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How To Give Writers Constructive Feedback When Requesting Content Revisions

how to give your writers constructive feedback

Developing quality content is crucial to build your brand and attract key audiences, but it’s definitely something easier said than done. Your best bet might be outsourcing your content creation to a team of writers.

Since your brand and reputation mean everything as a business, you need to be completely satisfied with your content before clicking publish to ensure you’re making a solid first impression to potential customers.

How can you enable your team to create consistent, valuable, and unique content? It all starts with providing helpful feedback and suggestions that guide your writers.

You know the Farmers Insurance slogan, “we know a thing or two because we’ve seen a thing or two”? Well, our writers are kind of like the Farmers of content marketing. We do this all day, every day!

We’ve asked our best writers for tips and tricks when it comes to facilitating great communication and feedback during the editing process. This list is their most valuable advice – all in one place.

With 70% of marketers investing in content marketing, writing impactful pieces should be a top priority for your business to stay ahead of the competition. The more effectively you can achieve this, the better. It’s a win for everyone.

Ready to learn more? Let’s dive in.

Key Takeaways:

  • Providing writing feedback helps you produce better quality content.
  • Build a strong working relationship with writers by sending them lots of constructive review feedback.
  • Create and update a style guide for your writers to follow and adhere to brand consistency.

Why is Providing Feedback to Your Team Important?

Feedback is an essential part of any leader’s skill set to shape your team’s performance for the better. In fact, constructive feedback helps create a healthier environment, boosts productivity, and helps you achieve better business results.

When it comes to your writing development, you need to create content that speaks to your customers’ pain points, needs, and desires to build a deeper relationship with them.

Throughout the project journey, you can improve the content by providing feedback during the development process to sharpen your writer’s skill set. This is why we start with test articles at MIG. These are our figurative punching bags for feedback.

With 53% of businesses outsourcing their writing, providing feedback allows your freelance writing teams to ramp and produce content more quickly for your brand.

Content creation: Half of companies outsource content, but quality is a persistent challenge - Agility PR Solutions

Source: Agility PR

Here are a few additional reasons why you need to provide writing feedback:

  • Help keep the project on track and meet deadlines
  • Avoid major, repeatable mistakes
  • Form healthy relationships between you and your writers
  • Motivate others to produce better outcomes and professional growth
  • Save your business more money by not paying for additional revisions
  • Improve your market position and thought leadership
  • Build valuable customer relationships

As you stick to a consistent process, providing constructive feedback keeps your writers engaged in the work process and improves your business growth.

Teaching Your Writing Style and Tone

Before you give writing feedback, provide your writers with proper guidelines beyond just the Associated Press Stylebook or the Chicago Manual of Style.

While you may be excited to hand off a new assignment to your writer, examples of style you really like allows your writers to refer to this material when they have a question instead of going to you for every detail.

Do you want CTAs at the end of each blog? What is common industry vernacular? Who are your buyer personas? What is your preferred subheading cadence? Answer all of these questions and more in your stylebook.

Our method; briefing documents for each of our clients. We ask all the right questions, so you don’t have to worry about thinking of them. That’s just one of the benefits of outsourcing your content marketing. You gain professional knowledge without having to break a sweat. Pair this with thorough research conducted by our writers and a strong foundation is laid before any content is even written.

Here are a few additional ideas on what you should include:

  • Target audience with a list of benefits for each persona
  • Product and company information with exact details
  • Competitive information if you want them referenced
  • Capitalization, punctuation, and grammar preferences (the Oxford comma rule is actually quite a polarizing subject, so definitely worth touching on!)
  • Tone and voice to determine how your brand resonates with your audience, such as formal, snarky, educational, funny, etc.

Deliver style guidelines with each project assignment brief, so your writers have a clear understanding of your standards and expectations. You can provide these in an e-book PDF format or something like a Google Doc so your writers can save it to their desktop for ease of use. Google Docs are living documents, so your goals can change without derailing your process.

Coaching Your Writing Team: 5 Ways to Be Successful

Did you know that only 31% of businesses rate their content successful? It all starts with feedback.

Sure, your content idea might be dynamite, but if you don’t follow up the project journey with quality feedback, it’ll likely fall flat. Although I’m sure they wish they could, writers can’t actually read your mind. You have to let them in on your industry knowledge sometimes.

32% of business rate their content successful

Source: Content Marketing Institute

Let’s look at a few key ways you make sure you provide your writers with actionable feedback that will drive better content results.

1. Comment on Your Writer’s Good Qualities

A recent study shows that 44% of people are more likely to disassociate after receiving more negative feedback than they felt they deserved. Of course, no one likes hearing negative things — so how can you avoid fatigue?

You should always start the feedback loop by commenting on what the writer did correctly. Discussing what the content accomplishes as-is helps the writer stay motivated and highlights what’s working versus what’s not to better understand the expectation. If you’re struggling to find positive feedback, think about it a bit more broadly and focus on things like search engine optimization or industry knowledge.

Developing a good cadence with your writer takes work on both ends, to make things easier in the long haul. Try not to get frustrated in the beginning! Your style and theirs need to meld together and the only way to make that happen is constructive feedback.

2. Work with Your Legal and Cross-Functional Partners

Depending on your industry and regulations, you may need to loop in legal and other cross-functional partners before publishing the content. To help this process go more smoothly and avoid frustrated writers, make sure you get project buy-in from all cross-functional partners before handing it off.

You’ll be able to more clearly outline outcomes, features, and things to avoid in the project guidelines after you loop in everyone.

It would be best to have your legal and cross-functional groups review the content as the last stop instead of in the middle of the review process. This allows your writer to make quick edits at the end of the project timeline and helps you manage the stakeholder’s time.

To help your legal reviews go more smoothly from the start, consider these best practices:

  • Provide any disclaimers, regulations, or industry knowledge that legal will request to include in the initial project brief, so your writer knows the immediate requirements.
  • Consider creating content that won’t even need a legal review like behind-the-scenes or how-to guides.
  • Give your stakeholders a process to follow when providing feedback so your writer doesn’t have to guess when they will receive the final revision rounds.

3. Include Specific Edits in Your Revision Requests

When providing feedback and asking for content revisions, make sure you offer examples of potential solutions to point them in the right direction. For instance, if your writer keeps using sentence case in your headers but your guidelines say title case, point it out in a comment and show them the correct way to format the text!

Going out of your way to give writers additional context shows your willingness to see a successful final draft. This also helps educate the writer for future articles. Making the revisions and giving feedback now will only help your future self.

Another method; ask your writer questions while giving feedback. If you’re unsure about a section of your article, asking a question can help send the writer in the right direction and expand their potential.

An example might be, “Should we replace the ‘seo services’ section with ‘seo blog writing services’? This applies more to our industry and will help the reader understand more what we do.” In this example, the feedback should leave the writer feeling like they know exactly how to improve the piece. This also gives more context to the type of work you do, which is feedback that will last.

4. Keep Communication Channels Open

Everyone has their own tone when providing feedback to writers. What you may intend to be a quick comment could come off as rude to your team – making it difficult for them to decipher your actual content expectations. Instead, consider holding regular in-person or virtual meetings with your team to discuss feedback in real time.

Meeting with your team allows you to have an open conversation about a content piece you’re unsure about and talk through the changes you’d like to see.

Our team has an onboarding process in place for just this; to make sure there’s open and often communication in the beginning, when working out the kinks is the most effective.

5. Mention Recurring Mistakes When You See Them

As a marketer, you may want to do it all yourself instead of providing feedback. While it’s sometimes easier, it sets your writer up for failure because they’ll never learn the correct tone or structure that you prefer. Not to mention that when you fail to mention a recurring error and then correct it ten pieces later, you’ll leave your writer scratching their head asking, “Why now?”

If you want your writer to listen and trust your feedback, you need to be completely honest with their mistakes from the start. It will also help you break everyday habits to ensure the writer sticks to your style guide and project brief.

Developing Rockstar Content Starts with Good Feedback

Whether you’re working with your in-house team or a content marketing agency, providing quality feedback allows you to stimulate professional growth and develop high-quality content that drives conversions.

While constructive feedback may feel a little uncomfortable at first, it’s the best way to ensure the end product is valuable to your customers and reduces future legwork. Ready to create impactful content for your business? Get started with Marketing Insider Group today.

We want to share 5 additional best practices for providing feedback and requesting content revisions that we’ve found will correct a lot of common mistakes that are costing marketing teams time and efficiency.

1. The Right Time for Feedback

One of the keys to effective feedback is timing. Everyone knows the risk of reviewing work too far along in the creative process – getting things wrong without enough time to change them.  It’s basically self-evident. But an equally damaging, and commonly made mistake is combatting that by reviewing too early in the creative process.

As a stakeholder, you want to make sure the content you’re responsible for is meeting its requirements and that often translates to checking in with your content creators early and often. But reviewing too early can interrupt the creative process, and disrupt the cohesion necessary to make content compelling.

It’s better to be clear about your expectations up front and give feedback on a rough version than to micromanage a piece of content’s creation. Otherwise, you’re spending time working on a piece of content that could be better spent elsewhere.

2. Give Your Feedback Request Context

Once a piece of content is ready for review,, giving insight into the specific type of feedback that a team is looking for will save a lot of time and frustration. Asking vague questions like “what do you think?” or “how could this improve?” is going to yield equally vague feedback. Instead, be specific in the areas in which you’re looking for feedback (and the areas you’re not).

Let’s say your team is producing a video testimonial, for example, and you want to collect feedback on the first version. By letting your reviewers know that all you’re looking for feedback on is the video’s story (and not the color correction or audio mixing), you won’t get requests to do work that’s meant for further along in the process.

Instead, contextualizing your feedback requests allows the reviewers to focus in on what actually needs reviewing, allowing for higher quality input.

3. Give Actionable Feedback

The purpose of sending a piece of content through the review process is to make it better, not highlight the shortcomings of the project or the person who made it. Great feedback should always suggest practical ways to move forward.

One way to make sure your feedback is actionable is to make sure it’s specific to an issue that needs to be resolved before the content is ready for its next step. If you find you don’t like something, ask yourself why and what you would do to improve it.

When offering ways to move forward, make sure your suggestions stay within the original scope of the project. It isn’t fair to complain about something missing that wasn’t addressed in the creative brief, or that is a result of limited resources.

If your feedback doesn’t offer up a solution that can be acted on within the necessary timeframe, you might want to reconsider giving it.

4. Separate the Review and Approval Process

Requesting feedback is different from requesting approval, and one way to practice healthy reviewing habits is to separate the two into their own processes.

Not everybody who needs to review has the power to approve, and not everybody who does have that power needs to be involved in reviewing at earlier stages in the process. Crossing those paths results in a messy situation that negates all of the best practices we’ve talked about so far!

Instead, keep the review process tailored to specific stages of the creative process and only once it’s ready to be approved should the final stakeholders be brought to weigh in with their opinion.

Reviewing should be about changing and shaping the content; approvals should be about if the content in question is good enough to be published (or whatever the next stage is).

5. Trim the Number of Stakeholders

You’ve been following the best practices lined up above, and have collected some great, insightful feedback that has lead you to the final approval stage. The last thing you need is to collect approvals from six different stakeholders at this point in the process. If you’ve thoughtfully separated your reviewing and approving processes, then you won’t have to.

Instead of having a committee of content gatekeepers, try involving some of those stakeholders earlier on in the process. Have the brand department chime in while reviewing the overall message or story; have legal chime in after you’ve drafted in copy. By the time the content gets to the one or two approvals needed to published, it will be in better shape, they will be more aware of it, and more likely to say yes. You also leave less room for dialoguing that should have happened earlier in the feedback process.

Use these best practices to boost your review and approval efficiency, regardless of what type of content you’re creating.

The post How To Give Writers Constructive Feedback When Requesting Content Revisions appeared first on Marketing Insider Group.

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How to Develop a Content Strategy (with Examples)

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.

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How to Assess Your Content Performance: 5 Tools You Haven’t Tried

How to Assess Your Content Performance: 5 Tools You Haven't Tried

Content analysis is a marketing task that’s never really complete.

You need to come back to your old content again and again to see what should be updated, which new visibility opportunities can be pursued and how to better optimize it for more conversions.

With that in mind, there’s no set list of content analysis tools you should be using again and again. New tools bring new methods and, hence, new ideas. Here are 5 tools to use for content assessment:

1. Which Keywords Have I Missed?

Any time I am assessing my existing content performance, I start with identifying which keywords I have missed.

Content gap analysis answers one of the most important content marketing questions: which topics have I failed to cover, and which questions have I failed to answer when creating that content?

It’s usually a multi-step process where you need to:

  • Identify competing URLs
  • Run organic analysis of current positions
  • Compare rankings with yours and identify which keywords your URL fails to rank in top 50

Serpstat is the SERP analysis platform that minimizes the whole process to only one step: simply enter your URL into their Missing Keywords tool, and it will generate a handy content analysis report including:

  • Search queries competing pages generate traffic from while your URL fails to rank in top 50
  • Search volume and “Competition Strength” for each query (“Competition Strength” is Serpstat’s own metric they calculate based on average authority of pages ranking in top 10 for the given query)
  • Other URLs from your domain that rank for any of those queries (For you to avoid internal organic competition, i.e. keyword cannibalization (the term I am not a big fan of by the way). This latter report section is pretty awesome: I’ve never seen this done by anyone else and for established blogs (that tend to have a lot of content on similar topics) it’s a time saver!

Serpstat

You can also filter the report by search volume, competition strength, any keyword in the query.

This is one of those reports that have too much going on: I always end up working on all “Other URLs”, as well to try and push them higher in SERPs.

SE Ranking is another useful tool that offers an advanced competitor traffic research tool that helps you identify your competitors’ organic and PPC keywords. I always check this tool when I want to identify my competitors’ primary targets and see of this is something I need to pursue:

SE Ranking

2. Who Will Find My Page Content Satisfying?

Another fundamental question to answer is: is my page meeting the users’ expectations? In other words, have I done enough to optimize for search intent?

Not only is search intent playing a decisive role in engaging your visitors, but search intent optimization also is able to boost your rankings. That’s because Google has learned how to identify whether your page is meeting users’ needs when deciding how high it should rank.

Text Optimizer is a semantic analysis tool that runs your query through Google search, grabs search snippets and identifies words and phrases that Google associates with this specific search intent.

You can use Text Optimizer to better optimize your content for search intent for any given query.

Simply enter your query and provide your page URL: the tool will run Google search for your query and identify which related concepts should be covered in your content for it to better meet Google’s (and its users’) expectations. Include 20-25 of these concepts in your copy to better optimize it for search intent.

Text Optimizer

3. Does My Page Pass the 5-Second Test?

What’s the very first impression your page makes when users land on it? Is it instantly clear what the page is about? Are CTAs clearly visible on the page? Is the goal clear?

Studies have shown that most people need just a couple of seconds to decide whether they want to stay or leave a web page. In today’s fast-paced digital environment where most people browse the web on the go, from their mobile or smart assistant devices, this time frame is likely to become even shorter.

This makes your actual content quality almost secondary: most people won’t even see it unless they are instantly compelled to stay. This is where the 5-second test comes along: let strangers look at your page for five seconds, and then ask one simple question: “What was this page about” or “What are you supposed to do on the page?”

If you recruit your own testers, this test is free to run. I usually use the Usability Hub to quickly set up the tests. You can also recruit testers through the site which costs $30 (free for the first-time users).

Usability Hub

4. What Distracts Users from Following the Conversion Funnel?

Besides understanding the instant impression your users get when landing on your page, it is helpful to know what exactly distracts them. The easiest way to collect this data is through running a one-day heatmap test.

A heatmap is the visual representation of user behavior on the page, including scrolling, clicking, mouse movements, etc.

If you need to identify what gets your users’ attention, set up a move map that tracks cursor movements on your page. In most cases, it is safe to assume that people look where their cursor moves, so move maps can give you a good idea where people look when landing on your page.

landing page heatmap

There are multiple platforms that allow you to run heatmap testing, as well as several WordPress plugins that integrate heatmaps into your A/B testing routine. In many cases, unless you have really heavy traffic, you can run simple move map testing for free.

5. What Is Interrupting Your Conversion Funnel Flow?

You probably have a few CTAs within your content, each leading your visitor down the conversion funnel, from clicking to opting-in to finally buying. Which of those steps is reducing your conversions?

There is a detailed guide on tracking your conversions on WordPress. If your site is on Joomla or Wix, Finteza can help.

Finteza is a free web analytics tool that allows you to monitor multiple events on a page and how they interact with one another.

Finteza

It’s pretty obvious that an extra click reduces conversions, so eliminating the extra step is likely to boost conversions.

Finteza is pretty easy to set up. Adding events for tracking is very straightforward too. If you are not technical enough, you can simply add a new link attribute data-fz-event=”Event+Name” (Put your event name instead of “Event+Name”), and the new event will be automatically populated and monitored.

Monitor all kinds of conversion-focused links within your content including clicks to lead magnets, form fills and clicks-to-call.

Your Content Assessment:  Putting It All Together

There’s an overwhelming amount of both traffic acquisition and conversion optimization tactics. With so much testing and analyzing, how do you put everything together in a most actionable way? In other words, how do you move from analyzing onto implementing?

When working on old content, I treat it as a new marketing campaign. As soon as I come across an existing article or landing page that needs some work, I put it down as a new content project in my calendar inside ContentCal.

ContentCal is a collaboration editorial tool that is every content manager’s dream. I don’t have time for creating tickets or distributing tasks, so ContentCal is ideal. It takes two seconds to schedule a content campaign and put together a content brief, including all the numbers and test results I was able to collect.

My team will be notified of an approaching campaign through the shared calendar and will be able to quickly share the tasks and implement the suggestions.

Having a centralized dashboard that consolidates all my plans keeps me very organized and productive.

Hopefully these new content analysis tools will breathe fresh air into your assessment process and inspire you to look for new tactics and trends to boost your content marketing performance.

The post How to Assess Your Content Performance: 5 Tools You Haven’t Tried appeared first on Convince & Convert.

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Special Ad Audiences Going Away for Facebook Targeting

If you run Facebook ads under a Special Ad Category, you should know that Facebook Special Ad Audiences are going away.

In this post, let’s shed light on what they are, the timeline for their removal, and what you can do instead.

Let’s go…

What Are They?

Special Ad Audiences are only relevant to those running ads promoting a Special Ad Category. Special Ad Categories are sensitive topics that require adjusted rules. You would declare a Special Ad Category while creating the campaign.

Facebook Special Ad Categories

If you run ads for housing, credit, employment, social issues, electiopns, or politics, you need to declare that. Once you do, your options will change to prevent you from violating certain rules. If you fail to declare a Special Ad Category in order to get around these restrictions, expect to get ads rejected and potentially your ad account shut down.

So, once you declare a Special Ad Category, you can create a Special Ad Audience for targeting.

Special Ad Audience

Special Ad Audiences are a lot like Lookalike Audiences (you can’t use Lookalike Audiences when promoting a Special Ad Category) in that they allow you to create an audience of people similar to those in a source audience of people who are close to you.

Facebook Special Ad Audiences

The difference is that a Special Ad Audience is adjusted to comply with the restrictions related to the Special Ad Category. It won’t use information like age and gender or certain demographics, behaviours, or interests.

Deprecation Timeline

Of course, Special Ad Audiences are going away due to Meta’s settlement agreement with HUD. While this specifically impacts housing, Facebook will be removing Special Ad Audiences for all Special Ad Categories.

Following is the timeline from Meta regarding the deprecation of Special Ad Audiences:

  1. August 25, 2022: you will no longer be able to create new special ad audiences.
  2. September 13, 2022: special ad audiences will no longer be available for use in new ad creation via the API.
  3. October 12, 2022: Special ad audiences will no longer be available for use in new ad creation across Ads Manager and the API. After this date, affected ad sets may be paused for delivery. To resume delivery of the paused ad sets you will need to update them to remove Special Ad Audiences.

Like most changes, this appears to be a rollout considering I’m still able to create Special Ad Audiences through Ads Manager for now.

According to this timelin, you’ll no longer be able to use Special Ad Audiences in new ads via the API on September 13 and Ads Manager on October 12. That said, if you have ad sets running now targeting Special Ad Audiences, they’ll continue to run until October 12. After that point, they’ll pause.

What Should You Do Instead?

Whether you pivot now or wait until Special Ad Audiences are taken away, start preparing now. What should you do?

Facebook isn’t particularly helpful on this point. Their advice is “exploring broader targeting options.”

I don’t run ads promoting Special Ad Categories, so I can’t speak on their effectiveness — or the loss incurred when they go away. But, I have heard from some using Special Ad Audiences who have seen success with them.

The problem, of course, is that your options are limited. While Facebook’s recommendations of exploring broader targeting options feels insufficient, I struggle to provide much more advice here. You can’t use Lookalike Audiences. You can continue to explore the interests and behaviors that are available when using Special Ad Categories. You can go entirely broad without interests and behaviors. But, that’s pretty much it.

The one question I have is whether you will always be running ads under a Special Ad Category or only in specific situations. An example I’ve heard of is related to a car dealership. The dealership business itself isn’t a Special Ad Category, but the credit portion is. They could conceivably run more targeted ads when credit isn’t part of the experience.

Like always, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach here. You should experiment and find what works for you. If you have a sizeable budget, you can experiment with multiple approaches at once. If you have a limited budget, focus on one approach at a time.

I don’t expect this to be a significant loss. Special Ad Audiences were quite broad already and required the algorithm to help isolate an effective audience within it. That will continue to be the case when you go broad.

Your Turn

Do you run ads promoting Special Ad Categories? What will you do instead of using Special Ad Audiences?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Special Ad Audiences Going Away for Facebook Targeting appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

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10 Examples of Awesome Landing Pages that Convert

To lead more users to your products, you need to create a showstopping landing page. To do this, you’ll need to consider your audience, your call-to-action, the product or service, and your niche.

Beautifully crafted landing pages focus on giving potential clients the down low on your product quickly. If you can marry this with visually appealing graphics, a clean and organized template, and social proof, then you are well on your way to creating landing pages that convert.

Formstack.com says

Learning to put together a high-converting landing page is no easy feat. Subtle changes in design, layout, or copy could mean the difference between coveted clicks or the dreaded “back” button.

Dreaded is right. Keeping users on your site is the no. 1 goal when crafting your landing page.

Here’s a quick video from Flux Academy talking about what makes a good landing page:

Quick Takeaways:

  • A good landing page will grab the attention of prospects and clients alike, driving up your conversion rate
  • Landing pages need a healthy mix of aesthetic appeal and informative content to get people viewing your content
  • There are tons of online resources designed to make landing page design easier

Here are a few samples of landing pages that just plain work:

  1. Unbounce

Unbounce is the top example of an excellent landing page because it has all of the required elements—from the catchy headline to the simple CTA copy and visually appealing screenshots. These guys make a living from designing landing pages so we can expect their pages to be nothing short of brilliant.

The overall design of Unbounce’s landing page banks on SEO, and there is enough content to keep readers engaged with the site before they complete the next action. On the other hand, the details do not distract visitors at all because they’re all below the fold and only evident upon scrolling.

  1. Wistia

Wistia’s smart contrast of blue and white is visually stimulating. Added to that is the sign-up form, which visitors see the moment the page opens. The form for creating an account is strategically placed on the site, while FAQs to answer a visitor’s queries are placed at the bottom.

External links have been removed, and there is nothing to distract users from their next action.

  1. H.BLOOM

Bloom combines a few important elements of an engaging landing page: beautiful and captivating images and a minimalist template. The white space on the page allows visitors to take in all the images and details, as too many fancy designs on the page can distract users from the main objective.

It has an above-the-fold form and a brief explanation of what happens when you fill it out. The “Submit” button is not to be missed because of its bright color.

  1. American Bullion

American Bullion’s catchy headline tells readers right off the bat what the page is all about. This saves them from having to browse the whole page.

The introductory paragraph gives just enough information to intrigue, but isn’t too long. The site has a simple call-to-action and brightly colored submit button. Testimonials and trust symbols round out the overall look and feel of the page and provide additional information about the company.

  1. HBO Max

HBO Max has the added benefit of selling a really cool service. They have their actual live titles circulating on the landing page, giving users visual aid to help sell the service to them.

This landing page is colorful, gets to the point, and clearly highlights the “sign up now” button for prospects.

  1. Neil Patel

Neil Patel’s official website is another great example of a distraction-free landing page, indicating to visitors that there is only one path for progression. It displays a compelling description of the offer in an aesthetically pleasing presentation.

His CTA copy within a huge orange button helps drive the point home to readers that this offer will teach them how to grow their business.

  1. Bills.com

The clean and refreshing feel of Bills.com is due to the crisp white and blue layout of the landing page. The minimalist feel of the large slider removes all unnecessary distractions from the page and gets straight to the point.

  1. Webprofits

Webprofits has a grainy black background, but the white text contrasts against it nicely. There is a prominent field form for the visitor’s website address and a bright pink CTA button that draws visitors toward their next course of action.

The page offers complete details about Webprofits and its services, plus multiple call-to-action buttons at the bottom of each page (“Talk to Webprofits”).

  1. Basecamp

Basecamp has an info-heavy design that directs reader’s eyes to the 30 day free trial and number of sign ups from the week prior. The highlight of this landing page is the quick information a prospect would want to know immediately.

Many users looking for extra storage space are likely doing research on the best rates for the most data. Presenting this information off the bat eliminates the annoying process of having to click on every single page to try and find that information.

  1. Netflix

Netflix’s landing page is a great example of lean content and a compelling call-to-action. After your visitors read your headlines, they need to know what to do next. In this case, a big red button that’s impossible to miss invites users to “Get Started”.

Netflix (and all streaming services nowadays) have a leg up on landing pages. They don’t have to have a lot of information because you already know what they’re providing.

Wrap Up

With an impressive landing page, you can improve your content marketing conversion rates and directly increase your actual sales. If you’ve already got great content and a compelling offer but aren’t seeing a lead volume that reflects their value, maybe it’s time to start looking at landing page design.

Putting together a high-converting landing page is no easy task. Minor changes in the copy, layout or design can mean the difference between form submissions and the dreaded high bounce rate.

Make sure that you’re A/B testing each aspect of your landing page to discover the combination that works best for your specific audience.

Happy testing!

Do you want to use some of the marketing strategies seen here on MIG’s site but need some help or advice? Marketing Insider Group has a team of 35+ experienced writers ready to produce content for YOUR business. Check out our weekly blog content service or schedule a free consultation. 

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Grad Schools Must Change in Pursuit of Gen Z Students

Grad Schools Must Change in Pursuit of Gen Z Students

What You Need to Know About Gen Z Graduate Students Now 

60% of Gen Z graduate students are the first in their families to attend graduate school, and it stands to reason that many schools have yet to create a game plan for connecting with their younger student audiences.

LaneTerralever partnered with the Convince and Convert team to produce the Grad Student Insights Report: Gen Z in the Driver’s Seat 2022 and uncovered several key themes that help us better understand Gen Z and their student experience. The research seeks to uncover why the up-and-coming generation of potential post-grad students is exploring graduate school differently from their previous generational counterparts. 

49% of people surveyed are more interested in pursuing grad school now as a result of the pandemic.
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Gen Z is Highly Interested in Higher Ed

In this post-pandemic (or nearly post-pandemic) world we’re living in, we’re seeing people from all walks of life show a greater interest in attending grad school. Knowing the pandemic sparked a lot of introspection, it doesn’t come as a surprise that people would be interested in pursuing a way to better themselves through education. However, we’re not just talking about the career students of the past. 

This new generation of graduate students has a different perspective on the graduate experience. While they remain engaged and motivated to attend like other generations, the research found that 45% of them would prefer to be fully in-person for their education. This iscompared to 80% of multi-generational respondents that chose an online or hybrid model. 

Gen Z's unique perspective on Grad School
Cross-Generational Motivations and Barriers 

Across the generations, we see that motivations and barriers to graduate school are very similar. 

According to the research, career advancement is the #1 motivator across all generations, but Gen Z is less interested in earning potential than other generations before them. We also see that Gen Z has chosen to favor “helping careers” such as medical or health programs while other generations find themselves drawn to business or computer science. 

It is not unique for Gen Z to be concerned about how to pay for their schooling. However, unlike other generations, 90% of Gen Zers stated that they would need to rely on some sort of financial assistance in order to attend the graduate school program they are interested in. This leaves an open opportunity for higher education institutions to be very clear about the types of financial support that are available as a gateway to enrollment for this generation. 

90% of Gen Zers stated that they would need to rely on some sort of financial assistance in order to attend the graduate school program they are interested in.
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In addition to financial considerations, the access and delivery of education have garnered increased importance post-pandemic. 47% of respondents said that program delivery is much more important to them for their graduate experience than it was in undergrad. Also, 39% of students say that they care about a school’s location and proximity to home more now than they did in undergrad. This is important when creating messages for these audiences about your institution. Providing clarity for students on what they can expect from the experience as a whole will be essential to capturing today’s higher education students.

Gen Z considerations for grad schools

Reaching the Gen Z Graduate Student 

First and foremost, remember these students are real people, and they want to know what their experience will actually be like if they choose your institution to continue their education. 

We found that size of the school was less important to potential students than your brand itself, with 79% saying prestige is a somewhat to a very important factor in selecting a school. The message you are sending is incredibly important, but where and how you’re engaging these students is critical, too. 

Most Millenial and Gen Z respondents said alumni networks are important in getting messages out about furthering education. However, this similarity does not carry over to other communication channels. While Millennials felt that social media was integral to their decision-making, Gen Z found that while fun, most higher ed social lacks the authenticity they are looking for, choosing to favor strategic influencer communication to help them make a decision. Leaning into real stories from faculty and students can help bridge the authenticity gap and provide valuable informative content to all potential students, especially Gen Z. 

In addition to communication considerations, the decision window is also shrinking with newer generations. 71% of students said they spent between one month and up to one year researching before making a program decision – but Gen Z’s decision window is much tighter with 47% saying they would decide in 3 months or less. 

This condensed window means the expectation of communication has changed. In fact, 60% of students expect a response the same day they reach out to an institution. Then, only 64% say that a school’s communication has met their expectations. This leaves open opportunities for higher ed to improve on their interactions with prospective students. 

The Next Generation of Graduate Students Awaits

Knowing these up-and-coming generations and their specific needs is essential to take them from prospective students to enrolled and engaged. We know that their needs differ from generations before them, but many of their needs echo what we’ve seen before. As we wade through what future generations will require, one fundamental perspective remains–there is no universal truth when it comes to graduate students. Being able to redesign your recruitment strategies to align with new generations and various life stages will be the driver of success. 

There are great opportunities for improvement identified in the report, so take a look and see how to improve the student experience.

Download Report for Grad Schools Pursuit of Gen Z

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How to Develop Your Own Content Marketing Roadmap

content marketing road map

Think of content marketing as a journey. Like any journey, you need to know the destination. When you have a content marketing roadmap in hand, though, you can focus on where you want to go and the best way to get there.

As Forbes’ Brian Sutter puts it, “It’s really hard to hit a target when you don’t know what the target is.” But as he points out, there are quite a few of us who don’t know the destination.

Nearly a third of us, according to a Content Marketing Institute study. We can do better.

All too many companies don’t have a consistent messaging strategy, don’t know where or when to find and publish content, and don’t tailor their content marketing to their target customers, as a 2016 Forbes study discovered.

It’s time for a roadmap to get your business to its destination. Learn how to develop your own content marketing roadmap—one that’s a custom fit for your business.

Quick Takeaways:

  • Starting with your business case, get your C-suite on board and set your priorities.
  • Engage your employees early on.
  • Define what will drive business growth.
  • Decide which kinds of results will determine your business value (subscribers, conversions, etc.).

Assess Where You Are and Where You Want to Go with Your Content Strategy

Like an actual map, your content marketing roadmap needs to start with where you are—and where you want to go. Set your content marketing priorities at the outset and stay on the road to measurable results.

Build the Business Case

  • Conduct a content audit: An effective business case for an overhaul of your content marketing strategy must start with where your content marketing currently is. A content audit will provide you with the clout to get your company executives on board for the change. Learning what types of content you have and the results they bring in can help give your business case direction. When you contrast those numbers with the possibilities that lie ahead with a change of direction, you’ll have a better chance to succeed.
  • Engage your employees: Research from all fronts indicates that engaged employees can become the most effective content marketing tool in your arsenal. Make them a part of your strategy from Day One—and you’ll multiply the reach of the content you publish. An effective way to get them on board is with a content marketing workshop that includes everyone in your company from the janitor to the CEO. When employees see the importance of effective content marketing and how they can participate, they’ll transform into some of your best advocates.
  • Identify your business’s growth drivers: What activities drive your business’s financial and operational results? Whether it’s web traffic, the number of goods and services you’ve sold, or whatever factors spur your business’s growth, those are the numbers you want your content to drive upward.

Identify What Measures Define Your Business Value

Look at the actions that drive value for your business. What actions bring in the most revenue? These actions will be what you’ll target with every piece of content you create. For some businesses, it will be an increase in subscribers or upgrades to existing subscriptions. For others, it might be an increase in leads or face-to-face meetings. For even others, it will be online conversions or call-to-action responses.

Look into the factors that must happen before a customer takes the desired action. For example, for customers to upgrade their subscriptions, they must first become unpaid subscribers. To entice a person to respond to your call to action, the promised benefit must be one they need to better their business or their life.

Set Your Initial SEO Strategy

All your efforts will come to nothing without people to see your content. Although SEO does stand for “search engine optimization,” that’s a bit of a misnomer. You’re not marketing to search engines–but you must get their attention before your content appears before your target market’s eyes.

First, you need a strategy that prioritizes unbranded searches. To attract people unfamiliar with your brand who need what you offer, you need to have your webpages pop up when they search for the goods or services that you provide. Create quality content that tackles the topics your target audience needs to read, and you’ll start seeing your name come up higher and higher in searches.

Secondly, you need to work toward a content cadence that makes sense rather than posting random blog posts. Your content should march in tune with your target audience’s needs in a logical flow that leads them to take the action you want them to take. With each publication, develop their thought toward that goal.

Too, within each piece of content, establish a flow from beginning to end. That internal cadence will lead your audience’s thought process through the piece—one sentence leading to the next; one scene followed by one that develops the idea further—like a good story.

Reading and watching good content (or listening to good music) can give you a feel for an effective cadence in your own communication. If you and your teams don’t have the time to create the actual content itself, you can outsource it to an outside agency, so long as they follow your stated goals.

Start Creating Content

Once you’ve gotten your strategy in place, it’s time to begin creating content. Think about which platform will best showcase each piece of content. Next, organize your content so that people who come to your site can find it easily. Finally, set your employees into action to create content and share what your teams have created.

Sharing your story is all about the customer, not your company. As HubSpot’s Justin McGill points out, you need to focus on the challenge your product or service will solve for your target audience. Then, let your content tell the story about exactly how it will solve their problem.

In other words, you need a “customer-obsessed culture of content.” Obsessed not only with them—but with their needs, their hopes, dreams, and goals.

Choose Your Storytelling Platforms

Think about what platform will best communicate your stories. When you’re introducing a new gadget that has complicated written directions, a video might be the best platform. Content that needs to cite authoritative sources usually needs a written platform.

On your website, make sure that you’ve organized all your content so it’s easy for visitors to find what they need. Just like you need a measured cadence in what content you produce, you need one when you organize that content.

Several areas warrant extra attention. They are:

  • The navigation bar: Put it at the top of the page so it’s the first thing visitors see. Secondly, word it so it’s easy for visitors to find content. Usability testing can help you learn whether your typical customer can find what they want quickly.
  • Search bar and content categories: Consider putting an onsite search function on your website. Having the ability to search provides customers with a more user-friendly experience, making it more likely that they’ll return and buy what you’re selling. Group content into categories so when a visitor types something into the box, they’ll see several suggestions. This strategy makes it more likely that they’ll read more than one of the articles, building your standing as an authority in your field with each article they read.
  • Top posts: To get even more mileage out of your top posts, you can pin your best-performing content to appear first on your site. Promote those posts on social media, too. Use a content hub to organize your content into categories, making it even easier for visitors to find what they want.
  • CTAs: Every piece of content you create should have a call to action (CTA). Make these easy to understand and easy to do. Use wording that emphasizes the visitor’s needs—how taking that action will bring him or her closer to a solution to their problem.

Activate Your Employees

You’ve engaged your employees. They’re enthusiastic—but how do you harness that enthusiasm into action? The answer is employee activation. Turn your employees into brand advocates, and you’ll have an unstoppable force that will take your company to new heights.

  • Content creation: The more employees you have creating quality content, the more you’ll build the trust factor in your customers and potential customers. Enlist the help of your resident subject experts to explain complicated processes. Get employees involved in creating posts on social media. Milk the expertise of everyone to create content that will draw more business to your doors.
  • Sharing content: You shouldn’t just encourage your employees to create content. Also, encourage them to share your company’s blog posts on social media and elsewhere. Your employees’ networks are vast—and can open up your content to a whole new audience. Not only that, but encouraging them to share content builds your trust factor—since people are more likely to believe content that comes from an employee.
  • Gamification and incentivization: From a simple “thank you” and recognition at the next meeting to actual real-world prizes and merchandise, look for ways to encourage your employees to share. As you can see from the numbers on employee believability, the return on your investment is likely to be great.
  • Reporting: Having a comprehensive central system to store content makes reporting on employee-created content much easier. With such a system, you can track the results automatically and have a record of all content your employees have produced.

Distribute and Test Your Content

Getting the word out online is the next step along the road to successful content marketing. Don’t stop there, though. Testing each piece of content to see how it performs is essential to content marketing success.

If your budget allows, consider paid distribution to targeted audiences. Choose your best-performing content; narrow the audience to whom you show it, and then see how it performs. Targeted audiences might be smaller, but they’re more likely to need what you’re selling.

Find which distribution platforms (social, blog posts, or even guest blogging on non-competitor but closely aligned sites) work best for your business and distribute it on those places. Don’t forget offline content distribution, either—particularly if you’re a brick-and-mortar business.

The main point to remember in content distribution is to focus on where your customer is and what forms they prefer (video, written post, infographics, or printed brochures—just to name a few). Look for where they spend the most time and publish your content there.

To get the most mileage out of every piece of content, you need to distribute it on your social channels as well as those you don’t own. When you do, you have a shot at attracting a whole new audience for your content.

  • A/B test: Test each piece that you’ve shared on social, varying one element at a time. Called split or A/B testing, this strategy can identify the best way to tweak your content to communicate your message even better.
  • Engage influencers, other publishers, and your followers: On social, engagement and helpfulness are the name of the game. Be sure to interact with your followers. Respond to comments and help them solve their problems. If you can, ask industry influencers or thought leaders to engage—or even produce guest posts. Engage with other content publishers in your industry as well. Often, you can engage in joint projects that bring in revenue for both parties.

Paid Distribution on Social Media

Many social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, allow you to limit the audience that sees your content. If you haven’t done so, do some research on your typical customers to find out on which social media platforms they’re more likely to hang out. You can even create customer personas to personalize your customer profiles even more.

Once you’ve done your research, use your customers’ preferred platforms to segment your audience. Use your likely customers’ demographics to narrow down who sees what content.

For example, if you manufacture ballet footwear, you might use Facebook’s targeting abilities to boost a post about pointe shoes to under-40 females whose interests include not only ballet but also figure skating and gymnastics, since those sports often use ballet to cross-train for artistry.

Similarly, for a post about increasing flexibility in male dancers, you would do well by targeting males who belong not only to ballet groups, but also those young men whose interests include figure skating, gymnastics, and other sports in which flexibility is a plus. Believe it or not, even some football players use ballet to become more flexible and agile.

Don’t forget to A/B test your targeted social media content to get the most out of your investment. Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook all make it easy for you to test content for performance.

Other Paid Distribution Platforms

With Outbrain, you can take your paid campaign a step further. Not only can you target your audience, but your ads will appear on top-performing news outlets and other sites where your target audience browses often. Called native advertising, Outbrain’s ads appear as “sponsored stories” alongside other news story recommendations.

Google Ads, too, can target which audiences see them. They work a little differently—by showing up at the top of search results as people search for what you sell.

Again, A/B test each piece of content so you can put your money into your highest-performing organic content. Once you have outstanding content, the keys to your content marketing success are yours. You can use this content to achieve measureable results, driving you toward your goals.

Measure Results and Optimize Your Strategy

Measurement doesn’t stop with the results for each piece of content. You need to keep track of the difference your content marketing strategy makes on your business value.

  • Map your progress to the measures you’ve chosen to indicate business value: Whatever measures of business value you listed at the beginning of the roadmap—and they’re different for every business—should be the first thing you measure. Whether or not you have achieved your goals for these metrics, you need to optimize your content strategy to grow these numbers even more.
  • Reach new audiences: Brainstorm ways to reach new audiences who might have a keen interest in your products and services. When you find new audiences, you’ll find new customers—and make the bean-counters oh-so-happy with the revenue they bring in.
  • (Re)activate your employees: Use whatever victories you’ve achieved—no matter how small—to inspire your employees to become more active in content marketing, whether it’s creating content or simply spreading the word.
  • Track and optimize conversions: A key marker of success, conversions are essential to eventually turn browsers into buyers. Look at—and implement—strategies that can increase conversions at every step along the customer journey.

Once You’re on Your Way, Keep an Eye on the Road

Throughout the process, you and your teams need to do several things to stay on track. These essentials will take you to an endless list of destinations and new opportunities.

  • Keep track of top topics, authors, and posts: To make sure your content reaches the maximum number of prospective customers, you want to identify and promote your best performers.
  • Engage on social: Never stop engaging. Look for more ways to reach out, more industry influencers to get on board, and find new audiences for your content—and new buyers for your products and services.
  • Test marketing offers: Whether you offer a white paper, an e-book, a free consultation, or other helpful goods or services, you need to test which ones result in the most subscribers, customers, or other conversions. Only put your money into offers that work.
  • Collaborate with your sales team to maximize conversions: Although collaboration with all your teams is important, collaboration with your sales team is critical. After all, they’re the ones on the front lines. They hear all the objections, all the compliments, and all the feedback. Listen—and get a better picture of your customers’ needs.

Then, create content that meets those needs. When you do that, you’ll have such insight into your customers’ needs and desires that they’ll think you’re reading their minds.

Not exactly. You’re just following your roadmap.

If you are ready to follow your own content marketing roadmap to get more traffic to your site. check out our Content Builder Service. With world-class content, your business can get on the road to success. Set up a quick consultation, and I’ll send you a free PDF version of my books. Get on the road to success today with more traffic and leads for your business.

The post How to Develop Your Own Content Marketing Roadmap appeared first on Marketing Insider Group.

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