not be friends. #SorryNotSorry

Repurpose or Update Old Blog Content

Repurposing your older blog content is one of the most efficient ways to give your website traffic a boost. Start by looking for articles that used to perform well but whose traffic has come down. Then update them with newer information, stats, add some opinions (this article was originally published in 2015!)

Look for content that used to rank but has become out of date. Look at any articles with years in them and update those as well. My team has spent the last 3 months doing this to any articles with the years 2020, 2021 and 2022 in them. We have found a 20% uplift when we update these older posts!

Bar graph showing boost in organic search traffic HubSpot received before and after updating old posts.

Nurture Your Email List

Having an email list is one of the best ways to drive return traffic to your website. This is because you’re nurturing a group of people (your subscriber list) who are already interested in your brand. With the right approach, email marketing can be one of your top sources of web traffic.

Here are some simple best practices to get started:

We recommend building your subscriber list as soon as possible. Make it easy for web visitors to subscribe to your email list with a prominent button, link, or form. Use an email marketing tool like Campaign Monitor, Mailchimp, or Constant Contact to help you track performance metrics from your email marketing efforts.

Most of all, remember that your email newsletters should aim to be mini curated versions of your content for that week or month. While promotional messages can certainly be included in your emails, they shouldn’t be the sole or primary focus. Always think about what your subscribers will find valuable (your content) vs. what they will likely dismiss as spam (solely promotional content).

Promote Your Blog Posts

Writing your blogs is only half the job. You also need to promote them to maximize potential for brand visibility and driving web traffic.

So how do you do it? Some tried and true blog promotion tactics include:

  • Sharing your posts on social media – This is an easy one. Get your blog posts on social media to give them more visibility and potential to be shared.
  • Make your content shareable – Creating shareable content is one of the most effective ways to get your blog promoted by visitors who enjoyed it.
  • Include blog posts in your email newsletter – Be sure your subscribers are seeing your best content by sharing it in emails.
  • Repurpose old content – Take your most popular blog content and repurpose it into an ebook, video, infographic or other engaging form of content.

Check out this post for 8 ways to boost website traffic with social media.

Use Social Media Re-Marketing

We know that social media is a great marketing tool for both B2C and B2B brands. But social media alone isn’t enough to boost website traffic. You need to cpombine it with the power of your article research to take your website a step further.

Start by installing a tracking pixel on your website from one of the social media platforms your audience uses most in order to set up re-marketing audiences. You can do it for both Facebook and Twitter to keep engaging with your web visitors on those platforms after they’ve left your site.

Why is this important? Here’s a startling statistic: 95% of people who visit your website will not return again. While this number can vary across brands and industries, a quick look at your new vs. returning web visitors will tell you that the majority are not returners.

Re-marketing through social media is an important way for you to continue driving interest and return web traffic that may ultimately convert into leads and sales.

Try Blog Syndication

Syndicating your posts on other sites is another great way to drive traffic to your blog or site. Search for top sites your target audience may visit frequently and reach out to the editors to see if they would be willing to feature your content.

Just be careful. Some sites will take an unrestricted license (and even sell) your content. I’ve been burned using this approach but I’ve also benefited greatly. Think carefully about the audience (and the ethics) of the site owners where you want to syndicate. For most authors, syndicating your content can provide access to a new audience and help you build authority.

Guest Contribution

Many sites today accept blog contributions, and it helps drive more traffic to your site and build your credibility as well as brand awareness. Look for sites that have strong readership or the target audience you are trying to reach.

You can also invite industry thought leaders and influencers to guest blog or interview them for blogs. The name recognition will not only increase traffic to your site but boost your credibility as well. You can even build an entire army of volunteer contributors to your own site by asking for guest contributors.

SEO Optimization

Optimizing your site for search engines is the best way to boost your organic traffic. Don’t forget that statistic — 93% of web experiences are starting with search! Be sure you’re using SEO best practices for all of your content and paying attention to Google ranking factors as they evolve over time.

Some of the most important places to focus:

  • High-value content – It’s not just about hitting keywords anymore. Google AI is smarter than that, and they’re analyzing your content to make sure it’s actually high-quality and relevant to the topic and audience.
  • Keywords – But keywords are still important. Use a tool like SEMRush to get a huge list of keywords you can cluster and organize into topics you know your audience wants.
  • Headlines – We talked about this, but it’s worth mentioning again. Without an awesome headline, you likely won’t even get noticed. Focus on writing headlines that readers can’t resist!
  • Include Visual Content – Content marketing is all about visual content these days. Including images and videos in your content makes it more engaging, increases shareability, and helps it rank higher on SERPs.
  • Pay Attention to Technical Stuff – Meta descriptions, image alt-text, tags — it all plays an important role in helping your content rank. Don’t forget the little things!

Interactive Content

We’ve all been there — we go on the internet with a specific goal in mind only to realize 10 minutes later we’re taking a quiz about what kind of cat we’d be based on our zodiac sign.

The thing is, people will take fun quizzes, surveys and the like on just about anything. It’s part of the internet experience in 2021. So why not use them to make your content more fun and interactive? To boot, interactive content can also create more value for your customer because it can help them learn something about themselves.

What we mean is that we don’t recommend you use a cat quiz (unless you’re Buzzfeed). Think instead about what you want your audience to discover as it relates to your content, and create something interactive to help them do it. So, if you’re writing an article about blogging best practices, maybe you include a quick test your readers can take to score their blog as it exists today. This helps them understand how your content is going to help them improve.

There are many types of interactive content. Here are some that perform well:

types of interactive

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Webinars/Webcasts

Share your expertise with your target audience by offering free webinars or webcasts. Find topics that your target audience is most interested in, then take the time to create an engaging and informative presentation. This is a great way to share your industry expertise and drive traffic to your website by putting a timestamp on the event (i.e. join us LIVE at X date and time).

But don’t make it boring! We all hear the word webinar and (let’s admit it) stifle a yawn. Don’t forget about your killer headline, great description, and interesting topic.

New to webinars? Check out this step by step guide.

Podcasts

If you’re not ready to do live presentations just yet, podcasting is a good way to practice your presentation skills and still share your insights with your target audience. The key to driving traffic to your site is to make sure you are consistent and are promoting your podcasts on social media. Over time your audience will grow and you’ll build a repeat audience.

Quick tip: boost your podcast audience by inviting guests who are influencers or experts in your industry or who have a large following themselves. This will help you generate interest, gain more listeners and increase web traffic.

Partnerships

Brand partnerships are a pretty well-known growth hacking strategy and can be an excellent way to increase web traffic and build your audience. You can start by thinking about brands in adjacent markets who, when coupled with your brand, bring added value to your customers.

Partnerships have compounding growth effects by exposing your brand to new audiences and building your brand reputation at the same time. When done well, they create a virtuous cycle of growth for your brand with both partners and customers.

Community Building

People like to weigh in and share their ideas on topics they are passionate about. To increase traffic, build community by engaging directly with your audience. You can do this in a few easy ways.

Always leave the comments open on your blog and social media posts. Respond to comments and questions quickly and thoughtfully. Encourage conversation between customers, too! On social media especially, you can ask specific questions to generate a high number of responses and create discourse around topics.

The more you engage directly with readers who are commenting on your content, the more it will happen. Don’t forget, too, that posts with lots of comments and engagements also show up more on people’s feeds. Building community gets your direct audience more engaged but it also helps generate new interest, too!

Comment on Other Brands’ Content

Contribute your insights and comments regularly on other blogs and sites that are relevant to your business. Doing so helps get your name out there, which can drive more traffic to your site in the long term. Just like with guest blogging, you want to make sure your comments are relevant and insightful to build your credibility and establish relationships with other readers.

Adding genuine thoughts and insights to the conversation on other brands’ content also increases the likelihood that they’ll do the same for you. It also creates potential opportunities for formal brand partnerships as you build relationships with other brands you respect and get value from.

Timely Content

Creating content around timely news and events shows your brand is knowledgeable and on the pulse of what’s happening in your industry. Don’t shy away from writing blog articles and social media posts about trending topics. Providing unique opinions shows your brand personality and keeps your content relevant and fresh.

Join Social Media Groups

We know that building community, commenting on other brands’ content, and seeking brand partnerships are all ways to increase web traffic. One vehicle for accomplishing these goals is through social media groups. Looking for groups relevant to your business and industry and staying active in their groups helps you make new connections and establish yourself and your brand with other industry professionals.

Facebook and LinkedIn are the primary social media platforms for group membership and activity, so look there first if you’re taking on this strategy. Once you’re there, don’t be afraid to share your content in an insightful way (steer away from straight promotion which can come off as tone-deaf and self-serving). Industry groups are mainly made up of peers looking to share insights and learn from each other, not scroll through ad content.

Mobile Optimization

Today more than half of all web traffic is generated via mobile devices, and Google’s share of search engine queries is at 96%. Google has also implemented mobile-first indexing, meaning that mobile versions of your website may be considered even more important than desktop.

mobile web traffic growth

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All of this is to say that if you want to rank higher on SERPs and increase web traffic you must optimize your website for mobile. This is slightly different from creating mobile-friendly content, which works for mobile users but is really built for desktop. Mobile-optimized content is designed with mobile users first in mind.

Experimentation

One brand’s secret sauce for success may not necessarily work for you, and for this reason you want to experiment to find out what works best for your brand! Don’t be afraid to try new strategies and put your own spin on them, too. People are drawn to brands that are authentic and unique, so copying exactly what another brand does isn’t likely to bring you success.

Taking a metrics- and data-driven approach to measuring your content’s performance is the best way to understand which tactics are working best for you. This makes it possible for you to capitalize on the strategies that are driving results and phase out those that aren’t.

Ready to increase your web traffic today?

Your content strategy can be built to continually drive web traffic and increase your marketing ROI. Marketing insider group has SEO experts and writers who can help you build the best strategy for your brand and deliver publish-ready content every single week.

Check out our Content Builder Services to learn more or schedule your free consultation today!

The post 21 Ways To Boost Your Website Traffic Right Now appeared first on Marketing Insider Group.

Guy wondering about content enabled campaign

Ever heard of a content-enabled campaign?

Content-enabled campaigns refer to a series of strategies that align content and demand generation in order to create a dialogue with your audience. They help deliver content based on buyer needs and interests that encourage progression through the funnel, all while gathering better data to score, nurture, and qualify leads.

Translation: They bridge the gap between the marketing and sales departments so that content and campaigns actually bring in marketing qualified leads (MQLs) who are ready to buy.

And guess what? Content-enabled campaigns work. Data from an upcoming Demand Gen Report has found that 34% of marketers say they’re seeing better lead quality and a higher number of sales accepted leads. Pretty interesting, right?

Content-enabled campaigns are crucial when it comes to bridging the difficult gap between marketing and sales goals, and increasing efficiency for leads.

In this post, we’ll explore how and why to create content-enabled campaigns. Let’s get started.

Content-Enabled Campaigns: Transforming Leads

Ask any demand gen and content marketing team what one of their major struggles is, and they’ll likely tell you: “We want to transform our demand gen and content marketing strategy to scale MQLs who are both in our target category and ready to buy now.”

In other words, both teams want to get better at attracting target audience members who are engaged with the content and are ready (or are at least pretty close to being ready) to buy. We call these leads Super MQLs and they are extra important because they make the sales team more efficient and effective.

Often, sales teams waste a lot of time sifting through poorly qualified leads to figure out which ones are actually an appropriate fit and ready to buy. Being able to remove the step that filters the leads, you end up saving a massive amount of time.

Data echoes this sentiment: According to MarketingSherpa, 61% of B2B marketers send all leads directly to sales, while only 27% of those leads will actually be qualified.

When the demand generation and content teams can hand over more highly qualified leads (even if there are less of them), the sales conversion rate jumps. However, in order for this to happen, you can’t just keep putting out the same old content and campaigns.

Content for sales enablement does something non-traditional. It creates a conversation, it resonates, it engages, and it creates a visual, dynamic experience. So next, let’s talk about how that actually works via content-enabled campaigns.

But first, check out this infographic on converting leads to sales:10 Actionable Ways Agencies Can Convert Leads into Sales | by Jessica @MySiteAuditor | Medium

Conversation and Experience

To create a content-enabled campaign, you have to begin by creating a two-way dialogue with your audience. From there, you can turn that conversation into an experience.

But it can’t be just any conversation. You have to think deeply about the target audience’s wants, fears, and needs, and what questions and concerns are rolling around in their minds. They need to feel like someone “gets” them before they become more apt to buy. Make sure the dialogue you create pivots on the value you’re going to provide, too.

This dialogue also needs to accomplish specific goals on your end of things, too. Ask yourself:

  • What major pain points can we tease out and then present a solution for?
  • What questions do we need to ask to better qualify leads?
  • What lead information do we need to ask for?

The goal is: Ensure that the content is creating a two-way conversation – not a one-way information dump. You should be providing value and creating an opportunity for engagement on the audience side, and creating an opportunity to better qualify leads on your side.

But how exactly do you do that?

Sometimes, adding an interactive element is a way to begin the conversation. Interactive content such as an assessment, quiz, poll, or calculator allows the user to input his or her unique data and get a personalized response from the content itself.

The result: Engagement and an experience-based conversation with the user.What is Interactive Content + 15 Types to Create

Think about it: Anyone can put out a static blog post, whitepaper, or eBook – but it’s not an engaging experience.

Best case scenario: You’ll get a name and an email address from someone who downloads a piece of content on your site. But that’s not a highly qualified lead – that’s just a lead. You know very little about who this person is, what their pain points are, and whether or not they’re a good fit to hand off to your sales team. All you know is that they downloaded a piece of content on your site.

The fix: Better lead scoring and sending the right leads to sales at the right time is born from content-enabled campaigns and leveraging experience-based material. Do you need to radically transform your process? No. But you do need to layer in better qualifying content strategically throughout a campaign.

Anyone can put out a static whitepaper or eBook – but it’s not an engaging enough experience anymore.

Why Experiences Work for Content-Enabled Campaigns

Maybe at this point you’re wondering, “Why experiences? Why do these work so well for this type of campaign?”
Experiences are effective because they go beyond the standard whitepaper or static eBook, beyond the ubiquitous PDF, and strive to create something engaging for the audience that touches on what the audience actually wants.

At the same time, they help better qualify leads for your sales team. That’s a win-win.

The experience is:

  • Visual, interesting, and dynamic
  • Encourages input from viewers
  • Provides value worth engaging with
  • Connects deeply, resonates

From here, you can expand those experiences through the funnel from top to bottom to create a “cool thing” that also delivers engagement and translates into sales.

By creating content-enabled campaigns instead of content and then campaigns, you’re constantly striving to create more synergy between content marketing, demand generation, and sales.

Using different types of  content-enabled campaigns advances leads from the early stage (awareness), to the middle stage (consideration), finally to the late stage (decision) where they’re ready to buy – thus creating more Super MQLs for the sales team as seen in the example below.

Marketing Qualified Leads: How to Identify and Generate MQLs | Upwork
Source: Upwork

Content-Enabled Campaigns: Bridging the Gap

All marketing teams have big goals and high demands. And now, there’s a mandate to produce more, always more. More awareness. More traffic. More leads.

But that model can harm the effectiveness of content, demand gen, marketing, and sales teams. Taking a strategic step back for a wider view to hone in on quality and effectiveness can bridge the divisions among your teams.

Many sales and content marketing teams come together and have good intentions about better qualifying leads – but then they go back to their desks and fall back into their normal, daily routines out of habit. As time passes, the old tactics find their way back into place, and again, time gets wasted as those junk leads eventually find their way back into the sales funnel.

Sales and Marketing Alignment: Asset Manager Best Practices
Source: Superscript Marketing

However, with content-enabled campaigns, both teams can help each other more effectively lead score through content and campaigns that are conversational, engaging, and packed with value for both the user and the business. Pushing boundaries by exploring new content formats and creative tools can be accelerator for getting your team on the right track.

Let’s recap what the content-enabled campaign is one more time:

  • A series of strategies to align content and demand generation with sales
  • Creates a dialogue and experience with your audience
  • Provides value and insight to both parties
  • Sharpens focus on prospects who are the right fit and ready to buy

In short: This format is taking the Progressive out of Progressive Profiling putting the “Q” back in MQL.

If you are ready to get your own awesome content on your site, check out our Content Builder Service. Set up a quick consultation, and I’ll send you a free PDF version of my books. Get started today–and generate more traffic and leads for your business.

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